Best work flow for slow motion with XL H1

[Jonas Nystrom]

I'm planning a production with lot's of slow motions. I need your input for the best work flow. My experience is that XL H1 clips with time remaps can be beautiful and not SO beautiful at all... One thing, panning or dollying sideways can be stuttering in 25f, and with slow motion added it's like an slide show.

I've done slow motion in Shake, in adaptive mode, and with right circumstance it's lovely, but sometimes with really funny artifacts. Often it will need some rotoscoping as well.

So do you have any ideas, please let me know!

PS. Is there any affordable camera with faster fps then 25/30p or 50/60i HD? DS.

[Charles Perkins]

the pany hvx can do 60fps in 720p mode i think. so that might suit your needs more than the H1. but there is a shot in the sample forum above with a slowmo clip in it and how the dude made it. i think it had something to do with a trampoline.

[Dan Keaton]

My other hobby is Top Fuel Dragboat racing. (I am a crew member, not the driver or owner.)

I recorded the boat during our last race using the XL H1.

The recordings were 1080i60, with 1/60 shutter. I was 1500' from the boat, past the finish line, while the boat was at the holding rope. Since the races go very quick, 1/4 mile in under 5 seconds, I was not zoomed all of the way in, in order to keep the boat in the frame.

During editing, I cropped to get the boat a little closer, and then, using Vegas 6.0d reduced the velocity to 10%. This worked great.

I then tried 1% velocity. This exceeded all of my expectations. Mathamatically, I should have used 1.66%, but this is not available in Vegas, as far as I know. So the options for super slow motion are 1% or 2 %.

My goal was to analyze the motion of the boat as the driver applies full power, about 6,000 horsepower, at the start of the race. This was for our use, not to make a film out of the footage.

The results were beyond belief. We could see the throttle plates (butterflys) on the engine slowly open, the heat coming out of the exhaust headers, then the water boiling from underneath the boat, then the boat slowly, very slowly moving forward and rise out of the water.

When I selected the 1% velocity, I just wanted to see what it would look like. I had no expectations that it would look so good, or be so helpful for our analysis.

So, I highly recommend that you shoot some test footage with an XL H1, using 1080i60 and then experiment in Vegas with the Velocity tool!

[Jonas Nystrom]

I love this forum! Thanks for your input!

Have anyone done overcrank in Shake?

All best // J

[Lee Alford]

dan. you can make a nice living selling that footage as stock if you record it everytime you go out to race. both full speed and slow motion can sell seperately. 1/120 is even better then 1/60.

[Dan Keaton]

Dear Lee,

Thank you for the tip. I will try 1/120 shutter speed.

Will this cause strobing?

I have to perform a whip pan as the boat goes past me at over 240mph.

I want to get a second camera so that we can record a close up of the start and another camera following the boat during the entire pass.

[Yasser Kassana]

Here is a really good article here for slow motion.

http://rarevision.com/articles/slow_motion.php

In short, shoot in 60i or 50i depending on what part of the world your in. Use twixtor to seperate the fields into frames. So you end up with 50 frames or 60. Then slow it down to whatever you want.

In in slow mo, always shoot 100th or 120th shutter speed!!!!

[Jonas Nystrom]

Thanks Yasser!

Actually I had a look at Twixtor earlier - but I decided to go for the new Shake instead. Do you have any clips with time changes done in Twixtor? I've tried Barlows favourite Nattress Standard Conversion but it seem to work not so well in PAL.

I achieved some fairly good result when putting 1080i50 into a 720p50 sequence in FCP. Then exporting and after that importing into a 1080p25 seqence.

But not so good as the Slowmo Master Barlows clips ;-)

[Barlow Elton]

Originally Posted by Jonas Nystrom

I've tried Barlows favourite Nattress Standard Conversion but it seem to work not so well in PAL.

Jonas,

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)

[Jonas Nystrom]

TJOOHOOO as we say in Sweden!

Thanks Barlow, at last I solved the problem (when I red your instructions closely). And for all living in Pal countrys - FCP 1080p50 doesn't have 50 FPS as editing timebase - that's why I only got pairs of frames (no better then 25p). So don't put your 50i clip in a 50P timeline, put in a 60P timeline (with 60FPS editing timebase)! When I put the clips in a 1080p60 timeline, all the problem was solved - and exported with Cinema tools conversion everything looks nice! Also done the last of the Slo mo in Shake, maybe it's even a little bit smoother (maybe) but it take ages to render!

Only one question, why do Cinema tool resize the clip to 640x340 (anyway the info says so, but it looks like it is HD in FCP)?