Recording for slo mo
 

I have a shot of a team running onto the floor that I want to run in slow motion, but, when I slow it down the players are out of focus.

What is the best way to record the event to get the best results for doing slow motion?

MiniDV cams don't come with a slow motion option. For slow motion capturing, the frame/field rate would have to be increased (during shooting). My old DVL9500's have a slow motion feature, but they play back with only part of the screen size, so it's pretty useless.

You can only do it in post. Most NLEs have a slow motion feature.

See this thread.

I do quite alot of slomo work, what I've noticed so far with vegas is that I can get pretty decent results. (Vegas has a sample function)

But the main camera part that I've noticed is that I generally don't want to shoot at a too high sutter setting (I did this and the slowmo got stuttery) So keep it around 1/60 (1/50) never under that but if you can keep it around 1/60 to 1/120 (1/100).

If you are going to use any tool that uses samples. Do not shoot in progressive or frame-mode. (if you have that option.) This is the most damageing you can do.. Use interlaced video (this gives the program more material to do the sampleing)

I'm shooting normal video with my VX2, and editing slo-mo with Vegas. No problem slowing it down, but there is a lot of blur, probably due to the amount of player motion. I will try playing with the shutter speeds a little.

Thanks for the link Ken.

I've also done some slow motion and think Andreas is right on point. Unless you're out of focus I think you're seeing motion blur. That's usually a good thing because, as Andreas points out, at faster shutter speeds you'll get a choppy effect like a "fip book". The motion blur helps with the transition between frames.

I don't use Vegas so can't help there, but in Final Cut Pro there's an option called "frame blending" which helps. It tries to construct additional frames using the data from each 60i video field. Again, as Andreas says, you want to feed it as much temporal data as possible so don't shoot any longer exposure than 1/60 sec (NTSC). I've found that 25% of original speed still looked pretty good for my purposes. Then after processing the slow-mo sequence I deinterlaced with DVFilm Maker which seemed to help reconstruct some of the missing data and give the appearance of more sharpness.

Also, is the camera tripod mounted or hand held? Adding shaky camera movement to the mix could be part of the blurring problem.