Slow Motion Problems.

[Christopher Wright]

I’m with Steve on this one. With Discreet edit* you could do rock-solid slomo (or speed up a clip) at any rate (including to the decimal level) and it didn’t displace the clip in the timeline and/or look like garbage. It was one mouse click WITHIN the clip, WITHIN the timeline, no rendering, and you were done. I can also attest that CS4 PPro does a very acceptable job of performing speed changes now using the same paradigm. Everything else is a time consuming work around. Of course you can go out to Boris Red, After Effects, Combustion, Motion etc. to get great looking slo mo, but that is missing the entire point. Like having a really good Title program within FCP (which CS4 also now has), the speed change implementation in FCP has always sucked.

Dual 2.5 G5, IO, Kona LH, IO, Medea Raid, UL4D, NVidia 6800, 4Gig RAM
Octocore 8 GB Ram, Radeon card, MBP, MXO
Windows Vista Adobe Studio CS4, Vegas 8.0, Lightwave 9.3, Sound Forge 9, Acid Pro 7, Continuum 5, Boris Red 4, Combustion 2008, Sapphire Effects

[Rodney Sims]

Alexander,
A very nice and thoughtful explanation – however…
Your technique for applying an overall speed change to a clip via the media is only workable if your clip is a shot already broken down on the rushes roll as a separate entitly. If your rushes were done on a professional format with backspace recording, your rushes will be a continuous 40 minutes or so. Although you have specified the exact section of rushes you wish to send to Motion, applying an global 50% speed setting turns the whole rushes duration to 50%, and suddenly you’re looking a a slow-mo’ed bit of footage you didn’t want. Having to first export and re-import footage as a new clip is ludicrous. Why isn’t that a user-definable command within Motion’s import function?

There’s a simple analogy to this: I select a book in a bookstore and when I get to the cash desk, I find they want to charge me for the entire shelf. It doesn’t make any more sense in Motion, and to create unnecessary within tight-time workflows is insane. The only reason I can think of is that other (Avid) systems have sewn up the copyright on any sane way to produce exemplary slow mo’s. And if any of you are able – check out the Avid speed ramp tools / graphical interface, and you’ll see what I mean!

Good luck with your speed fx.
Rodney