A better slow motion

Luxo wrote on 5/28/2002, 6:07 PM
I'm curious why consumer grade cameras haven't added a slow motion mode. It seems video technology has increased far enough that adding the ability to capture more frames per second would be trivial. Certainly it should be posssible in prosumer grade cameras. Anyone know if this has been tried? Now that we have 24p cameras, this would be another logical step toward bringing the movie studio into the home.

In the meantime, I heard about a technique used in After Effects that takes a video clip and converts each field into unique frames. I assume it does this by splitting the fields and then interpolating the missing scan lines. I haven't seen this in effect, but my guess is it's pretty CPU intensive but results in a sharper slow motion than most NLE (including Vegas?) provide. Should this be considered for future versions of Vegas?

Luxo

Comments

SonyDennis wrote on 5/28/2002, 9:31 PM
1) Consumer grade cameras probably don't have robust enough transports to handle the increased tape speed for over-cranking (to get slow motion). Plus, most consumers have problems understanding indoor vs. outdoor lighting & color balance, so how would you explain slow motion? <g>

2) Vegas *can* interpolate fields just fine. Here's an example:
- Bring in a 30i source.
- Turn on "resampling" on the source video (right-click in event, Switches, Resample).
- File | Render As. Custom, Video, Template: Default, Frame Rate: 60, Field order: None (progressive). OK.
- Render.
- Start new project (File | New, Frame rate: 60, Field order: None (progressive).
- Bring in rendered file.

You'll see that every 60p frame is unique and complete, interpolated from to 30i source.

Without even rendering to 60p, if you turn on resampling, you can use velocity envelopes and/or rate changes on events and they interpolate pretty well, even to non-multiples of the frame rate.

///d@
Cheesehole wrote on 5/28/2002, 11:53 PM
>>>You'll see that every 60p frame is unique and complete, interpolated from to 30i source.

yes Vegas can certainly do this properly. with my camera I can shoot in interlaced or progressive mode and I always make sure if I'm shooting for slow motion that I use interlaced so I can get 60 samples per second instead of just 30. then I can render at 30p at 50% speed without interpolating frames for smooth slow motion.
Erk wrote on 6/30/2002, 1:24 AM
Cheesehole -

What kind of camera?

G
Cheesehole wrote on 7/1/2002, 2:30 AM
it's a Canon GL1