Hey everyone:

A client wrote to me the following question. "will you watch this video and tell me how they created the effect in it CrossFit - Chad Vaughn, 285 pound Snatch - YouTube

The super slow but super detailed shot is to do with the type of camera you have or what you do in something like after effects ? any ideas you can give me would be cool"




I'm looking at this and thinking, they must have used the sony fs700, for such a detail shot. What other comparable cameras can achieve such a detail shot like the clip posted? I'm anticipating the client rather use my NX5U, instead of recommending a high end what's the best way to achieve this type of detail?

For super slow footage what would you recommend to achieve it?
If at the shoot what's the best setting you recommend to shoot it at?

If it's better to fix it in post, which of the following software I have, you recommend I should use
(Vega 12, FC7, Powerdirector 9 ultra, Adobe Premiere Elements 9 ?)

Thanks!

Robert

I'm assuming Phantom or other dedicated high speed high resolution camera. The dark room is kind of a "giveaway" to me that this is a TRUE high speed video as opposed to just some reasonable high speed with Twixtor, but hey, I've been wrong before.

And Crossfit is large enough that one would assume they had a production budget to rent one so it isn't far-fetched.

Yeah I'd go along with Shaun on this. This doesn't appear to be something that was done in post. I'd be willing to bet that they had 2 or more cams shooting it. At least 1 shooting at a standard rate and 1 like a Phantom shooting hundreds if not more frames per second. It's just way to clean and smooth to my eye to be something done in any post production software.

Hi Don,

I haven't used the camera before, so I apologize in advance for being very green.

I'm curious when you mentioned they shot it both standard and High frame rate, would they use
one camera to do that and change the settings or set up two camera, each set at a different frame rate?

Then cut/past the footage together in post?

I can only imagine they used 2 cameras. The reason they might have shot at a standard frame rate is like a scratch track. Let's see how it looks in real time. More of a reference point than anything else. Of course there is always the likelihood that they used 1 camera and did 1 take! How would you like to be the guy lifting that thing and have the director yelling , "OK let's take it again from the top"! Maybe not so much.
It's really hard to say with 100% certainty how this was done since we weren't there.
You asked if you could duplicate this with an NX5 so my answer would be, you might be able to get to a certain point of coming close but even using Twixtor or any other software to slow the footage down and maintain the integrity of the footage, it's not like shooting at say 1200 frames per second or even more. I've seen high speed footage done at 10,000 frames PS, (nature stuff) and it is absolutely incredible.
I'm sure you've seen it as well.
So could you duplicate it? Might get close. Perfect? Nope, not unless you used what they used in the same way.

Ok, gotcha, I understand now Don, thanks.

Out of curiosity, have you worked on many slow mo projects? And if you did, what gear did you use?

Robert

Shaun, thanks for you're feedback, and I had the same question for you, as Don.

Have you worked on many slow mo projects, and what kind of gear you used?

I've not worked on anything this extreme. Anything I've done in this realm which isn't that much, has been done in post.