The Course of “Ghosting Island”

[George Dean]

Hi Alberto,

In your OP you stated “slowmotioned a little bit”, which is subjective, but would lead me to think you were slowing down the motion to about half (50%). If that is the case, when you film at 60p and put that footage in a 30p project, your slow motion is going to be smoother than regular speed footage shot at 24p and viewed at 24p.

The best we can do to smooth out slow motion is to shoot it in slow motion, but if we are picking segments after the shoot to slow down in post, I shoot everything at 60p and then speed up those segment I want at regular (30p) speed. This avoids the ghosting because slowing down 60p to 30p is simply a matter of taking out every other frame and what we have left then is exactly what the camera would have recorded at 30p. Am I making sense? In this case you would disable sampling to avoid the ghosting in a progressive project.

On the other hand if you are shooting action shots, it’s better to shoot them at 60p, put them in a 60p project, disable sampling, render them to a 60p video, which will produce exceptional smoothness compared to 24p. This does not provide any slow motion, so you then would use a program such as ProDad ReSpeedr ($99 USD) which I think does a much better job of producing slow motion than does Vegas Pro. ReSpeedr, like Twixtor, has several options for building slow motion video depending on the scene and time to render and the quality you select. And they have a trial version you can download to try it out. Also, this time of year ProDad often runs specials on their software products, so you may be able to snag a deal.

If you shoot a sequence at 60p and put that in ReSpeedr and set the slow motion at 180 fps (33%), bring that into Vegas Pro in a 60p project, I think you will be amazed at the smooth quality. At any rate, almost ALWAYS, disable sampling when producing progressive projects in Vegas Pro., then shoot the appropriate fps speed for the action you are filming and if your budget permits, pickup a copy of ReSpeedr (after trying out the trial) to compliment your productions.

As for the capabilities of Vegas Pro, actually slowing down video 50%, to me, usually is acceptable. However it is not unusual for pricey NLE’s to require plug-in’s or doing round-about processing with a 3rd party program to accomplish certain task. I have no idea what you paid for Vegas, but let’s say it is priced at $300, which is pretty cheap considering all it does. Then there is the Twixtor plugin for Vegas priced at $330. If Magix spent the time to develop Twixtor to add into Vegas it would jump the price to around $600!! For those who don’t need slow motion graphics they would complain about the high price for features they don’t use. And for us that do use the feature of slow motion, there would be little to gain cost wise. Lucky for some there is alternative like ReSpeedr, which in my opinion is not as good as Twixtor, but also not as pricey. At least we have some options depending on our budgets.

Can Magix put something into Vegas Pro as capable as Twixtor without raising the price? Of course they can, but the development cost would be a bit hit to their profits, but we never know what they are working on for the future….could be something in Vegas Pro 17…..maybe!

Best Regards……George

[Alberto Poli]

George thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me in such an accurate way! I really appreciated it!
I’m gonna check ReSpeedr right away and see how it goes!

[George Dean]

Alberto,

Another option that was just posted today is Happy Otter Scripts. It is a combination of scripting tools for various jobs within Vegas and has a Slow Motion feature. Currently it is available as a free beta with possible release as a finished product this coming year.

I downloaded it a few hours ago and tested out the Slow Motion feature which was quite impressive. Here is the link to the posting

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/1022929

Wayne Waag is a long time supporter of Vegas Pro and the community and a good guy. He has on the website also some tutorials, so you may want to download/view the one on slow motion before trying it out.

Best Regards……George

[Alberto Poli]

Dear all,
I would like to update you on my progresses.
Thanks to all your suggestions, I figured out that some codecs were missing on my computer.
Now that I updated the Cineform, the HVEC, and Lagarith and that “interpolate field” and “disable resample” on the PROJECT PROPERTIES are ticked I can slowmo without aliasing or not-smooth results.
I probably don’t fully understand why now it works but it does! So if any of you has a more conscious answer idibe happy to read that 🙂

[George Dean]

Alberto,

Thank You for the update and glad you have it worked out. Sometimes it’s better not to look a gift horse in the mouth (so to speak) and just go happily with the acceptable results you have found.

Best Regards……George