Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/4/2010, 3:25 PM
I think you should try out the technique and decide if it really produces better quality slo-mo before you worry about whether it is scriptable.

I watched the tutorial, was skeptical, and so I tried it out.

In no way does it force Vegas to do anything remotely similar to what Twixtor, Motionperfect, or other motion estimation-based slo-mo tools do. All Vegas does for slow mo is to, in essence, create additional new frames by crossfading adjacent frames. This provides very smooth, but also very soft, slow motion. The good news is that you never get any surprises, but the bad news is that the slow motion is fuzzy.

By contrast, motion estimation software looks at every small group of pixels, determines where they are going, and synthesizes all the intermediate frames. If it makes the correct choices, the new intermediate frames are sharp and clear and gorgeous. If it makes the wrong choices, you end up with strange, warped frames. Like the little girl in the old poem, when it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.

The VASST technique shown in the YouTube video merely adds some additional in-between frames, and therefore really doesn't fundamentally change anything. In my brief tests, it actually seems to add more ghosting. This would tend to make the video look even smoother, but would also make it look even softer. My test confirmed this to be the case.

Try it out and see if you like the results, but my guess is that for most slo-mo work this would actually make the result look worse.

I'd be interested to hear other people's experience.

FWIW, I posted on my YouTube page, a long time ago, this example showing the difference between the various ways of doing slo-mo in Vegas, compared with doing the same thing using MVTools (a geeky, but free motion estimator that can be used for many interesting things, including slow motion):

http://www.youtube.com/user/johnmeyer77#p/u/25/UEfpP1zZKVs

Jøran Toresen wrote on 2/4/2010, 3:44 PM
Thank you John for your constructive input. It’s getting late here in Norway, so I will look into this tomorrow.

By the way, have you seen my post on the Sony Vegas Forum about the new German DeshakerIF plug-in for Vegas. This is not a script, but a Video FX.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=694089&Replies=22

Thought you might be interested since you have dedicated much time to Deshaker. I believe the author has cooperated with Gunnar Thalin.

Jøran
johnmeyer wrote on 2/4/2010, 4:16 PM
I haven't downloaded and tried out the plug-in because I'm so completely happy with the professional script that Andy E wrote, building on the work originally started by David Arendt, and then taken forward by myself. Andy's script adds the de-shaken video as a take, something which I find incredibly valuable, since motion stabilization often introduces problems, and it is nice to be able to "A/B" the before and after.

I'd be very interested to hear from people that use the fX version to hear what advantages it has over the script.