Weird framerate effect I see in a lot of professional “highlight reel” type videos, wondering if it can be done in Vegas

[Steve Roberts]

Hi Raymond,

It’s a great effect. It’s origin I believe is from when shooting on film and the speed of the film speeds up to the correct frame rate essentially overexposing and speeding it up. Spaghetti Westerns filmakers used handcranked cameras to get a similar outcome.

I haven’t tried it but this comes to mind. I would suggest you could try using the velocity curve to speed up the video along with a animated levels control and also some glow effect which can also add the effect of too much light getting into the gate area of a film camera.

Have fun !

Steve R.

Amongst Projects
——— Sound, Visual and Electronic Content
projects.amongstmyselves.com

[Raymond Pace]

Steve,

Thanks for the quick response. What exactly does “animated level control” refer to? I searched for it in Vegas’ help feature, but couldn’t find anything on it (at least as far as I could tell).

Thanks again

[Steve Roberts]

Sorry I’m not one for using the exact names for controls due to using such a large range of software. My poor brain would overload.

OK. I’m presuming you are using Vegas Pro 9 or higher. So you put your video into a video track. Click on the icon “Event Effects” at the right edge of the clip. Choose the Sony Levels plugin, hit OK to accept it. Now the Level screen should come up. Down the bottom left of the plugin screen should be an “Animate” button. When you click on this you are given a time line where you can “animate” level adjustments.

But this will just to do levels adjusts you understand to generate the brightness flare out effect.

I think I’ve used correct terminology this time. Sorry about that.

Steve R.

Amongst Projects
——— Sound, Visual and Electronic Content
projects.amongstmyselves.com

[Raymond Pace]

Oh, okay. How would I go about recreating this effect once I do that? All I see is a timeline and options for brightness (as far as I can tell).

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Sorry, I’m at work (where I don’t have a copy of Vegas), but what I believe you’re talking about is called “speed ramping”, where action on-camera is at normal rate until the selected event or time, when the camera appears to be put into slow motion (i.e. to highlight the new super-duper detail in a car commercial), then returns back to normal speed.

This can be done a couple of ways: 1) if you right click on a video segment and select the Properties menu item, a dialog box comes up with information about that clip. I believe it’s on the tab that automatically comes up (I think the dialog box has 3 or 4 tabs), towards the bottom. There is an adjustable field for Frame Rate or Play Rate, which is normally set to 1.000. You can push this number up to increase the play rate (i.e. the clip plays faster), or down to slow down the play rate. Setting the value to 0.500 would play the video back at “half speed” while setting the value to 2.000 would play the video at twice it’s normal speed. Changing this setting will make the entire clip selected play back at the rate you set here. To get a normal, slow motion, normal play of a clip, you would have to slice the clip into three segments on your timeline, leaving the first and third clip at their default (normal or 1.000 play rate), and changing the second (middle) clip to a value less than 1.00 to slow it down or greater than 1.00 to speed it up.

The second (more elegant) way to accomplish this is by adding a velocity envelope to your clip. Quoting from the Vegas 10 User manual, page 209, “You can use velocity envelopes to change the speed of a video event over time. To view a velocity envelope, right-click the event, choose Insert/Remove Envelope, and then choose Velocity from the submenu”. The velocity envelope appears on the event as a blue line. I believe if you hover over the line with your cursor, a little flag comes up telling you that the velocity is currently set at “100.0” or normal speed. Dragging the line up increases the velocity, while dragging it down decreases the velocity. The real feature here is that you can add velocity envelope points, so that you can increase and decrease the velocity of the clip over time, creating smooth transitions from the normal to fast or slow portions.

At any rate, the Vegas manual gives a pretty good explanation of how to do this. You can download the Vegas maunal (for free) from the https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/manuals website, and it should be on the CD software disc you got with Vegas.

[Raymond Pace]

Oh, okay. I’ve got it now. I was able to re-create the effect successfully, but now, and I hope I’m not being a bother, I’m still curious as to if I can remove the effect from a video that already has it.

Thanks.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I don’t know of an easy, accurate method to do that, but if I was trying to do this, I would apply the velocity envelope to the clip, then you could probably fairly closely approximate it back to “normal rate” by putting in velocity points and reducing or increasing the play rate to look “normal”.

[Raymond Pace]

Sorry for asking so late, but do you have any idea how I should arrange the velocity points and what exactly to change?

Thanks again.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Again, if you didn’t create the original clip, you won’t know the “exact recipe” for how they did the speed ramping, but I think you can come pretty close.

I would select the region of the event (clip) that you believe has been speed altered and set this to play in looping mode, selecting some video before the speed ramp and some video after the speed ramp that would be at “normal” speed. Now observe this section of the clip while it loops. You are trying to identify where you first observe any change in the speed of the video (up or down). After you identify the spot in the video where speed changes, add a point to the velocity envelope line (point #1), at that time. Identify the spot where the speed returns back to “normal” and put a velocity point on the velocity envelope there (point #2). Now you will need to determine if there is a “smooth” transition from normal to slow and back to normal again. If there is, then you would add a third point (roughly midway between the 1st and 2nd points). This would represent the maximum velocity change you are applying to the event (i.e. 200% which would “counter-act” the video speed being set to 50% by the original person. When you speed up the video running at 50% speed by 200% you would get 50% x 200% = 100%, or “normal” video playback). Here is a screenshot somewhat showing what I’m talking about:

Velocity Envelope #1 is the actual velocity envelope I set in Vegas. This would “correct” the event that starts to speed ramp down (slow down during playback) at 1 second on the timeline, with the maximum correction (150% playback speed) at 2 seconds, and smoothly transition back to “normal” speed at 3 seconds.

The video event may have been speed ramped more linearly in the transitions from normal to slow like in Velocity Envelope #2 (which I have hand drawn onto the screenshot). Here the video plays normal to about 1 second, then transitions linearly to it’s max at 1:15 and then maintains that speed for about 1 second (to 2:15 on the timeline), then linearly transitions back to “normal” speed at the 3:00 point on the timeline.

The video event may have been speed ramped more abruptly in the transitions from normal to slow like in Velocity Envelope #3 (which I have hand drawn onto the screenshot). Here the video plays normal to about 1:12 second, then instantly transitions to it’s max at 1:12 and then maintains that speed for a little over a second (to 2:17 on the timeline), then instantly transitions back to “normal” speed at the 2:17 point on the timeline.

All you can really do is to set some points on your velocity envelope line and play with them until you get the closest approximation of “normal” playback of your video event.

The third velocity envelope example I talked about is actually what I’d bet on first (if your video is patterned after a car commercial speed ramping), where the video plays normally until time X then instantly goes into slow motion for a few seconds to show you this nifty car detail, then snaps back into normal speed. The velocity value of the envelope is then set to “counteract” the slow motion they put on the event, so you will be increasing the velocity (to a number greater than 100%).

Keep in mind that changing the velocity up (increasing the playback speed) will shorten the length of your video event on your timeline. If you have a 10 second video and change its velocity to 200% it will play twice as fast (in 5 seconds rather than 10), and decreasing the velocity (decreasing the playback speed) will increase the length of your video event. If you take the same 10 second video event and slow down the playback to 50%, it will take twice as long to play, or 20 seconds. These large time changes would be affected by applying the velocity envelope for the entire video event. This change in “effective” video length could come into play if you have your video clip set to play for a specific amount of time or have it sandwiched between two other video events.

I hope the picture gives you some idea of what I’m describing, as the words by themselves are (I believe) quite confusing. As I stated at the beginning, unless you know the exact “recipe” they used, you won’t be able to completely counteract what they did, but in my experience, you can get close enough for most viewers.