Slow Motion in Premiere CS6

[Ron McKinney]

Look, I'm back, okay? In 2002-04, I was heavy into wedding videos, short films, music videos. Shot with a Canon XL-1 back then, switched from editing on Premiere to Final Cut Pro. Now I shoot with a dSLR and a Canon XL H1, and I'm editing on Premiere Pro CS6, also have access to the CS6 Adobe Suite. I love the Adobe Cloud.

So I've slowed my first clips down in Premiere to 50% 60%, whatever, they look bad. Choppy. What's up with that? 10 years ago, they looked pretty good. My concern is that I shot everything (well, almost everything) at 60 fps back then, and now I'm shoot at 25 fps and that's what the difference is. Is that true?

Any chance I could pull it into After Effects and slow it down and it will look good? What do you guys do when you want to add some slo-mo and you're usually shooting at 25 fps? Do you immediately kick up the shutter speed during the shoot?

Appreciate any feedback.

Ron

[Battle Vaughan]

More fps is better. Obviously, there are longer non-image times with 25 fps than with, say 60 or 120. Software which interpolates between the frames to create the extra frames used in a slo-mo effect have fewer frames at 25 than at 60fps and bigger jumps in the motion to deal with. creating gaps which look jerky.

For software, AE with Twixtor (3rd party plugin) is reputed to be the best current way...twixtor is not cheap, however. Another plugin, not as expensive, is Kronos from the Foundry. Haven't used it but there are free trials of both programs available: http://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/ and http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/kronos/

[Pete Bauer]

Here's what's up with that:

The XL1 had a frame mode, but if you were shooting "60fps" that means 60 FIELDS per second. At the expense of some resolution, that is easy to slow down. If you're now shooting only 25p, you have only 42% as many images per given amount of time. Not nearly as easy to slow down.

If you know you'll want to do slow motion with the footage, shoot at 720p60. Same as 10 years ago: smoother slow motion at the expense of some resolution.

BTW, 25p is a PAL frame rate. Did you buy a European version, or have Canon do the dual-system upgrade for your XL H1?

[Ron McKinney]

Thanks for the info, Battle. Not sure what I'll do yet. I'll go with what Pete suggested and shoot at the faster frame rate.

Pete, sorry... must've had PAL on my mind. We're shooting at 24fps. Thanks for your suggestion, as that's what I'll probably do going forward. I tend to do a lot of slo-mo in my montages, so I'll just have to get used to bouncing around from 24 fps to 720/60. Thanks for responding.

Ron

[Battle Vaughan]

FWIW, AE comes standard with Timewarp and motion blur functions, they work ok but the 3rd party apps get really good reviews. Might try timewarp first since it's there. Pete is right, and my somewhat verbose explanation boils down to the same thing: more frames.

[Ron McKinney]

Okay, next question for anyone who might be on this thread. My 2nd shooter was using a Canon EOS C100 camcorder and so I pulled an image from it. He was shooting at 1920x1280 and for some reason, I thought I would pull a really nice image from it. But now I'm thinking the resolution is simply 1920x1280 pixels, which is large enough for a nice web-sized JPG and printable to 4x6 (1200x1800), but that's about it. Is that right, or am I missing something. Here's a pic I pulled from his footage.

Sorry, don't know how to imbed.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8244/8...e967d600_c.jpg

[Pete Bauer]

Ron, how did you pull the image? The c100 does up to 1920 x 1080 ("full HD"). The linked image is an 800x536 pixel jpg so cannot be simply a full video frame.

[Justin Molush]

I always make it a note to use the framerates I have and slow it down not past a perfectly conformed speed.

For example, I will always have a 24P/25P (depending on your zone) timeline when I know I am going to slow things down.

50p @ 50% -> 25p
60p @ 40% -> 24p
30p @ 80% -> 24p
30p @ 83.3% -> 25p

And premiere does a wonderful job of conforming these perfectly into the timeline with no framerate skips. Its simple math and it depends on your project. Now, you can always turn frame blending on to get some smoothed frames in between some jagged slow downs if you dont have a good frame rate to start with, but I think that looks cheap. The next option would be framerate interpolation software, like Twixtor which works wonders if you know how to use it.

When I know I am going to be slowing footage down I always use 60p, if that is not an option I use 1080/30p (i shoot on a 7D so thats the highest option) and instead of going 180* shutter, around 1/60th, I might do it at 1/80th to sharpen it up a little bit. 1/100th is not out of the question if I am going to go to Twixtor later. If shot correctly, I can usually simulate the 60p upwards to around 120fps no problem, but you need to be aware of the software limitations and things that are moving too fast in the scene for the software to work correctly.

[Trevor Dennis]

Originally Posted by Battle Vaughan

FWIW, AE comes standard with Timewarp and motion blur functions, they work ok but the 3rd party apps get really good reviews. Might try timewarp first since it's there. Pete is right, and my somewhat verbose explanation boils down to the same thing: more frames.

I've used Timewarp in AE at 25% and it looked pretty good to me. And I've only used it the once as I am fairly new to AE, so I dare say I was missing a trick or two.

[Tim Kolb]

Yes, I'd agree that I suspect Ron would really like shooting at 60 fps, and simply telling Premiere Pro to interpret it as 24 fps in his project...very smooth 40% speed...in realtime.

I've been doing this for so long that I usually don't even think about it as a notable feature.

[Ron McKinney]

Thanks, guys, I used TimeWarp and it worked nicely in my current project.

Tim, interesting idea there for me. So you shoot at 60 fps. Do you create a sequence with settings at 24 fps, and then you still have to slow it down? Or do you create the sequence at 60 fps but slow everything down to 40%? I presume this gives you that film-like look that we're looking for in shooting 24 fps?

[Tim Kolb]

Like I said, there isn't nearly that much work involved...

If the program is basically 1080p23.976...make your sequence and edit.

...take your 720p59.94 and right-click on it in the project panel and pick "modify" then choose interpret and specify the 23.976 framerate.

No slowing it down...no render bar even...it will simply run at 23.976 as smooth as can be as there is no frame interpolation at all. (you'll have to scale it up a bit to fill the screen, but it works pretty well.)

[Ron McKinney]

Interesting, Tim. Thanks for sharing!
Ron