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retiming techniques in fcpx with frame rate differentials
working on a 24p project. have some footage shot at 30p that i’d like to slow down.
any advice on techniques within FCPX to take advantage of that extra 6fps i’ve got to work with?
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6 Replies
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Highlight the clip and click on the retiming menu and choose conform speed.
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right right. and then if i want to slow down further. something approaching 50%. should i just stretch it out with the retiming handles to whatever comes out to double the conformed length or is it better to not quite go exactly double?
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That’s what I’d do. Keep an even cadence. So, if 30p in a 24p sequence is 80%, then you’d want to EXACTLY double that length (sorry you’ll have to do some math) and drag it out to 40%. If you just drag it without knowing what length you need, you’ll notice that it says 40% over a pretty wide span. The longer the clip, the wider the span it will consider 40%, because it’s rounding. But if at 80% speed it’s 60 frames, then you want to drag it out to 120 frames to get 40%. That way it’s playing each frame exactly twice.
After that you might want to play with the frame blending or optical flow modes to see if that makes it look better or just odd.
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ahh i think the inexact range of what 40% would be was f-ing me up. thanks.
it’s a shot of a girl in a dress spinning, so i’m guessing blending will be better since its kind of blurry anyway. but am going to experiment!
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Experimenting is always good.
I had a piece last month based around a guy spinning balls of fire on chains in a cave. Fire Poi.
In one section, I slowed the performance down to about 33% which looked awesome – then applied optical flow which looked BEYOND awesome.
It looked like the balls of flame were surrounded by vapor distortions running both ahead of and behind the actual fire elements.
The still doesn’t do it justice, it’s really cool in motion.
You can never precisely predict what optical flow will do to unusual content. Sometimes it’s just magic.
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Interestingly, at this point it seems like just a plain retime looks the best….forgoing both blending and optical
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