Sloooow-moooooo

[Jon Geddes]

Well, without using any third party plugins or an expensive high speed camera, you can just change the speed of your footage to the desired slow-mo percentage, then right click on the layer, go to frame blending, and change it to “Pixel Motion”. It will take a long time to render, as it has to generate frames between frames.

You might want to be careful with this setting though, as sometimes it can guess motion incorrectly and you get some strange distortion, so just watch all the slow-mo footage back to make sure it’s ok.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com

[Kevin Camp]

as dave says, the best way is to shoot it that way.

another way that can give pretty good results particularly for half-speed slo-mo, is to shoot interlaced, set ae to separate fields and preserve edges (select footage in project window and choose file>interpret footage>main select those options) then drop that into a new comp and choose layer>time>time stretch and set to 200%. this usually produces surprising good half-speed slow-mo, where ae uses the extra field data to interpolate the new frames.

you can push that further by enabling frame blending (layer>frame blending>pixel motion), click the frame blending option in the preview window and set the stretch to 400%. ae will then create frames between the frames to get the footage to quarter speed slo-mo with varying results. sometimes this can produce decent enough footage, but often you’ll get some bad frames or strange artifacts in the interpolated frames,a nd you’ll have a tough time getting usable results if you push interlaced material beyond 400% (progressive will be hard to push beyond 200% with this method).

timewarp my be able to produce better results, but again it will be hard to push progressive footage beyond half-speed (interlaced footage should be deinterlaced, stretched and rendered as described above, prior to timewarp).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Neil Weaver]

Thanks all.

The reason I was asking is I’ve just discovered the joys of shooting progressive over interlaced – I never realised it was interlacing that makes footage look really ‘video-y’!

I’m not looking to shoot proper slow mo, despite the title of my post – sorry Dave! It was more for those times you might need to run a clip a little slower than full speed, so thanks for all the advice.

[Neil Weaver]

Thanks Dave – I would, but I’m over here in PAL land shooting at either 50i or 25F.

My Cannon does offer the option of 720P though – what are the advantages of that over 1080?

[Neil Weaver]

Too many cameras, too many formats, too many codecs…
Still, thanks to the Cow, I’ve discovered JES de-interlacer which could be the answer to all my problems. Well, the editing ones anyway!