Ive been messing with a few SD clips on vegas pro 8.0 by adding velocity envelopes which can speed up and slow down clips to give a time lapse and slow motion effect. When i do a slow the video down it gets choppy. Any way to fix that?

What you're running into is the fact that the footage you have just doesn't have the frames necessary to get rid of it. Interlaced footage slows better than Progressive unless you're shooting more than 30 frames per second. but if you only have 30 full images or 60 half images in a second and you slow it down to 5 frames per second the lack of constant movement or too much movement between frames in a given time will make it so that your brain doesn't fill in the gaps, but instead sees them as separate images and so it will appear jerky.

Hope that helps you understand why it's not able to be done in a straight editor.

If you get a tool that will generate frames inbetween the existing frames you can sometimes get decent result on a relatively small investment ( $100-200 ).

Dave

You can also double fields by duplicating the track and offsetting by one field, then reducing opacity to 50. It works. Try it.
Shoot a higher shutterspeed for better post-generated slow motion.

what shutter speed would you recommend ?
i recently shot some fast moving footage @ 500 and when slowed down in vegas it gives like a silhouette ghosting effect, do you know how this can be improved

thanks

You can also double fields by duplicating the track and offsetting by one field, then reducing opacity to 50. It works. Try it.
Shoot a higher shutterspeed for better post-generated slow motion.

Great tip Douglas. Thanks