Slow motion with the GL1
 

I'm using the Matrox RT2500 with Premiere 6 and want to do some slow motion. Anybody have experience with either product trying to do a nice smooth slow motion effect? I've just tried setting the speed and am not impressed. Any hints?

Bruce

I use the system at college, and the only way I knew how to do it was via the speed control in Premiere - and yes I would agree that sometimes it can look very jerky - I think the reason for this is that it skips frames/ adds frames in order to reduce or increase the length or speed.

I would be interested to know if there is another way of doing this.

All the best,

Ed Smith

I had a look in the Matrox manual today - they said that it can look jerky and suggested to:

- Always Deinterlace

- Flicker Removal

This is done by clicking right mouse button on the video clip > Video Option >> Field Options >>> and then click desired effect.

Word of warning you will have to render when this is applied.

It sometimes pays to read. hehehehe ;+)

Hope this helps,

Ed Smith

Thanks Ed.

Tried it and still think it looks cheesy. Someone on another forum suggested taking a look at the AE Twixtor plug-in from RE: Vision Effects (http://www.revisionfx.com). I'll give the demo a try this weekend and let you know how it looks.

Bruce

No problem. It would be interesting to know how the plugin works and whether it would do a good job.

Keep me updated.

All the best,

Ed

Ed,

The Twixtor plug-in worked great on the clips I tried. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and get this puppy. Thanks for your input.

Bruce

bruce, this looks like an interesting option, do you (or anybody) have any cuts of the output of this plugin?

If you are on a PC, you have access to TMPGENc. Using this program, you can start with a 30(29.97) FPS interlaced DV and convert it to 60 FPS by making each field(A and B) an independent frame. Some vertical resolution is lost, but, you can recover a little of this with a sharpening filter(unsharp mask). When played back at 30 FPS, the motion is extremely smooth. A very good way to do slomo. If you'd like the TMPGENc templates for the conversion process, go to:
people.freenet.de/codecpage

Casey,

Even the 8 sec clip is prohibitively large, so, no. BUT...

Got a tip on another forum that works very nicely:

1) Change speed of clip
2) Apply Video->Adjust->Brightness and Contrast filter

That's it. It seems to work fine down to a speed of 50%. The difference between this and Twixtor was negligible. Of course I'm by no means a Twixtor pro so take this with the proverbial salt grains. But for a no-cost, easy, FAST rendering alterative it can be very viable depending on your final audience.

For speeds below 50% Twixtor was the hands down winner. Very pretty, smooth and clear in most intances.

The best option is to download the demo version of Twixtor (free) and do your own comparisons with your own clips. Be warned though: render times are pretty long in most cases so keep your clips short. Just a suggestion.

Cheers,

Bruce

Try ramped slow-motion oin after effects...works great.VEry smooth image.....

I had forgotten about this thread for a while...Since my last post I had invested in the full version of Twixtor and have used it quite a bit. One shot in particular comes to mind while editing a project for a local political group.

They had handed me some DV footage that they shot with a zr-10. There was one shot of a building here in Plymouth on the coast with this large area of golden brown grass in front of it. The wind was such that the grass was blowing around pretty hard and pretty quickly. I used twixtor to slow it down to 25% of its original speed, and the result looked incredible, it was near perfectly interpolated, even something as complex as all the individual blades of grass were handle with an incredible degree of accuracy.

Unfortunately i dont have the clip available, i did grab one still shot of an interpolated frame, however:

http://fat-dog.net/kc/cliffs_after.jpg

Really looks great!
How much did u pay for the program?
Hard to use?

You can find info on Twixtor pricing at

http://www.revisionfx.com/rstwixtorprice.html

As far as usability goes, I use it solely with combustion...and find it fairly easy to use, often you'll need to experiment a little with the settings to get what you want. Or, if you're like me and really don't mind the render times, you can max out the interpolation quality settings and just read a book. =D

c

I should also add too. that twixtor does an excellent job with speed ramping in After Effects. Combustion doesn't support this feature in the plug-in, however.