Twixtor and AE Time Remapping?

[Chris Wright]

Here’s Twixtor’s rebuttle…

Twixtor is often 2 or more times faster against both AE’s “pixel motion” and its Timewarp filter. Often Twixtor is even faster than 2x than the Timewarp plugin; it depends on the settings and whether or not you are adding motion blur upon speeding up a clip.

Twixtor has a feature that allows you to not generate inbetweened frames on either side of a cut edit in your source clip (and, for dissolves,Twixtor has a way to turn off the motion estimation for just the transition based on where the transition is located in the source).

Twixtor works in floating point. AE’s “pixel motion” works in floating point, but the Timewarp filter with changeable settings does not.

Twixtor has the ability to remove motion blur upon slowing down footage. Timewarp will not remove motion blur; it only adds motion blur (a feature which Twixtor has as well).

Twixtor does frame rate conversion very simply and is built in to the plugin. Pixel motion works as expected in this regard, but the Timewarp plugin assumes you will time-stretch the footage in a comp that’s the same frame rate as your source (as far as I’ve been able to figure out). I presume you can do the time-stretch math yourself… Precomping and retiming in the original source frame-rate and then put that into a comp with the required output frame-rate… a bit more work for the workflow.

Twixtor Pro also has many features to help you fix problems when they occur in the tracking. Most notably, when the tracking goes “bad”, Twixtor allows you to use AE’s splines (masks) and point positioners to show Twixtor Pro exactly where things are moving from frame to frame. There are no corresponding features in Timewarp or AE’s “pixel motion” setting. Twixtor Pro also allows you to specify up to 3 separation mattes in order to help the plugin track individual objects separately. Pixel Motion does not do this and the TimeWarp plugin only allows you to specify one foreground separation matte.

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In my experience, Twixtor is 10x faster rendering and less complicated, but slow effects from interlaced can get slightly flickery because it doesn’t have as many tweaking options for smoothing scanline iteration tweens and luminance. Download its demo and decide yourself money vs time, rendering vs time learning new product. time=money=time