Slow motion techniques
 

Hey what are some of the best ways you guys do slow motion stuff? Up until now I've been doing optical flow retiming in Motion but it gets kind of weird with 24p. So I've had to just slow down the footage and blend the frames which looks really bad! I wish the camera had overcranking :( . Maybe I should shoot in 60i and then before I'm done make the footage turn into 24p? I've heard there's software to do this but I don't know of any. Thanks!

Hi Keegan. Never shoot 24p if you are going to slow down that footage. As you have seen, the results are not ideal.

Set your frame rate to 60i and the shutter to 1/120s (maybe even faster if you are shooting sports). When you bring this footage into an NLE you will be able to slow it down to 24fps and get nice smooth slomo. The exact technique for doing this depends on what NLE you are using.

Richard

Possibly the bigfest flaw with the XL-H1 is not slow motion in camera, maybe they'll bring out an update soon. What happened to the big announcement from Canon on Sep 29th?

Yeah I am shooting sports, mountain biking so there's a lot of movement. I keep hearing different things! Some people say shoot at 1/50 shutter speed for smoother slow motion and some say higher shutter would be better. I'm using Final Cut by the way

Hi Keegan. 1/50 shutter will give more motion blur, which doesn't look good to me for slomo playback of sports action. I much prefer a faster shutter which produces sharper images. If it happened to be too fast, I could always add motion blur in post, however so far I have not needed to do that.

But if you're not sure what to believe, why don't you go and try it out for yourself? Just shoot the same thing with a few different shutter settings (you can call out the setting for each shot to make it easier to identify later). Then put the footage in your NLE, apply the slomo you want and see what looks good to you.

Richard