Smooth Slow Motion FCP5

[Joel M]

I tried posting before, but my thread got totaly off topic so I'm starting this one. I'm trying to achive that silky smooth slow motion look you would get if you captured at a high frame rate. I've tried capturing at different shutter speeds, but when I slow it down in FCP 5.0, it looks really jittery.
I understand JES Deinterlacer is an option, but for some reason, I can't get it to work for me. Is there any certain settings I should use? Is there any other method you can suggest?

Thanks!

[wfeu]

alot of ppl use twixtor http://www.revisionfx.com/

[ccirelli]

Your best bet? Shake. It does an incredible job of slo-mo'ing footage. Or, you can move up to Final Cut Studio 6 - Motion and FCP6 now do this as well.

I realize Shake is end-of-life app, but the advantage to this is the price dropped from $5,000... to $499 (about half that for Academic).

EDIT: After re-reading your post, I realize this doesn't exactly answer your question. I'm not sure how much success you'll have in FCP5 without a plug-in, or Shake, achieving this effect.

[transducr]

I just started using FCP, but is it possible to shoot 60p and simply set it to play back 24? Or is that what the above post was referring to as looking jittery?

[xzu]

sorry I could not reply earlier

First of all you should know that FCP do not handle smooth slow motion. it is not a judgment, it is a fact.
all tips given on FCP are just patches, but has nothing to do with pro workflow.
Why is that ?
Main reason is that FCP cannot set your sequence up to 60 frame (50 in PAL) per second.

There... I can see your smile and you already see my point. The all stuff is about using enterlaced material, with the TOTAL amount of frames contained in a second. THAT FCP do not handle it !

Second : consider that a good slow motion cannot be obtained without the help of a ... good and planed shooting.
Why is that ?
When you grab 60 frames (ok, ok, ... fields) per second, the shutter is set for a natural display at 30 frames per second. When playing back footage at half the speed, the moves are displayed as if shutter was opened for too a long time : the echo of the move looks like if you had set the shutter very low. And that is normal due to speed in playback. In film we don't have such problems because camera shoots at high speed for real, so the exposure time for each frame is short : when played back at normal speed, slow motion looks natural, no move displays trails or echo.
So you need to shoot at shutter speeds that equals twice the field rate :
for 60 i = set shutter to 120/
for 50 i = set shutter to 100/ (HV 20 do not support 100, just grabb the next one).

After Effects is a good choice to acheive slow motion at the end : just import your enterlaced footage and consider it as a 60fps (or 50fps) and slow it down to 50% as it is. And because 50% is a good speed to have many in-between frames, you may also acheive a slower motion by applying the plug in described in this post for slower speeds. Remember that the more you get in between frames (fields), the best the plug in will work. Working in NTSC is of course, a better solution to get more frames and slower speeds.

[havanother]

After effects is the way to go. The latest CS versions include slowmo effect that sort of morphs between frames. Rather than just doubling the amount of frames so you get stuttery footage, it blends the differnce and smooths it out. The results are pretty good - but unless you can increase how many frames you're recording per second, you're not going to get that lovely slow mo you see in films.

Having said that, I remember seeing a camera recently - it was a Canon I think, with a slow mo feature which, for a short period, will record more frames per second. I've never played with one, I suspect it's a gimmick that doesn't actually work, but you could Google it if you're keen.

If you can't get a recent version of after effects, do a search on YouTube, I remember seeing a tutorial on slow motion settings that was pretty simple, something to do with switching frame blending on and choosing your frame rate to make it easy for the programme to work out.

Havanother

[xzu]

Having said that, I remember seeing a camera recently - it was a Canon I think, with a slow mo feature which, for a short period, will record more frames per second. I've never played with one, I suspect it's a gimmick that doesn't actually work, but you could Google it if you're keen.

I don't know about Canon, but Panasonic P2 cam has the same feature. And in fact, what does the camera is exactly the same process I described before. But instead of playing back at 1920*1080, it playback at 720p, certainy because interpolation of FIELDS to make them appear as FRAMES. Sometimes camera uses flash memory (so it gives limited slow motion footage), to avoid tape being used at different speed : the footage are more compressed in these cases. 10 sec of footage interlaced are recorded in the flash memory and recorded at the same time on tape (buffer somewher) at 720p and twice the speed.

[xzu]

here is a sample video I made to illustrate result of my technic using AEFX

Shoot in HV20 (sorry I don't see video tags to embed that QT movie on this post)
http://cinemahd.free.fr/videos/exempleralentiweb.mov
(use right click and download the .mov file)