Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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Exactly. The shutter setting of 1/120 @120 fps means that the amount of motion blur on each frame is what would be appropriate for a shot that was captured at 60 fps. The shutter should have been at 1/240 for optimal motion blur. You can sometimes get away with a 360-degree shutter at framerates higher than this, but only if you’re in the right circumstances.
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The camera op screwed up, big time. First, the FS7 is capable of 180 fps in XAVC-I, so the camera op messed that up in the first place if the director wanted it as slow as possible. Second, a 360-degree shutter introduced more motion blur into the scene. A 180-degree shutter would have been standard, and would have greatly reduced the motion blur.
It doesn’t matter whether the camera’s native framerate was set to 50 or 25; 120 fps is 120 fps, and will only give you 2.4x slow motion in a 50 fps timeline, and 4.8x at 25 fps. What does matter is that (a) the camera op missed the opportunity to record at 180 fps, and (b) set the wrong shutter angle so the frames were more motion blurred than they should have been.
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Post a Dropbox copy of the clip? I’d be curious to try–I’ve rarely come across a scene like this that AE can’t solve. Sometimes you have to mask out part of the scene to limit AE’s confusion.
AE looks, if I remember correctly, more at the light areas than the dark, so if you’ve got good contrast in the ground, you’ll be better off.
One other trick that has worked for me in the past is precomposing and reversing the clip. Weirdly, AE tracked that better than it did forward. Then you just time-reverse the keyframes of the camera.
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Hah, it’s never as simple as that, is it? Sounds like you’re on top of the problem, sorry to imply you hadn’t thought it all the way through!
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Precompose, and in the precomp, sharpen, add stupidly high amounts of contrast, darken it, whatever it takes to make the features more visible, and track the resulting precomp with AE’s 3D Camera Tracker. I’ve done this a number of times. Also, if you have the metadata about the shot (sensor size, lens focal length), do a calculation to obtain the horizontal Angle Of View, and manually enter that into the 3D tracker. Use the Detailed Analysis checkbox. All these things in combination may result in better outcomes for you.
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Hey Todd–doesn’t the XL-H1 have an HD-SDI output on the right-hand side of the camera, on the shoulder rest? If so, wouldn’t that be a better (and more compatible) choice that would allow you to interface with modern recorders like the Atomos Ninja and Blackmagic Video Assist?
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I’ve never heard of any camera including this feature, ever! A little more context might be helpful. When you say “live” do you mean “broadcast,” or do you just mean you want to get it in-camera?
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Got it–I didn’t pick up that there was no money for the edit, just that you were trying to reduce your edit time.
One approach you could take: two Blackmagic Ultrastudio Mini Recorders ( https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio ), and a license for Telestream Wirecast (or a similar software switcher). Wirecast is primarily aimed at streaming, but it also has capabilities to record a local copy. That’s what I use, and it works well.
Then you can live switch on your computer, and record the line feed on your machine’s local disk. Would save you even more time transferring media.
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Trust me when I tell you that you probably don’t want to live-switch it. One wrong button press, and you’ve messed up some important point by being on the wrong angle. I live-streamed a day-long event with six speakers, with onscreen graphics and a Powerpoint feed from the onstage monitor, which I recorded as a line feed downstream of the switching. I figured we’d have it as an archive of the streamed event, and didn’t want to take up an additional 6 hours * 4 angles’ worth of drive space.
Months later, I get complaints that we can’t recut it to show another camera angle, or without the graphics, or whatever. Of course, nobody ever specified that it would be used for anything else, but…you have to be smarter than your co-workers/clients.
For my money, the simplest way to do this would be to get some kind of standalone recorder ( https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/hyperdeckstudiomini OR https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicvideoassist ) or video encoder that hooks up to your machine ( https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/h264prorecorder ) and split the HDMI signal from the Powerpoint machine to take a video feed from the computer. Sync it up in post, and only cut to the Powerpoint feed when you need to–the slide will change when the speaker changes it, and you don’t have to drop in slides, just make cuts at the appropriate times.
Otherwise to live-switch, you’re looking at a capture card for your machine, probably some signal converters, switching software…
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According to your second image, your captions are already at 1920×1080.
Are you just trying to increase the text size? If so, you can do that in the Caption panel: select all your captions from top to bottom, and apply your desired transformations in the toolbar on the top of the Captions panel. I would make sure that your transport bar is hovering on your longest caption in the timeline, so that you can be sure it doesn’t go beyond the borders of the frame when you size it up.
These transformations won’t stay in effect if you export an SRT, but it will stay that way inside Premiere so you can burn your captions into the video, if that’s what you’re after.