fast-motion limit

cape-ealing wrote on 8/11/2011, 11:47 AM

I have a video of my baby asleep for 8 hours. I want to turn it into a 'fast-motion' video of say 3 mins duration - to show her wriggling furiously and wandering around the cot at night. Trouble is that when I do the 'ctrl-click' and reduce the video I seem to get to a limit of reduction to about 2 hours. I cannot get it shorter than that.

Is there therefore a limit to the extent I can 'compress' or 'fast-motion' video and, if so, how can i get around it?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 8/11/2011, 11:55 AM

Have you tried right-clicking on the clip and selecting Properties -- then, on the Video Event tab, setting the Playback Rate? (A tip from my book.)

There may well be a limit on how fast you can go, but this may also give you more control than you'd have using the timeline method.

The workaround would be, of course, to output the fastest clip you can make as a DV-AVI, import that into your project and apply Time Stretch to it -- and do that as many times as it takes to get it up to the speed you need.

DocSatori wrote on 8/11/2011, 11:56 AM

This might not be the best solution, but here's what I did. I had a long video and wanted to 'time lapse' it - without getting into skipping every X frame - so I scaled it the way you (cape-ealing) did as much as possible. I rendered that video. Then I imported that rendered video into a new project and scaled it again ... using the 'ctrl-click' technique. The results were satisfactory. Hope this helps (HTH)

AlanADale wrote on 8/11/2011, 12:49 PM

There's really no limit other than what becomes presentable. Here's a link to an excellent tutorial explaining exactly the effect you are trying to achieve. You might also like to bookmark this YouTube page as the tutorials presented are both clear and easily understandable..........some of the best that I've seen on the subject of VMS. By the way, if you Ctrl + Click on the end of the clip and drag it left it will display in percentage terms the amount of increased speed and you'll notice that it won't go beyond 400% i.e. x4 faster. The video demonstrates a workround without losing quality.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TemporalParadox1#p/u/19/mlNvv6seGW4

Hope this helps.

DocSatori wrote on 8/11/2011, 2:46 PM

Right. When you get to the part of Temporal's You Tube tutorial (at about the 4:30 mark), he suggests the same thing I did in my first comment for this thread.

Scale to the maximum, 400%, render, and then scale the rendered video again to whatever setting you want.

cape-ealing wrote on 8/13/2011, 9:09 AM

thanks, all. will try the render technique.