Slo-mo settings

[Ben Lynn]

I'm producing the video portion of an Easter musical at church and I have a question regarding slo-mo settings on the GL2.

Which setting will get the cleanest slo-mo footage, normal mode or frame mode? And what what is a good shutter setting for those? Will a 250 shutter on frame mode get a clean slo-mo or would it come out cleaner if I have it shot in normal mode and de-interlaced in post?

Now for a little more info on the shoot. Then scene set will be the desert and John the Baptist is baptizing people behind a big rock. As they come out of the water they throw back their hair and dance through the set. It's a pre-taped segment that will be shown during the live performance (it's to much to move all the props and water during the live event).

So lighting shouldn't be an issue as we'll have control over it and we're not limited to just the stage lights.

Thank you for the input on this.

Ben Lynn

[Ken Tanaka]

Ben,
Well, nobody's offered any thoughts on this so I'll toss a few in.

Fundamentally, it's important to keep in mind that your GL2 can only shoot at 30 frames per second. (High quality slow-motion film photography is done with high-speed cameras and film stocks able to shoot many, many more frames per second.)

It's also important to know that the GL2's "shutter speed" has no relation to those frames per second. Shutter speed, in the case of video cameras, refers to the CCD sampling frequency. It's a common misconception to confuse "shutter speed" with frame rate.

That said, there are no optimal settings for doing slow-mo shooting. The results are highly dependent on the nature of the subject, the lighting, whether or not the camera (or lens) will be in motion, etc.

The final results will also be highly dependent on the tool you use to slow your footage down. Since your footage will always be playing back at 30fps, creating a slow-motion effect requires that frames be artificially created in between the native frames captured from the camera. The slower the slo-mo, the more frames that must be synthesized. Using on-board slo-mo facilities on your editor may or may not produce usable results. Third-party tools, such as Adobe's After Effects or, even better, Re:Vision Effects' Twixtor will generally produce far better results, given GOOD clean footage.

Off-hand I'd recommend starting your experimentation in Frame mode and shooting with a shutter speed of 1/100. DO make time to experiment beforehand.

Good luck!

p.s. Go Illini!

[Rob Lohman]

Ken put down some excellent advice. I would like to add that
changing the shutter speed (increasing to 1/100 or higher)
will result in less motion blur and thus sharper images that
might result in a less fuzzy look when the footage is slowed
down in post.

I would suggest you try some experimenting with normal, frame
and different shutter shooting modes. See what works best
for the look you want.

[Cosmin Rotaru]

I think normal (interlaced) mode would be best. This way you have 60 (or 50 for PAL) fields that can be (depending on the editing app) converted in 60 frames (when slowed down to 50%).

[Mark Jefferson]

Another alternative would be to use Dynapel's MotionPerfect. It'd significantly cheaper then Twixtor ($39 vs. $599) and gives good results. Personally, I shoot everything in Frame mode, and use either MotionPerfect or After Effects (depends on what I'm doing) to generate the slowmo