Slow Motion From Stills

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yes, this process works for me.

I do not know why it wouldn’t work.

Did you try the timeline index trick posted by Mark Smith?

[Michael Lescord]

Thanks Mark, but it didn’t work. When selecting all files in the timeline index, the change duration option doesn’t work with either control D or the menu selection under modify (greyed out).

I don’t understand why a program as expensive as this can’t simply handle jpg’s in a sequence for slo motion video. It’s kinda ridiculous, but for me it just sucks.

[Michael Lescord]

I have a support call with Apple at 1300 hours Eastern tomorrow. I will post the result of this call, if it happens.

[Mark Smith]

So back to the time line index ……

1) throw some stills in the time line they will probably be the default duration of 4 seconds or something like that.

2) in the time line index, select the first still, shift click the last still, which selects all your stills. In the time line you will se a white marquee around all your stills. Move your mouse pointer From where ever it is to the time line, the marquee around the clips will turn yellow.

3) control D, enter desired still duration- entering 1 will change the duration to one frame, 2 will make 2 frame duration etc. your clips are all changed to the desired duration.

If you are going to do make stills sequences into video sequences frequently I’d either advise you generate still sequences using Compressor or whatever Adobe App and then import that .mov into X and manipulate from there OR make the stills sequence inside X, and when you have all your stills in the time line with the desired duration, make that stills sequence into a compound clip. You will find what ever you want to do with that compound clip, speed ramping, grading, cropping, much easier than dealing with your base clip of hundreds of stills. I do a fair amount of time lapse created from digital stills and I’ve been down this road….

[Jeremy Garchow]

Have you tried deleting your preferences?

[Michael Lescord]

So I did everything you said with the timeline index and it didn’t work.

I have selected all the stills and changed them into a compound clip, but playback even at 20x in the viewer is too slow. How do I speed it up further?

It would be desirable to know how to change duration of these stills. Thanks for trying to help me. I will post the results of my conversation with Apple support.

[Michael Lescord]

I did a search in FCPX for “delete preferences” and of course got no hits. How do I delete preferences?

I was able to get a choppy slo mo video by changing all the photos to a compound clip and using custom speed in the retime menu to 12000% (twelve thousand percent). Not exactly the result I’m looking for!

[Jeremy Garchow]

The first Google search of “FCPX delete preferences” turns up this:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht203477

[Michael Lescord]

Hmm, wonder why you can’t search FCPX for delete preferences and get an answer? Maybe the program is not very good?

Anyways, thanks for that google search. I reset preferences according to those instructions and it had no effect.

Slo mo at 12000% is choppy and seems to change exposure for some reason. Not usable at all. Looking like I need to buy Adobe and pay subscription prices just to get slo mo.

Crazy.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Here’s a screen recording that I did to show that this works with ~620 photos.

The duration of each still was 4 seconds, and then I change them to one second.

https://vimeo.com/user59786527/review/278687545/3a1009ea76