I am a noob to final cut and was wondering how to make a goos slow motion with standard footage. When just slowing it down it becomes to blurry. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks

Do you have Frame Blending selected? Try that. And I rarely slow anything down beyond 40%

There are other solutions ... I think Ken Stone.net has a slo mo solution using Compressor and I've heard of people doing their slo mo in Motion

I find 50% with frame blending works pretty well for me

If you have Motion 3, just send your clip over there and use a change speed behaviour and select optical flow as the frame blending mode. It takes a while to process and builds some kind of cache file in your Motion Documents folder, which can get to be very huge. A better way is to export a self contained Quicktime Movie of just what you want to retime, add one second handles, then take that to Motion, otherwise Motion analyzes your entire media file even though you're only sending a small part of it.

Jason:
This may not help you now but in the future if you can shoot at a higher shutter speed say about 125 at 60i, when you go to slow it down the quality is much higher.

John

For 50% speed you can put interlaced video on two layers (at 50% speed) and add a flicker filter to the top one. One layer gets deinterlaced top field, and the other bottom field. I think you have to nudge one of the layers by half a frame. This way each field becomes a frame and te motion is very smooth.