Canon XL2 and Premiere Pro - Slow mo
 

I am trying to find the best way to produce quality slow motion with the equipment I have, a XL2 and Premiere Pro. for settings on the camera is 60i the best way to go and then just slow it down to 50% in Pro? Last time I tried it looked choppy and wasn't the quality I was looking for.

What version of Premiere are you using? CS3 has vastly improved slo-mo over PP2, and if you get the whole suite AE has some pretty good time remapping from what I've heard.

But for standard DV I found even older versions of Premiere pretty nice, doing it just as you described.

PP CS3 has a very good time remapping feature, which also allows for ramping up or down. It is one of the standard effects for each clip, just like motion. You do not need the whole suite for that. It makes life a lot easier, since you no longer need Twixtor or similar to get good quality.

yeah its CS3... how do I do remapping? its not just slowing down the speed of the clip is it?

right click on the footage in the timeline and go to time/detoration (or something similar) and a little window will pop up, you can now increase or decrease the speed by typing in the percentage (and even reverse the footage)

I shot some stuff on the xl2 recently and slowed it to look almost filmic.. It came out amazing.
As well as 60i make sure you shoot your footage with a (1/500 +) shutter speed so cs3 can blend frames without artifacts.
I use After effects and a plugin called twixtor, you can turn each field or 1 interlaced frame into a fullframe. So essentially giving you a 50% slowdown then you can remap from there even slower.
PP3 uses pixolmotion of something like that for frame blending.. its alright but if you want the 200fps look I suggest twixtor and AE!!!!

That is still the old and very bad slomo. Just use the standard time remapping effect in the effect control panel.

Harm Millaard Quote:
That is still the old and very bad slomo. Just use the standard time remapping effect in the effect control panel.


I just tried using both methods on 60i material down to 10% speed and can't see a difference (both looked very good). Does the time remapping really perform better than the old method?

Yes and it also allows ramping up and down in speed. But essentially, it no longer requires using a plug-in like Twixtor (with it's very long render times) to accomplish good slomo's.

Yes, you can achieve fairly decent slowmos with the built in. but. its still only fairly decent.. comparing twixtor to generic adobe slowmo apps is like comparing Boujou motion tracking to After Effects motion tracking.

Short of shooting with a true 60fps varicam or motion film camera, twixtor is still the best option for dv footage. People would say Final Cut has very good slowmo software, yet they just released Twixtor plugins for Mac FC users. I wouldnt use twixtor for corporate stuff but if your going to make a short film or whatever, quality is king.