varicam slomo

[Dennis Scully]

Hi there, I am shooting a few commercials soon and need to do some super-slomo (400 fps) of food e.g vegetables falling into a pot of water and the highest frame rate on the varicam is 60fps. The Phantom we cannot afford and I'm looking at shooting at 60fps with a 45 degree shutter angle. I know there is software called TWIXT which does frame replication, etc which we can apply in post with some motion blur yet I am not sure if this will give us the desired effect -supersmooth slomo.

 

Does anyone know of another way of manipulating the footage to get to at leat 300fps/ We have a DS Avid HD suite and an Avid adrenaline.

 

Your help will be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks

Dennis Scully

[Phil Rhodes]

You're thinking of Twixtor.

 

In my experience it will do a very good job of slowing things down that are already going quite slowly - shoot at 100fps and it'll go to 200, probably, but don't expect it to take 25 to 50 convincingly. Even though that's only the same degree of stretch, it's more likely that the 100fps original doesn't actually have any high speed objects in it anyway.

 

This works up to perhaps four times the original duration, but heavily dependent on subject. For instance, the old standby drop of water falling into a pool of water works quite well because you don't have a large number of individual objects crossing over one another. On the other hand, for a long time there was a demo of a horse galloping through the shallows on a beach which was awful because you had thousands of droplets of spray all crossing in front of one another and it occasionally went a bit wrong. There are tools for avoiding this but it quickly becomes very labour intensive, perhaps impossibly so with the common high-speed subjects such as shattering glass and falling sparks.

 

In general, Twixtor is absurdly convincing, but it really depends what you're after. Without knowing more all I can say is shoot at the narrowest shutter angle you can, and then use something like Twixtor's stablemate Reelsmart Motion Blur to add in any desired degree of blur. The interpolation will work better on a sharper original, otherwise you end up interpolating blur and it's ugly as sin.

 

P

[Walter Graff]

Hi there, I am shooting a few commercials soon and need to do some super-slomo (400 fps) of food e.g vegetables falling into a pot of water and the highest frame rate on the varicam is 60fps. The Phantom we cannot afford and I'm looking at shooting at 60fps with a 45 degree shutter angle. I know there is software called TWIXT which does frame replication, etc which we can apply in post with some motion blur yet I am not sure if this will give us the desired effect -supersmooth slomo.

 

Does anyone know of another way of manipulating the footage to get to at leat 300fps/ We have a DS Avid HD suite and an Avid adrenaline.

 

Your help will be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks

Dennis Scully

 

 

If it's table top you will not get those kinds of numbers form a varicam and while Twixor is fun software, it can't do what you need. How about renting a Phantom form Abel Cine Tech? About the best results you'll find.