1% of 29.97 is going to give you about 1 frame every 3 seconds. This sure isn't going to be very smooth.

Actually I just dropped a 5 second clip on the time line and used a velocity envelope to drop velocity to 3% and it resulted in a very smooth slo-mo. Not real clear though.

What effect are you trying to achieve? As already stated, if you want continuous slow-mo, the result is going to look like, well, heck. On the other hand, if you just want a single frame displayed every three seconds, then make sure you disable resample. The result will look very crisp and nice.

If you want really smooth ultra-slo-mo, then Vegas is the wrong program. You should use Twixtor or the lower-priced Motionperfect. There are also AVISynth plugins like MVTools which are free and work well. These can produce awesome results with ultra slo-motion, but only on certain types of footage. If the footage includes lots of vertical moving members (like someone walking or a pan over a picket fence) the result is aweful.

Here is one example:



and here's one that is probably more relevant:



The description of how this second clip was produced can be found here:

How to create fluid slow motion video

ive been bitching bout vegas slowmo.. what.. for as long as the life of the old DVX100?? possibly longer..

the multi render method works ok for INTERLACED footage, howevre for waht YOU want (ie1%) id recomend you do it in increments of 10% and render to a lossless codec (uncompressed or maybe even HuffyYUV (not lossless, but better than DV or HDV

For progressive i use Synapels slowmotion.. however due to the frame interpolation, it CAN glitch out during a photographers camera flash etc

John,
How would a simple vegas user go about using these AVISynth plugins like MVTools ? I downloaded the MVTools plugin before I realized it wasn't a plugin for Vegas, but for this mysterious AVISynth thingie. What's the workflow?

Jim, maybe use Satish's Frameserver? - Grazie

"How would a simple vegas user go about using these AVISynth plugins like MVTools?"

From Vegas you would need to use DebugMode the Frameserver to serve to AVISynth, then another app (AVS2AVI or VirtualDub) to save the output of AVISynth.

Simplest steps:

1) Install AViSynth, MVTools, VirtualDub and DebugMode Frameserver
2) Create AVS file for slow motion (see below)
2) Serve the video from Vegas using Frameserver e.g. vegas.avi
3) Open the AVS file with VirtualDub and save as AVI.

AVS File:
***************
function smoothfps(clip source, float fps) {
fp=fps*100
backward_vec = source.MVAnalyse(isb = true, truemotion=true, pel=2, idx=1)
# we use explicit idx for more fast processing
forward_vec = source.MVAnalyse(isb = false, truemotion=true, pel=2, idx=1)
cropped = source.crop(4,4,-4,-4) # by half of block size 8
backward_vec2 = cropped.MVAnalyse(isb = true, truemotion=true, pel=2, idx=2)
forward_vec2 = cropped.MVAnalyse(isb = false, truemotion=true, pel=2, idx=2)
return source.MVFlowFps2(backward_vec,forward_vec,backward_vec2,forward_vec2,num=int(fp),den=100, idx=1,idx2=2)
}

avisource("vegas.avi")
smoothfps(2500)
assumefps(25)

***************
Andrew

As you've noted these aren't plugins for Vegas.
If you study the link Johnmeyer provides in his post above he does explain the workflow fairly well. If you're starting from HDV you'll need to render the footage to something AVISynth can read, uncompressed 1920x1080 works very well. The file size can be a bit daunting however as you'd likely only be slomo'ing a very short piece of video that shouldn't be an issue for you.
AVISynth and VirtualDub provide a processing pipeline, MVTools plugs into that pipeline, you specify the input file, output file and parameters for the plugin.
Not that different to how Vegas does things except Vegas uses the project file to control all the plugins etc and you build the project file using Vegas which is certainly way more elegant than how AVISynth or VDub work. Then again unlike Vegas these tools are free and written by people working in their spare time without pay. Elegance isn't a high priority, functionality is.

If I read the scripts correctly what you'll get out is an overcranked file, by the look of it at 100X the original frame rate. You'd then bring that back into Vegas and slomo it as per usual.

Probably worth restating a point John makes, for this magic to have a chance of working you must shoot your footage carefully.

Bob.