Twixtor vs. Flame for retiming

[Chris Borjis]

You can’t go wrong with Twixtor, thats exactly what its made for. +you get to keep it after your done. 🙂

[Jeremy Garchow]

If you have 60i footage, you can use after effects pretty easily and plug in free using all of the info of the 60i stream:

https://rarevision.com/v1/articles/slow_motion.php#

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for the suggestions.

In the interim, I tried the following workflow, which seems similar to the AE method Jeremy proposed.

I drop my 60i clip twice into a 59.94 timeline in FCP 6. I drop that sequence into another 59.94 sequence (as required by FieldsKit or Twixtor). Then I apply the FieldsKit deinterlace plugin to the nested clip and select the “2x FPS” option in the plug in. I render the effect, then export this clip to a QT 59.94 movie, then import that movie back into FCP. Finally, I drop the clip into a 23.98 sequence in Final Cut.

I get very nice Slo Mo @ about 40 percent speed, but the video is definitely a little soft (and not in a motion blur sort of way, it doesn’t seem). My rendering settings are all set to highest quality, and I’m working in 1920×1080 ProRes HQ.

Anything I can do to improve the softness of my result? Or is softness just the price you pay for trying to do this with interlaced video instead of film?

Thanks again.

[Aaron Zander]

i have to ask, does it look good in SD?

if it does, than you have your solution with out extra cost.

I know it’s a ‘half ass’ but it’s also a proper solution to a problem. Why pay a silly amount for a high end post house to do what you are looking for, or for some software when you are satisfied with teh result. Unless you plan to go HD broadcast, check it on an SD moniter

[Jeremy Garchow]

See the thing about the 60i to 24p method is that you aren’t making up any new information. You are basically taking the full spatial info, stretching it out in time using the exact information you started with. There’s no new media being created or interpolated. The method is better suited for after effects, but if it looks good in FCP then so be it.

Jeremy

[David Bogie]

sorry to butt in, I have no experiecne with any of these tools or formats (except I’ve done lots of retiming in After Effects over the years).

We just ran some regular ol’ DV through Smooth Cam in Motion, also available in FCP, and the slow motion results were quite lovely. The scene was a boat traveling at high speed on a river; camera was on a tripod on the bank so the shot is a rapid pan. The opposite river bank and the wake spray are the worst parts of the rendered image but the boat and the people on it turned out great. If we had known Smooth Cam worked so well, we probably would have shot at a higher shutter speed to DV so there was less blur on each of the fields.

Dunno how Smooth Cam works yet, we just pushed the button and watched it process. I’ll look it up later.

bogiesan

[Jeremy Garchow]

Smooth Cam for slow motion?

[Bob Roberts]

There’s a freeware macro for Shake that does what you’re looking for, FieldMO:
https://www.fxshare.com/shake/downloads/macros/time_modifiers/FieldMO-1323.html

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/154/856861

Good luck!

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I notice that no one offered any experience comparing output from a Fire, Flame, or other expensive post house solution to any of the cheaper more DIY options discussed. Is that because there is no difference? Or because no one has had a chance to A/B the two?

I said earlier that I had managed to produce decent results in FCP. Alas, last night I noticed that every fifth frame jumped a little bit. The motion seemed off, though there didn’t seem to be any interlace related frame blending problems.

I went to AE instead, as Jeremy had suggested, and ended up with much smoother results. No hopping frame. My Twixtor result in FCP seemed even smoother, but showed some field-related artifacting. I couldn’t figure out how to use FieldKits in combination with Twixtor in FCP. Using FieldKits by itself to deinterlace to 60p; and then reconform to 24p, I ended up with the hopping frame. When I tried to add Twixtor to my FieldKitted 24p or 60p sequences, I ended up with a mess. I haven’t yet tried Twixtor in AE, although the workflow seems like it should be simpler to use the 2 in tandem than in FCP.

I tried Smoothcam before I went to Twixtor, and got fairly mediocre results. Not as nice as AE or Twixtor. But maybe I’m missing something about the Motion workflow.

Has anyone compared the Shake retiming capability with the After Effects/Twixtor method? I would consider getting Shake if it’s better, but I already have AE.

Thanks again