[Randy Smith]

Hi Brad,
Perhaps my terminology was not correct, but when I was refrring to frame rate, I meant changing the number of frames in Twixtor. The A77 shoots at 59.94 fps I believe, and I was increasing the number of frames created by the Twixtor plug in. Honestly, I did a lot of trial and error to get the best results. I still have plenty to learn though. I’m rendering on a dual core processor, so even short clips are painfully slow. Here is a link to my hummingbird footage on vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/39163922
The second of the three clips came out the best. Honestly, I’m beginning to think it was dumb luck. I was shooting AVCHD 1080p 60 at the highest bit rate possible 26. something kbps. I’m not sure about what my shutter speed was. I’ve been told I have ghosting because I’m shooting at too fast a shutter speed, and that I should shoot slower speeds to get some motion blur for Twixtor to work with, but I’ve read other posts that say that motion blur is bad and I should shoot as fast a shutter speed as possible to stop the motion. I say its some crazy mathematical formula that when it works right, it is magic. When it doesn’t, it can be ugly. I really think it is the ratio of wing beats to shutter speed, to frame rate that has to be just right for it to work.

[Randy Smith]

Hi Brad,
Its interesting that we are trying to do the same thing with hummingbirds and Twixtor at the same time. I spent several hours trying to slow down hummingbird wings with Twixtor last night. I’m also shooting 1080p at 59.97fps with a Sony A77. I found that if I tried to set the frame rate too high (1000 or greater) it warped too much, but if I set frames to 240 or 360 per second and slowed it down to 50% it looked pretty good. Still not as smooth as 120fps real footage, but acceptable to me. Also I used Smart blend, and I used control/drag to stretch the clip. Let me know how its going for you, I don’t think there a lot of us that have tried Twixtor with hummingbirds, but it is certainly a worthwhile challenge.

Randy