I work for a church regularly that I have to make things out of thin air basically. I need to move things sometimes as slow as 15-20% or the original. I'm having trouble with the chopiness, and need to figure out a way of getting that whole overcranked film or something close to it.

Keep in mind that video is 30 frames per second (almost). When you slow it down the new inbetween frames have to be manufactured (which can lead to bluriness or ghosting) or frames have to be duplicated to fill in the space (which can look choppy). The smooth slow motion you see with film is created by filming the original scene at a much higher frame rate. If the movie is to be slowed down to 25% then the scene will be filmed at 96fps. Slowing this down to 1/4 speed results in 24fps which matches the regular film rate. When you slow video down to 1/4 speed you have 7.5fps which will look very choppy.

For giggles, try a fast motion piece like this:
put media on track.
Duplicate track
compositing mode on upper track should be Screen mode
Zoom in as deep as you can
With snapping on, move upper track forward in time by one frame
Mark the distance between the lower track and the upper track starting point
Turn off snapping and quantize frames.
Move upper track BACKWARDS in time so that it now starts halfway between where it was starting on the frame mark and where the lower track starts.

It sometimes helps, depending on lighting.

Just tried this! Excellent SPOT! ... . Now for tweaking, use the Kepad's 4 & 6 or 1 & 3 keys for moving clip backwards and forwards to get the "overlap" you want . .. works well.

Grazie

. .. just added some B'nW and B'nC FX to the Upper track . . now THAT is way cool!

It's a look I'm wanting for a traffic sequence going thru' the streets of London. . at speed . . .. . OH yesssss......

Grazie

Sorry about this question, are you saying to move 1/2 frame in vegas5b for offset. I seem unable to offset a 1/2 frame with Q. turned off. is there an internal setting?

If you want to move an event by less than a frame, I think you have to turn off "Quantize to Frames, under the Options menu (it defaults to on, and 99.99% of the time when you're working with video events, you want it on - this example is one of the exceptions).

You have to have snapping off as well.

Sorry in advance if I've misunderstood your question.

Skevos Mavros
http://www.mavart.com

As SPOT said plenty of light = faster shutter oe else if you can switch the shutter speed on the camera as fast as you can but watch DOF. You can always add some MB during after you slow it down.
Bob.

After rebooting, vegas5 is working again, I can turn off and on Quantize to frame.

I am working on a FAQ which includes information on how to create better slow motion. I tried Spot's shifting scheme, but it didn't work. I ended up, due to using the "Screen" compositing mode, with video that was much lighter than the original, which is exactly what the help file says will happen. Maybe I misunderstood the directions. I then tried the half-frame offset, but with normal alpha compositing, and the top track set to 50% opacity. This produced rather blurry video, although perhaps a little smoother in some ways (I had the slo mo set to 25%).

I've gone back and tried all the things that I posted about a year ago and found this:

1. Supersampling does absolutely nothing for slo mo. I was dead wrong in my earlier posts.

2. "Force resample" is no longer necessary (and probably hasn't been from Vegas 4 onward). The events all default to "smart resample," and with this feature Vegas resamples as soon as the playback rate is changed.

3. A small Motion Blur setting (somewhere between 2 and 4) on the video bus track can help reduce the slight strobing or flicker that sometimes mars the motion. By the time you get to a motion blur of 6, the video starts to blur, and you get very liitle additional artifact reduction.

4. Reduce interlace flicker makes no difference.

5. Using "Best" instead of "Good" for rendering quality makes absolutely no difference, and makes your renders longer.

The above observations are all based on testing I have done in the past 24 hours. I used a clip from a volleyball game and slowed it down to 25%. This is a great test clip because it has vertical and horizontal ball motion, hard lines on the court, the grid provided by the net, and camera movement.

The good news is that the Vegas defaults give you the best slow motion, and Motion Blur is the only additional setting that you need to use to get rid of strobing artifacts, and you only need to use this on some clips.

I'll been doing the same, but I have had good results. I used Ctl and also velocity envelopes down to 52% using footage from universal park, bright day, fast moving ride. alignment issues, exist in test, but still the rendered track looked good. the offset technique requires good alignment. Is it perfect, not yet and probably never will be, but it is a good solution that does not require additional software, a plus for vegas and golden advice from Spot for the struggling editor or for users who want to use vegas in new ways.

apit34356,

I must be missing something. When I follow Spots advice and use "Screen" for compositing, I get video that is too bright. Are you not having this problem?

Perhaps he forgot to mention that the lower track should be made a child track, and that the compositing mode that should be set to "screen" is the Parent compositing mode, not the compositing mode for the track??

turn the screen on the parent composite mode, left side of the track definition. do not change track mode source alpha.

I left the child track fixed, and moved the parent track for the required frame offset. I used velocity en. because it doesn't stretch the lenght of the event on both parent and child tracks.

Johnmeyer, if you have the time, a nice script for slow motion where one can enter the % or number of frames to stetch with a fixed event lenght would be nice. If you can , thank you in advance,

AJP

turn the screen on the parent composite mode, left side of the track definition. do not change track mode source alpha.

Yup, that's what I figured. It is confusing to have two buttons labeled "compositing mode" on the same part of the user interface.

Johnmeyer, if you have the time, a nice script for slow motion where one can enter the % or number of frames to stretch with a fixed event length would be nice. If you can , thank you in advance,

I've been thinking about this a lot in the past few days. I do a lot of sports, and slow motion is essential for most sports videos. I have tried many different approaches to slow motion and have tinkered till the cows come home with Vegas.

Based on your input, I just got Spot's "two-track-half-frame offset" approach to work, but the effects are extremely subtle. I confirmed that I really did make a difference by using the difference composite mode between slo-mo create by Vegas in the normal manner, and slo-mo created with the offset approach.

Given that this approach doesn't make a huge difference (nor did Spot claim that it would, except under certain lighting conditions), I don't think it is worth scripting it. Also, since slow motion can be created so simply just by Ctrl-dragging the edge of the event, I'm not sure a script, just for creating normal slow motion, would speed things up by much.

Instead, I have been spending my time with other approaches that use motion estimation instead of frame blending. Dynapel's Motionperfect uses this approach, but the code is out of date, and Dynapel doesn't seem interested in improving the product. However, there are several AVISynth plugins that are very interesting: MVTools and Depan. As of a few minutes ago I have MVTools up and running, and the slow motion on my extremely difficult volleyball test is almost miraculous. There is absolutely no loss in sharpness compared to the original (unlike the Vegas frame-blending approach) and absolutely no flicker. When I put the Vegas 25% slow motion on one track and the MVTools on the track below, loop them, and then A/B compare on my TV monitor while clicking on the mute for the top track, the comparison is stunning.

The one problem however, is that is when you have distinct vertical objects (like a picket fence or flag pole), the motion estimation gets fooled, and the vertical object "bends" for a few frames. I think there may be some ways around this, and I will investigate and report back.

Except for this phenomenon, the slow motion quality is unbelievable. Given all the millions of man-hours spent perfecting MPEG-2 encoding -- which relies on having the best possible motion estimation -- this is clearly the better way to do slow motion. Since Sony has access (through MainConcept) to this technology, I would sure like to see it included in a future release, either as a feature, or as a separate plug-in (like Noise Reduction).