Slowing down footage and keep it looking great.

[Steve Roberts]

When you say “slow to 120fps”, you really mean “slow to 50% so it looks like 120fps”.

If you want the paint to be sharp, shoot with a fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur, which can’t be removed in post. Have lots of light available to facilitate the fast shutter speed.

Do as much testing as possible before the day of the shoot.

Imagine the paint frozen in time. Light it so it looks pretty. It’ll be shiny, so consider lighting it like a shiny product or a car, with a big softbox. If that’s an option.

I haven’t used AE’s Timewarp yet, so I recommend Twixtor as a plugin for creating intermediate frames.

In nested comps, consider slowing down the footage gradually: possibly 100% to 90%, 90% to 80%, and so on until you’re taking 60% down to your goal of 50%. Why? Because there may be a lot of drops in the air, and Twixtor might not be able to pick out a drop and follow it. Imagine a 6-spoked wheel that moves 60 degrees in each frame of footage. To the camera, the wheel is not moving. In your situation, if you go from 100% to 50% in one go, you might have some drops that apparently don’t move because one is in the same position as the next, so they’ll look weird when you slow them down: jerking back and forth for a frame or two. Anyway, read the Twixtor manual and do some testing.

[Peter Stenhouse]

We don’t have any 60fps footage, though I have tried a little something with AE’s timewarp, and it looks fine, at about quarter speed it holds up pretty well. But I am sure I can push it further still with what we shoot which will be under ideal conditions. Thanks for your advice.
Sincerely
Peter

small flowers crack concrete

[Jeremy Allen]

Andrew Kramer talks about adjusting speed and using Pixel Motion to help the frame blending in this tutorial. It may be of some use to you..

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=30