Slow Motion Question

[Barlow Elton]

Originally Posted by Marty Hudzik

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!

[Andrea Beck]

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!!!

[Barlow Elton]

Originally Posted by Derek Prestegard

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

[Barlow Elton]

Originally Posted by Andrea Beck

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!

[Andrea Beck]

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!

[Andrea Beck]

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

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

[Alex Tosuni]

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

[Cal Bickford]

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...

[Steve Siegel]

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?

[Dale Guthormsen]

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.

[Jeff Mueller]

Originally Posted by Cal Bickford

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

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.

[Cal Bickford]

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

[Cal Bickford]

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."