Slow Motion With Red Footage

[Frank DiBugnara]

Hi,

 

I have a shot of someone running shot on RED, 4K, 24fps.

 

I'd like to slow-motion the shot to around 50% speed. FCP and AfterEffects produce poor results. The third-party plug-ins seems costly and a bit complex, but might be a good option.

 

Can anyone recommend a solution that produces good results and is relatively inexpensive and simple?

 

Thanks.

[Kevin W Wilson]

You're not going to get really outstanding results since you locked your shot in at 24 fps. The best you can do to slow it down by half is generate a clip that runs at 12 fps, which will produce rather jittery slow motion. For slow motion you need more frames than you intend to project at. If you wanted to slow your subject down by half and your final projection rate is 24 fps, you need to shoot at 48 fps to produce a smooth result.

 

Sometimes you can get away with slowing down clips a little bit, say a 24 fps shot to something like 20 fps, but it still won't be smooth. There are plug ins like Twixtor that can do it, but they cost an arm and a leg and still will only produce okay results at best. Instead of having an actual frame of motion to pull from, these plug ins generate an inbetween frame to make up for what isn't there. Usually they merge the previous and following frame together by adding lots of motion blur, which is still unflattering; in my opinion.

 

I would recommend just reshooting at the proper frame rate to get the result you want. Unless of course you are okay with the jitter added by the non present frames, perhaps it fits with your story? There's several famous editors who slow clips down in post that were never intended to be used as slow motion clips, Conrad Buff, Michael Kamen and James Symons to name a few. So it happens all the time, you just need to decide if it's right for your story or not.

[John Sprung]

It won't be inexpensive, but FotoKem in Burbank has Arri's Relativity software. It does motion interpolation.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Phil Rhodes]

Twixtor really is quite competent:

 

http://vimeo.com/8574526

 

The thing is, fire is an easy subject for it in many ways (not all, of course), and it won't do nearly so well on more difficult material.

 

P

[Guest stevie wara]

Hi,

 

I have a shot of someone running shot on RED, 4K, 24fps.

 

I'd like to slow-motion the shot to around 50% speed. FCP and AfterEffects produce poor results. The third-party plug-ins seems costly and a bit complex, but might be a good option.

 

Can anyone recommend a solution that produces good results and is relatively inexpensive and simple?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Hi,

 

Have you tried Motion's optical flow retiming which is included with FCS? I haven't used it myself, but I am nonetheless curious as to its true usefulness and/or limitations.

 

Here's an example I found recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lENvzXa6k4

 

If you have already tried this and found it to be unacceptable, could you describe in what way?

[Guest Geoffrey Wayne]

Hi,

 

I have a shot of someone running shot on RED, 4K, 24fps.

 

I'd like to slow-motion the shot to around 50% speed. FCP and AfterEffects produce poor results. The third-party plug-ins seems costly and a bit complex, but might be a good option.

 

Can anyone recommend a solution that produces good results and is relatively inexpensive and simple?

 

Thanks.

[Richard Antley]

Hi Frank,

 

If you don't have the chance to re-shoot over cranked, but do have a least some budget to tackle this problem, then definitely get in touch with FotoKem about processing it with ARRI Relativity. It does a great job of exactly this type of processing.

 

If you need contacts there, please get in touch with me off list and I would be happy to provide them.

 

Best Regards,