Bob Richardson
April 23rd, 2010, 02:47 PM
Hi -
I've got a project where I'm trying to improve the look of some of my slow-motion footage.
First, some background:
A few months ago I did a promo for a client which involved a lot of footage from a soccer match. This promo is primarily to be published on the web (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), and we decided on a frame rate of 30p.
The actual raw footage was shot in 60p (1280x720), with the intention that there would be a couple of slow-motion segments, so we could slow the footage down by half and have a really nice slo-mo.
Just one problem: At the time, I was editing in Final Cut Express. FCE is actually a very capable program, but you are limited to a very small set of sequence presets that Apple gives you. If you are particular about codecs and frame rates, you have to use FCP.
Here's the issue at hand:
When slowing down footage (by changing the playback speed of an individual clip), we only got half the frames that we expected. In other words, FCE appeared to first be converting the clip to 30p to conform with the timeline (tossing away every other frame), and THEN slowing it down again for our slo-mo reseulted in 15FPS.
Those problems aside, the client was happy and the project is done.
This week, I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Final Cut Studio / FCP7 (for a variety of reasons).
As a learning project, I decided to revisit this soccer promo. I made a copy of my original sequence and set the new sequence to be ProRes 422(HQ), 30p. Things looked a bit better in terms of resolution, but the slo-mo was having the same problem. (Strangely, unlike when creating a new sequence from scratch, you aren't allowed to change the frame rate of an existing one int he sequence settings dialog -- is that right?)
So for the next experiment, I created a blank sequence with a 60p frame rate, and then copied/pasted all my clips from the original sequence.
The clips didn't line up correctly on the new timeline, but that's something I can fix manually. But what's bugging me is that my slo-mo still has half as many frames in it as I would expect. What gives?
Do I need to pre-convert the clips I want to use as slow motion rather than changing the speed of the clip on the timeline?
Thanks in advance for any tips!
I've got a project where I'm trying to improve the look of some of my slow-motion footage.
First, some background:
A few months ago I did a promo for a client which involved a lot of footage from a soccer match. This promo is primarily to be published on the web (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), and we decided on a frame rate of 30p.
The actual raw footage was shot in 60p (1280x720), with the intention that there would be a couple of slow-motion segments, so we could slow the footage down by half and have a really nice slo-mo.
Just one problem: At the time, I was editing in Final Cut Express. FCE is actually a very capable program, but you are limited to a very small set of sequence presets that Apple gives you. If you are particular about codecs and frame rates, you have to use FCP.
Here's the issue at hand:
When slowing down footage (by changing the playback speed of an individual clip), we only got half the frames that we expected. In other words, FCE appeared to first be converting the clip to 30p to conform with the timeline (tossing away every other frame), and THEN slowing it down again for our slo-mo reseulted in 15FPS.
Those problems aside, the client was happy and the project is done.
This week, I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Final Cut Studio / FCP7 (for a variety of reasons).
As a learning project, I decided to revisit this soccer promo. I made a copy of my original sequence and set the new sequence to be ProRes 422(HQ), 30p. Things looked a bit better in terms of resolution, but the slo-mo was having the same problem. (Strangely, unlike when creating a new sequence from scratch, you aren't allowed to change the frame rate of an existing one int he sequence settings dialog -- is that right?)
So for the next experiment, I created a blank sequence with a 60p frame rate, and then copied/pasted all my clips from the original sequence.
The clips didn't line up correctly on the new timeline, but that's something I can fix manually. But what's bugging me is that my slo-mo still has half as many frames in it as I would expect. What gives?
Do I need to pre-convert the clips I want to use as slow motion rather than changing the speed of the clip on the timeline?
Thanks in advance for any tips!