Slow Motion – Premiere or AE?

[Jon Barrie]

50% with PPro should look ok. Are you de-interlacing the clip? That will probably help. (right click clip in Timeline> field options)
If the interlacing is the wrong way that will look really bad… Deinterlacing should fix it or swap field order. (same as above access clicks)
Ahh… what about blend frames on the clip, try turning that off. (right click clip in timeline).
AE I usually use the time remapping…
Can you describe what does the final slow mo look like?
– Jon 🙂

[Doug Broomfield]

Thanks Jon for the tips.

We actually are working with “progressive” footage (shot in 720P HDV and imported through Cineform Aspect HD). So do we still need to de-interlace?

No we have not turned off blend frames. We could try that.

The final slow mo is soft, like it is out of focus.

[Jon Barrie]

720p – deinterlacing will do nothing. Frame blending will blend a ghosting of the next frame into the one you see, so that is what will make it look “soft” turning that off should help a bit. However you are limited with the progressive footage. I find it tends to not slow mo as well as interlaced. I guess it’s got to do with interlaced actually scanning twice as much as progressive…50i = 25fps and 24P = 29.97 with pulldown or 60i = 30fps. Hope it looks okay for you with what you have. If not I suggest testing the AE slow mo to try and invent pixels between frames. (Time Warp… i think.. you have options for pixel/frame interpreting)
Keep this in mind: Film shot at 24p slowed to 12p looks jerky no matter what, because you are holding the image twice as long on screen as normal. Slow mo for film is always shot at least twice the fps (48 or more). So you aren’t actually slowing down the footage that was shot for slow mo, just showing 24fps instead of the 48 or more it was shot at – appearing slow motion.
– Jon 🙂

[Harm Millaard]

Also keep in mind that PP2 is notoriously bad at slomo’s. AE is far better, but easier would be to upgrade to CS3 and use time remapping.

Harm Millaard

[Doug Broomfield]

Thanks Jon and Harm for the advise. Some good thoughts. Harm on your response are you saying that CS3 does re-mapping in Premier Pro or are you still referring to AE but CS3 makes time mapping a lot easier in AE?

Thanks

[Jon Barrie]

He means PProCS3 the time-remapping is based on the AE one. You can ramp the speed up and down inside the same clip in PProCS3.
– Jon

[Doug Broomfield]

Thanks Jon. Good to know CS3 has that feature. Will be sure to check it out when we upgrade. In the interim we will try some of the other suggestions. Thanks again for your responses.

Doug