View Full Version : How is this slow mo done?


Max Palmer
June 30th, 2014, 09:41 AM
One of my favorite wedding studios has a video with some very slow-motion segments done, and I really want to find out how this is done. The video is at: Opposites Attract from David Ruzicka on Vimeo (http://player.vimeo.com/video/95532346)

I'm looking mostly at portions of the video starting at 6:08, particularly the girl spinning around 6:17. As far as I can tell, the footage seems to be shot on C100's (can be seen in some clips). Even if the camera does shoot at 60p (not sure that they do) and they are dropping into a 24p or 29.97p sequence, this looks a lot slower.

Does anyone think this is being shot on a different camera, or is there some fantastic Twixtor-like trickery going on? The slow mo doesn't look like it's being done with a plugin.

David Barnett
June 30th, 2014, 11:57 AM
Probably shot 120fps. Without Twixtor or any slomo, this is native 120 (just my cousins birthday, not a professional gig):

Kendyls 30th on Vimeo

Shot on a Sony Z5U. My only drawback for me is I now use a MRC1 CF card adaptor, shooting to card. But the Slo-Mo 120fps feature is only available when shooting to tape AND Interlaced, not progressive iirc:( Too much of a pain to switch from tape to card and interlaced & back while at a wedding.

Noa Put
June 30th, 2014, 12:28 PM
Why Don't you ask the maker of that video? He has comments enabled on vimeo so who knows he'll share the secret and then you can come back here and tell us :) Even when you shoot 60p it would be difficult to get this smooth very slowmo, twixtor usually leaves some ghosting trails if you have busy backgrounds so hard to tell how he did achieve this because it does have the appearance of a high frame rate camera.

James Manford
June 30th, 2014, 12:37 PM
Thats the beautiful Sony NEX FS700 in action! 240fps @ 1080p. And may be even slowed down a little more in post for certain segments.

Amazing isn't it.

Noa Put
June 30th, 2014, 12:49 PM
That sounds most likely, I only use slomo in trailers, never in the final longer edit. For trailers slomotion can add to the emotion you are trying to show in a very short time. The gh4 can do 96fps, still far away from 240fps but a bit closer to epic slomows :) The problem is all camera's I know of that can shoot high framerates loose in image quality so you would need a good camera, there are some cheaper alternatives available I believe but not sure how the image quality will look like as it will matter if you have to match the image with other camera's.

David Barnett
June 30th, 2014, 01:19 PM
Thats the beautiful Sony NEX FS700 in action! 240fps @ 1080p. And may be even slowed down a little more in post for certain segments.

Amazing isn't it.

240fps sounds sick! Sounds like a cool feature.

Adrian Tan
June 30th, 2014, 06:45 PM
Hey Max, I also think it's probably an FS700 rather than C100... And it could be used handheld. At those sorts of speeds, you don't need stabilisation. But if it's C100, then it'd probably be 1080i60, deinterlaced and Twixtored.

By the way, a cheap option ($500-$1000) for super slow motion is the Casio Exilim series. Goes up to 1000 frames per second... just at some ridiculously low resolution, which is still, however, usable for YouTube purposes.

Mark Watson
June 30th, 2014, 11:38 PM
I think the Panasonic DMC-FZ200 has a slight edge over the best of the Exilim high speed capable cameras, and it's still in production. Interestingly, the Exilim EX-FH25 had 422 color space, but a lowly bit rate of around 13Mbps, as I recall. I also have the EX-FH20 as well as a couple other pocket-sized Exilims and the FH25 was the best of them. 120fps was 640x480 and quality ran downhill quickly at anything faster than that.

Mark

Danny O'Neill
July 1st, 2014, 02:00 AM
One shot had some Twixtor morphing but the rest seemed to be native. Especially given the light flicker which resulted from the increased shutter speed. Ask him on his comments.

Dave Partington
July 2nd, 2014, 01:29 PM
One shot had some Twixtor morphing but the rest seemed to be native. Especially given the light flicker which resulted from the increased shutter speed. Ask him on his comments.

I agree. The light flicker was unfortunate, and annoying, but I guess the B+G will love it all the same.

Max Palmer
July 7th, 2014, 01:55 PM
One shot had some Twixtor morphing but the rest seemed to be native. Especially given the light flicker which resulted from the increased shutter speed. Ask him on his comments.

Which shot did you notice it on? I was trying to look for some trailing artifacts but couldn't find any. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place.

Andrew Maclaurin
July 8th, 2014, 01:05 AM
i asked him. it's a sony fs700