[Graham Futerfas]

Thanks, Matthew, I’ll try that.

My test with the original settings I mentioned finally rendered, and it looked pretty good. Much better than my 30P originated footage. I used 250%, because 60/24 = 250. Perhaps it’s a simpler way of doing what you suggested above?

I’ll give your method a try and compare.

Thanks!
-Graham

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Graham Futerfas
Director of Photography
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.GFuterfas.com
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[Graham Futerfas]

Hi Matthew, thanks for the response.

According to Apple, Compressor incorporates Optical Flow technology to allow for re-timing footage.

https://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/compressor/conversions.html

I understand what you’re saying about 60i to 30P. They’re both technically 29.97 fps.

I know I can ask Compressor to retime the footage. I’ll test both the 30P and 60i footage to see what’s better. Thinking about it, though — with 59.94 fields to work with (all scanned in sequence temporally), the software only has to create half of a frame from one existing field. If using 30P, it has to take a whole frame and interpret an entire frame to get to 60P. I wonder which would yield better quality?

I understand that neither is ideal, but the HPX3000 doesn’t shoot 60P, and if I want some slow-motion for a project, I’d like to be able to offer it to the director as a possibility with the caveat that it won’t be as great as the 23.98 footage. How bad would it be? We get away with a lot in this business. 🙂

Best,
Graham Futerfas
(and every time I post I seem to fall behind on the thread…)

—
Graham Futerfas
Director of Photography
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.GFuterfas.com
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[Graham Futerfas]

Thanks, Russell.

I’ll admit that I’m not sure that Compressor is the right tool for this, but I don’t think Cinema Tools will do what I want either. I did try it, though, and thanks for the tip — I’ve never opened Cinema Tools, either. I could get 30P to play slightly slow motion when conformed to 23.98. I didn’t realize it was going to modify the original clip though, so I made duplicates.

I’d like to create 60 frame slow motion over 24 frame playback, though. I shot both a 60i test and a 30P test. In theory, I can do one of two things: take the 60i footage, deinterlace and use the fields to create new whole frames and play back over 24, or take 30P and double the frames using frame interpolation, and then play back over 24.

I know there is some new high-tech motion interpolation mojo in Shake and Compressor that I want to take advantage of. Of course, both options I have above will involve creating interpolated pixels, because I’m either reconstructing missing fields or in-between frames. I don’t have Shake, but I think Compressor might be able to do this because I technically want to convert one thing into another and whatever information is missing I want it to create.

Thanks for taking the time to respond… Final Cut crashed on my last Compressor attempt, so I’ll try it again. I think I got it close on the previous try, but some of my settings were wrong (200% instead of 250%).

Best,
Graham Futerfas

—
Graham Futerfas
Director of Photography
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.GFuterfas.com
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