slow motion

[Michael Szalapski]

Layer>time has several options. Read the manual to figure out which one would fit you best.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Todd Kopriva]

Time-stretching and time-remapping and the Timewarp effect are all ways to do this. Time-stretching is the simplest and least configurable. Timewarp is the most fiddly and most powerful.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————

[Kevin Camp]

if the footage is interlaced, you can easily slow it down to half speed by simply making sure that ae is correctly separating fields and using time stretch.

so first, select you footage in the project window and choose file>interpret footage>main. make sure that ae is separating fields in the correct dominance (ntsc sd is normally lower). you may also want to try enabling the ‘preserve edges’ option which will usually smooth the edges of de-interlaced footage. also, as a trick to avoid a step later, set loop footage to 1 (we won’t actually loop the footage, but it will double the duration of the clip, avoiding having to increase the comp length later.

once that’s done, drag the footage onto the make comp icon, then choose layer>time>time stretch and set it to 200%. do a ram preview and you should have a quick rendering, surpisingly clean looking, half-speed slow-mo effect.

if you need to get slower, then you’ll need to use frame interpolation methods. you can try time stretch at higher values but also enable frame blending (layer>frame blending>pixel motion). or you can use the timewarp effect, which has more settings for tweaking how the extra frames get interpolated.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Keith Gray]

Hi ,I’m after some experienced advice as I’m trying to get a good slow motion sequence together and I’ve never done it before.

Firstly what equipment am I using- Sony Z7

I have shot a dragon fly landing on a rock with a shutter speed of
3500fps. After reading other forum advice it seems After Effects “Time remapping” is a good tool to use. So I’ve put it into Time remapping. The real time length is 4 seconds as the insect flys around the branch before landing.I want the length of the clip to be slow down making the clip around the 15 second mark. please could you give me some advice on the settings I need in my after effects comp and possible values in the time remapping effect. I’ve been trying with various settings but my results are not great. It is slow but a bit juddery and I want it to look smooth. The time remapping looks a little confusing and have played about with the values but not getting the results I need. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Keith Gray

[Todd Kopriva]

Try setting the frame blending for the layer to Pixel Motion.

from After Effects Help:
“When you time-stretch footage to a slower frame rate or to a rate lower than the frame rate of its composition, movement can appear jerky…. To create smoother motion when you slow down or speed up a layer, use frame blending…. After Effects provides two types of frame blending: Frame Mix and Pixel Motion. Frame Mix takes less time to render, but Pixel Motion provides much better results, especially for footage that has been drastically slowed down.”

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————

[Michael Szalapski]

Any time you digitally slow something down by that much, it’s going to look juddery without some work. There are some plugins you can buy for AE that will do a better job of smoothly slowing it down.
I’ll try a couple of tips for you though.
I don’t know about that camera you’re using, but if the footage is interlaced you want the time slowdown to be in increments of two; so a 4 second clip should be slowed to 16 seconds. To get the time remapping plug in to do this, have your footage at the beginning of a comp that is 16 seconds long or longer. Apply time remapping. Drag the second (last) keyframe to the 16 second mark. Make sure your layer’s end point is there as well.
But if you’re simply slowing down the footage like this, you don’t need time remapping. Time remapping is used for more complicated things. You could just do Layer>Time>Time Stretch. Then just make your time factor 400%.
In either case, whether you use time remapping or time stretch you will need to turn on frame blending for your comp and for your footage layer. There are a couple of different frame blending options. The Adobe help files should assist you on how frame blending works.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.