Shooting Slow-mo with film

[Jon Rat]

Hi all,

 

I have a friend who wants to shoot slow mo on 16mm because he likes the film aesthetic.

He wants a maybe 200fps look but thinking about expense, could we get away with shooting say 50fps (or slower) and slowing down digitally with Eg. Twixtor?,

would it be as smooth as shooting film at 200?, if not is there another way of doing it?

 

much appreciated,

Jon

[Ben Syverson]

These days, 16mm high speed cameras cost less than 1000' of 16mm stock, and can go well beyond 200fps. I would just buy a camera and sell it when you're done with it.

[K Borowski]

I think he is talking about stock expense at that high of a speed.

 

 

I'd shoot at least 64FPS, but I guess it depends upon the subject; what are you shooting?

[Jon Rat]

Thanks for the replies,

 

yes, I did mean stock expense, the subject is things like bottles of liquid breaking, its an experimental piece.

So do I take it that it will be of benefit to shoot as high frame rate as possible and then extend this digitally?

thanks again.

[K Borowski]

There is John, but with 16mm you have grain structure to deal with; you may add a great deal of digital noise if it is more than doubling a frame. I'd shoot with as slow a film stock I could get away with (not easy to do with slo-mo) to mitigate the grain factor as much as possible.

 

Easier to do nice interpolation with clean source material.

 

 

 

Doubling of frames has been done long before digital came about. I forget if they did a half exposure from each sequential frame or what in printing, but there are ways of merging frames optically as well.

[Ben Syverson]

In the optical days, it was called "step printing." In fact, the famous "slow-mo" scene in Reservoir Dogs was not actually shot at high speed, but rather step printed.

 

Personally, I think step printing is the same category as freeze frames for pure cheesiness. But sometimes cheesy can work to your advantage.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Why does he want to do it on 16mm? Is it an aesthetic thing, e.g. mixing with other footage? If not, then I'd go with a digital system for the high speed stuff. You could always throw "grain" over top of it later on.