Hi guys!

Tomorrow we are going to shoot a spot. We have some slow motion scenes to be shot. What's the best and quick way to do the slow motion? We are in Brazil, here the television format is NTSC.

I've found lots of answers in this forum, but I have no time to read all the posts and figure out what's the proper way to do it.

If somebody could help me to figure it out, I would be very grateful. Thanks a lot!

P.S - We are Mac users - FCP, Cinema Tools and Shake.

I think your only real option is to shoot in 60i and set the shutter speed correctly for this....usually 1/120 to obtain clean, non blurry images similar to shooting at 60P. Barlow Elton has posted on several forums the best method to produce the desired results using FCP, Cinema tools and a Natress plugin that remaps files to full frames. The results are a really convincing slow mo in 720P....and possibly scaled back up to 1080P with only a minimal loss of resolution.

If I can find a direct link to his post I will add it here shortly.

The only drawback is you are limited to either 1/2 speed if editing in 30p or 1 1/2 speed if editing in a 24P environment. No in between speeds can really be emulated well. You'd need an HVX for that.

Peace!

Hi Marty!

Thanks for the quick reply.

We are going to shoot in 24f. Yes, I have the HDVxDV software.

But what exactly I should do after recording the footage?
Whats the steps in Cinema Tools? Do I have to use any new plug in or not?

Andrea,
It is important that if your project is in 24F that you still shoot the sections that you intend to use for slow mo in 60i mode. What essentially is happening is the camera is recoding 60 "Half resolution" images in the same second that it would normally record 24 full resolution frames. So make sure that you do not shoot these sequences at 24f. And don't be too fearful of the term "half resolution" that I used. The H1 is higher res than most comparably priced cameras that even "half resolution" slow mo is still very HD looking.

I am searching for the tools needed to accomplish this on a MAC. I am on a PC but Barlow has done this several times on his MAC using FCP, Cinema Tools and a $100 plugin from Nattress that remaps the individual fields into full frames. I have not done this myself but I have seen the results and it is very convincing.

Marty

Thanks again, Marty.

I just bought the Natress plug ins you told me.

Now I am looking for the steps here in the forum to accomplish the slow mo.

When I get the spot ready, I will post it here.

Cheers!

Barlow Elton wrote this:

"My trick is to put a 1080i clip into a custom 1080 60p (50p for you) sequence. Usually I make it an uncompressed timeline to minimize conversion artifacts. (most slow mo clips are short lengths anyway)

You add the Nattress Standards Conversion/Map Frames filter to an HDV 1080i clip on the timeline and choose "Fields to Frames HQ" and choose upper field first. Also, choose "normal" for deinterlace, rather than "smart". You should see the "combing" effect of interlace fields on movement within the image go away if you've done it correctly. It may have a slight amount of aliasing/jaggies on the image, but it should basically look progressive at that point. You then output a 1080 60p (50p again, in your case) clip and bring it into Cinema Tools and conform the frame rate to 24/25p.

Graeme's very affordable FCP plug-in is incredibly useful in so many ways...but for slow mo from the H1, it is easily the best thing I've tried and also the fastest rendering.

You should easily be able to get a true overcrank look/feel like this: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Elton/DadQBSlow.mov (10 MB h.264 720p)"

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=75384

Here is the link to a thread with the information in it. Hope it helps!

Edit: Doh! I see you found it! I will leave the link anyway just in case anyone else is looking!

Thanks!

Well, I am trying to do some tests before the shooting day (which was postponed...thank God).

Now I am very confused. Here goes my doubts:

1) After importing the footage, I went to check the format of the clip. FCP tells me the imported clips has TC RATE 30. Does it means the clip is 30fps? Shouldn't it be 60fps?

2) Whats the correct frame rate for the Timeline?

3) After conforming the clip in Cinema Tools, it is impossible to play the clip correctly. Whats the problem?

Hope somebody can help me.

Thanks a lot!

Well, I am trying to do some tests before the shooting day (which was postponed...thank God).

Now I am very confused. Here goes my doubts:

1) After importing the footage, I went to check the format of the clip. FCP tells me the imported clips has TC RATE 30. Does it means the clip is 30fps? Shouldn't it be 60fps?

If you shot 1080i with drop frame timecode, the correct frame rate is 29.97. Remember though that 1080i is 60 (59.94) fields per second, which when interlaced together is 30 (29.97) frames per second. What you want to do is extract each field to be its own frame and make a standalone 60p clip or sequence from 60i.

2) Whats the correct frame rate for the Timeline?
The correct frame rate for converting fields to frames in 1080 is 59.94 fps.

3) After conforming the clip in Cinema Tools, it is impossible to play the clip correctly. Whats the problem?

Let me say that normally when I do this stuff, I first convert my 1080i HDV material to an intermediate codec like Sheer or 10 bit uncompressed, and then perform the Nattress deinterlacing and Cinema Tools frame rate conforming before I integrate the material into an edit.

I usually don't finish in HDV anyway, so my normal route is to do offline edits in 1080 24p HDV and integrate slowmo shots that have been deinterlaced/frame rate conformed and HDV recompressed into the timeline as placeholders. When I'm happy with the edit, I copy/paste into an intermediate codec timeline (usually Sheer codec 1920x1080 23.98 fps) and also insert my original slowmo shots (before HDV recompression) into said sequence.

Complicated? Yes, but it's how I maintain quality.

You should really have a look at using AviSynth if Windows is ever involved in your workflow. It's a tremendously powerful script-based frameserver with a plugin architecture. Some of the advanced deinterlacers and filters that are available for AviSynth put everything short of a Snell & Wilcox Alchemist to shame. And it's all free and open source!!!

FCP's deinterlace routines are laughable by comparison. A simple bob most of the time, and a not-so smart "smart" deinterlace at best. With AviSynth you can load a 60i clip, smart bob-deinterlace it to 60p, and then use a motion compensated frame-blender to get it down to 48p. Finally decimate even frames to get nice slow motion 24p :)

MVBob is a REALLY good bobber (but very slow), and TDeint is a very nice bobber that's quite fast. MVTools has some lovely framerate conversion routines that use motion-vectors to create realistic looking effects.

Doom9.net has some great forums that revolve around AviSynth.

Integrating it in a QuickTime workflow is pretty simple, there's a QTSource plugin that can both read and write QuickTime files (preferably lossless like sheer or Animation codec).

A note, I've been using MVTools and TDeint to bob 60i analog capture material to 60p, and then slow it down to 30p for a VERY cool slow-motion effects. It integrates perfectly with a 30p timeline.

-Derek Prestegard

Hi Barlow!

Thanks for your reply.
Helped me a lot.

The Nattress plug in works very well, but I am still having problems to get the damn slow-mo.

I will describe what I am doing, maybe you can find where I am stumbling.

1 - Capture footage (1080 60i, 1/120 shutter) in FCP.
2 - Modify my sequence settings (timeline) to Field Dominance: none,
Editing Timebase: 59.94, Compressor: uncompressed 10-bits.
3 - Drop the clip on the timeline and render it.
4 - Drop the Nattress plugin on the clip. Set the plugin to -
Source Field Order: Upper, Mode: Field to Frame HQ, De-Interlace Options: Normal.
5 - Render it again.

Question: When can I slow the clip? I tried to slow it before and after these steps, but it doesn't work.

Sorry for the mess, Barlow. Hope you can still help me. Thanks a lot.

And Derek: I appreciated your tips, but we are Mac based. Thanks anyway.

Andrea,
Barlow will either confirm or denounce this, but I think you are just one step away form finalizing the slow mo. You should probably now open a 24fps project in FCP and drop the new 60fps clip into that. It will either immediately get played slow-mo from the timeline or you may have to tell FCP how exactly to handle the framerate. The bottome line is you need these 60 fps to now play at 24fps and that will give you your slow mo. The concept is footage that is recorded at a higher frame rate can be made slowmo just by placing it in a lower frame rate project.

Barlow, is this right or are we missing some other step?

Sorry, I don't have a MAC to verify any of this for certain!

Peace!

Can I suggest a Hack?
(don't boo me out of the thread)
you'll need Qt Pro

1) capture your 60i or 24f clip and go into the FCP Capture Scratch folder and open it

2) Select it with Qt Pro's in & out points

3) open a song in quicktime that is a little longer than your QT clip

4) over that song choose Edit> Add to Selection and Scale

= SLOWMO

You can then delete the audio track with Apple+J
(you can play with the length of the song to get the exact look you want)

I know it's a hack, but depending on the Project, it's quick and easy

Hi John.

Very funny suggestion, maybe it works with a small clip, when you don't have to pay attention on the technical details.

We will shoot a slow motion commercial for a client...so, I have to do the slow-mo like a pro, there is no other way. At the end of the day, we will have at least two hours of footage to work with. So....it is not the right workflow for me.

But I thank you very much for trying to help me.

Cheers!

Andrea,
Barlow will either confirm or denounce this, but I think you are just one step away form finalizing the slow mo. You should probably now open a 24fps project in FCP and drop the new 60fps clip into that. It will either immediately get played slow-mo from the timeline or you may have to tell FCP how exactly to handle the framerate. The bottome line is you need these 60 fps to now play at 24fps and that will give you your slow mo. The concept is footage that is recorded at a higher frame rate can be made slowmo just by placing it in a lower frame rate project.

Barlow, is this right or are we missing some other step?

Sorry, I don't have a MAC to verify any of this for certain!

Peace!

Hey, Marty! I will try it then!
Let you know if it works.

Thanks!

Andrea,
Barlow will either confirm or denounce this, but I think you are just one step away form finalizing the slow mo. You should probably now open a 24fps project in FCP and drop the new 60fps clip into that. It will either immediately get played slow-mo from the timeline or you may have to tell FCP how exactly to handle the framerate. The bottome line is you need these 60 fps to now play at 24fps and that will give you your slow mo. The concept is footage that is recorded at a higher frame rate can be made slowmo just by placing it in a lower frame rate project.

Barlow, is this right or are we missing some other step?

You are correct sir! The deinterlaced clip needs to be taken into Cinema Tools and conformed to 23.98 fps. Once you've done this, as far as the computer and QT are concerned, it is a 24p (23.98) clip. It should look like 2.5 slowmo now, and of course then you can integrate it as slowmo in a 23.98 timeline.

Also, consider using a bit of anti-aliasing in the Nattress processing. I usually select '30' out of a possible 100 on the slider, and I set the tolerance at '40'.

One other tidbit: For some reason Cinema Tools will conform the clip, and then when you open it in QT player, it usually shows up as a smallish-looking 640x360 clip. Don't be alarmed. Go to the QT View menu and click on "Actual size" and it should open up as an HD frame. Click "File/Save" and the file will open up at a normal large HD size after that. Annoying!

Yes!!!! It works!
:)))

Barlow, just a final question. If I want the clip a little bit more slow, what should I do?

Thanks a lot, guys! You saved my life!!!!!

LOL!!!

You should really have a look at using AviSynth if Windows is ever involved in your workflow. It's a tremendously powerful script-based frameserver with a plugin architecture. Some of the advanced deinterlacers and filters that are available for AviSynth put everything short of a Snell & Wilcox Alchemist to shame. And it's all free and open source!!!

FCP's deinterlace routines are laughable by comparison. A simple bob most of the time, and a not-so smart "smart" deinterlace at best. With AviSynth you can load a 60i clip, smart bob-deinterlace it to 60p, and then use a motion compensated frame-blender to get it down to 48p. Finally decimate even frames to get nice slow motion 24p :)

MVBob is a REALLY good bobber (but very slow), and TDeint is a very nice bobber that's quite fast. MVTools has some lovely framerate conversion routines that use motion-vectors to create realistic looking effects.

Doom9.net has some great forums that revolve around AviSynth.

Integrating it in a QuickTime workflow is pretty simple, there's a QTSource plugin that can both read and write QuickTime files (preferably lossless like sheer or Animation codec).

A note, I've been using MVTools and TDeint to bob 60i analog capture material to 60p, and then slow it down to 30p for a VERY cool slow-motion effects. It integrates perfectly with a 30p timeline.

-Derek Prestegard

Derek, this is all very good information! I will try this stuff out when I get my Intel Mac using Boot Camp and XP. I'm always interested in better results.

The reason I use the Nattress plug-in is because it renders FAST and gives me acceptable results. I've achieved phenomenal results from Compressor also, which has many of the same motion compensation/deinterlace/optical workflow/processing features that Shake users enjoy. The only problem was the insane render times on my dual 2.7 G5.

An eight second 60i clip, converted to 720 60p at best quality with all the motion compensation features enabled took nearly two hours to render. And sometimes I had strange glitched picture anomolies where there were areas of insufficient contrast in the image. (moving overexposed areas)

I've never had this problem with the Nattress filter and it would render the eight second clip (now 20 seconds of slowmo) in about one to two minutes.

Cheers,

B

Yes!!!! It works!
:)))

Barlow, just a final question. If I want the clip a little bit more slow, what should I do?

Thanks a lot, guys! You saved my life!!!!!

LOL!!!

I think if you want your clip a little slower with good results in 24p...I would consider using Shake or Compressor for this. Take the 60p clip and take the speed down 50%. Shake will hopefully create good synthesized "in-between" frames to give you the speed equivalent of 120 fps, which you can then slow back down to 24p via Cinema Tools, or probably within Shake too.

Experiment!

Cool, Barlow. I will try it.

When the commercial get ready, I will post it here.
That is the best slow-mo I ever had.
Without your help and the Nattress plug in I could not do it.

Thanks a lot!

Here I found how to make a perfect slowmo in Shake.

http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=78114

Edited... slightly off topic and started a new thread:
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=96988

Ok I'm resurrecting this old thread because I am having difficulty with this method. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Here is what I'm doing:

1) opening a hdv 1080 60i project.
2) right clicking the sequence icon in the project bin and going to settings
3) changing sequence settings to 59.94 (field dominance is automatically "none") and leaving the compressor setting at "1080i60" (tried uncompressed 10 bit and Apple ProRes but my machine seems to slow to handle them, end result was the same anyways)
4) capturing the 1080 60i footage and dropping it into the timeline
5) rendering it (do I need to get rid of the audio tracks at some point maybe?)
6) applying the nattress filter
7) rendering again
8) opening cinema tools and selecting "batch conform"
9) selecting the original "untitled" file from the folder it was captured to (is this the rendered file? I can't seem to find a way to save the rendered file separately)
10) conforming to 23.98

two new folders and a "conform.log" appear in the project folder.
one folder is called "conformed 23.98" and is empty. the other folder is called "skipped" and contains the original "untitled" clip. the conform.log says "skipped--the movie has temporal compression untitled"

I really need to figure out what I am doing wrong here, I'm half clueless about fcp as it is so bear with me...

In the three years since this thread was active, I wonder if any software (other than AviSynth, which requires a degree in programming) has appeared to allow Windows users to convert 60i fields to 60 frames,
the way Natress does with FCP?

Good afternoon,

I do slo mo all the time. One of the reasons I went with Vegas was that for slo mo you convert the 60 to 60 p, then you can change the play rate esaily; after that you can use the velocity envelope that does not just duplicate frames but interpolates the between frames. With the two it is pretty reasonable slo Motion. Nothing like all the stuuf from a few years ago.

If you still want to use FCP then just render it to an avi or Mov file and select it.

Ok I'm resurrecting this old thread because I am having difficulty with this method. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Here is what I'm doing:

1) opening a hdv 1080 60i project.
2) right clicking the sequence icon in the project bin and going to settings
3) changing sequence settings to 59.94 (field dominance is automatically "none") and leaving the compressor setting at "1080i60" (tried uncompressed 10 bit and Apple ProRes but my machine seems to slow to handle them, end result was the same anyways)
4) capturing the 1080 60i footage and dropping it into the timeline
5) rendering it (do I need to get rid of the audio tracks at some point maybe?)
6) applying the nattress filter
7) rendering again
8) opening cinema tools and selecting "batch conform"
9) selecting the original "untitled" file from the folder it was captured to (is this the rendered file? I can't seem to find a way to save the rendered file separately)
10) conforming to 23.98

two new folders and a "conform.log" appear in the project folder.
one folder is called "conformed 23.98" and is empty. the other folder is called "skipped" and contains the original "untitled" clip. the conform.log says "skipped--the movie has temporal compression untitled"

I really need to figure out what I am doing wrong here, I'm half clueless about fcp as it is so bear with me...

Hi Cal: Although no expert I've been doing this with my XLH1 and FCP for a while now, but my method does involve After Effects, I imagine Compressor or Motion could do the same thing. I lerned this method from an old DV based tutorial at : RAREVISION - New Media & Broadcast (http://rarevision.com/v1/articles/slow_motion.php#)

I shoot my main project as 24F and my slow mo stuff on a separate tape as 60i. For the slow mo I typically set my shutter at 1/120th. I capture the 24F material as either HDV 24P or Pro Res 4:2:2 and create a timeline that corresponds. I bring the Slow Mo stuff in as 1080 60i HDV then send it to AE and follow the procedures outlined in the above link. If you're familiar with AE you can easily select just the parts of the clips you want at this stage (remember handles). And remember HDV is upper field first.

When I bring this back into FCP it drops in seamlessly as 1080p 24FPS and looks stunning. I have never needed to drop it down to 720p.

Hope this helps.

don't have after effects unfortunately. anyone around used Barlow's method and can spot what I'm doing wrong?

Barlow very kindly responded to an email and explained what I needed to do so I will post his response below in case someone else is still interested in using this method:

"I think on step 3 you need to make it ProRes because HDV doesn't have a 1080 60p mode at all so what you will render will have interlace frames again.

Essentially:

1--Make a 1080 59.94p ProRes timeline and drop an HDV 1080 60i clip into it. (the "skipped" error message from Cinema Tools about "temporal compression" means that the clip's timebase can't be changed because the clip isn't in an I-frame format and has frames that are dependent on adjacent frames due to the nature of the codec. (HDV Long GOP)
2--Apply the Nattress filter (with settings you've described) to the clip on the timeline.
3--After applying it on the timeline, you actually need to drop the clip into the droplet in the filters tab. (don't ask me why, it's how Nattress explained to do it
4--Render out as a 1080 60p ProRes clip. You should see each former interlace field as a standalone frame in 60 fps clip.
5--Bring the clip into Cinema tools and conform to 23.98 (for 40% slowmo) or 29.97 (50% slow)
6--Optional--I tend to think the result is a little aliased looking in 1080 so I think it looks better downconverted to 720p, so downconvert if desired."