I wanted to test these two recommendations on getting good slow motion. I rendered out 4 clips for comparison purposes. What I found (at least for my clips) is that if I simply CTRL+stretch the event and do nothing else, I get the best result. Adding motion blending via the video bus came in second while disabling resampling gave horrible results with and without motion blending set to 3 frames.

Here are the results of the for sample clips. I would recommend downloading the original (bottom right of the web page as they are in HDV). Plus, the files are still in the queue to be converted.

j razz

wow that motion blend really stirs up any blurring in the shot.

i didn't mind the "no resample" one, tho it def had that interpolated camera motion to it (frame > frame > hold > frame > frame, etc)... but at least they were whole frames.

the "smart resample" one looked good on playback, but could see some blending near the end; wouldn't like that if it was being comped...

---

also, when speed is ramped up over 200%, resample-on will cause multiple images to appear on each frame...

...which, btw, looks r-e-a-l-l-y cool when it is then filtered by the motion-blur & supersampling envelopes in the video bus.

good topic.

If you shoot interlaced and slow it down to 50% the results motion wise will be perfect as you've converted 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second. The result will appear not quite as sharp as the original.

Beyond that and especially with low frame rate progressive footage then it's all in the lap of the gods. Your original footage arguably had only just enough temporal resolution to start with. The only way to then have a shot a slow motion is using smarts to interpolate the movement of the various object in the scene .Mostly this will work extremely well or it may create some interesting horrors like legs detaching briefly. You cannot do this in Vegas, you can do it for free in Virtual Dub or you can spend money and do it in After Effects.
If you need to do a lot of slow motion work consider investing in a dedicated high speed camera. The cost of entry has dropped dramatically in the last few years. Still not cheap , I'm talking dropping from $100K to $10K kind of "cheaper"

Bob.

Hi Bob,

I try to use VirtualDub to interpolate frames (and hope to use plugins from VirtualDub in Vegas32 via Plugin Adapter) but can't find proper plugin. All links lead me to MSU, but the most advanced plugins from MSU (frame rate conversion, superresolution and supperprecision) are not available as a public projects anymore. Do you know where to download suitable plugin for VirtualDub ?

Best regards,

" Do you know where to download suitable plugin for VirtualDub ?"

No I don't. The only times I've done frame rate conversion I've used AE, I paid for it, might as well use it :)

I'll see if I can find out for you though. I know John Meyer uses these.

Bob.

Hi Bob,

I hope, that SVP10 with Open Effects SDK will allow to avoid second platform of software. We are small company and I believe that decision to lay totally on Vegas is right due to :

1) cost of AAE (cost of entire suite is critical for us)
2) lack of regional support
3) very demanding soft in terms of computer hardware
4) steep learning curve
5) Microsoft announcement, that there will be NOT support for Flash in IE9 (instead of that, there will be support for H.264).

I have found examples of plugins which would solve some problems. For example : Twixtor from RevisionFX, Speedo from GenArts, Camera Tracker from The Foundry. It sounds very promissing and suppose some plugins should be ready on SVP10 premiere.

But now... need some workaround.

Best regards,

I'm very confussed.
Out of the box After Effects does pixel by pixel retiming, that's all you need to buy. I'm still running AE CS3 Production Premium bundle. You'll need to check to see if the standalone version of AE does retiming, not certain myself, maybe you need the pro version


Even so, those plugins from The Foundry and GenArts are incredibly expensive. If and when they do release a version of them for V10 I see no reason they'll be any cheaper and at prices of around $3K I cannot see too many Vegas users buying them somehow.

I haven't a clue what M$ and Flash in IE9 has to do with this?

Sure AE isn't all that simple to learn but there's a huge wealth of free training available complete with free projects to download. If all you want to do is retime footage that's very simple, not much harder than doing it in Vegas, just more controls to make adjustments.

Much of the difficulty of learning AE lies in learning the art of compositing. It's more advanced than Vegas in this regard so to get everything out of it, yes, steep learning curve. I wouldn't say doing 3D compositing in Vegas is easy to learn either, in fact once you grasp the principles it's easier to do in AE.

I run AE on the same hardware as Vegas. Doing the same task in Vegas and AE (100 track comp) Vegas needs more hardware than AE. Put simply AE is optimised for compositing, Vegas isn't, it's an editor after all.

Bob.

"I haven't a clue what M$ and Flash in IE9 has to do with this?"

I've seen a trend lately where lots of folks think "Flash = Adobe" and "Adobe = Flash", which then leads to calling everything Adobe makes "Flash". That leads to the odd belief that anything that doesn't support flash therefore isn't compatible with anything from Adobe.

Interesting twist on that is that Flash isn't even an Adobe innovation. They only bought it after it was already a mature technology.

A few things to note about slow motion.

1. "Resample" in Vegas, when doing slow motion, creates new intermediate fields and frames. It does this by blending adjacent fields and frames, much like a cross-fade. The resulting "tween" frame, being a blend, contains some ghosting and is softer, but the resulting motion is smooth.

2. The motion blur envelope, which you add on the Vegas video bus, adds blur between frames, by averaging multiple frames. The number of frames used is determined by the setting on the motion blur envelope. Motion blur can create some nifty effects, but IMHO the effect has nothing to do with correct slow motion. Virtually all detail will be lost. Another envelope on the video bus is also sometimes suggested: supersampling. This will do nothing and is only used for video created within Vegas (e.g., titles).

3. Back to resample. Several people always recommend disabling resample. This is an excellent choice if you want to maintain full spatial fidelity, i.e., you don't want to introduce any blurring by averaging or blending frames. The resulting slow motion, however, will be the same (more or less) as you would get with a variable speed film projector: as you slow down the projector, each frame is shown for a longer and longer period of time. Slow down the projector to 2 fps, and each frame is shown for half a second. Thus, once you disable resample, the resulting slow motion will be spatially perfect (no blending or ghosting), but it will be jerky. Most people would not recognize the resulting effect as "slow motion" but instead will call it "stop motion" (although that term has a specific meaning in animation), or "flip book" motion.

4. The only proper way to produce good slow motion is to over-crank the camera. Sony has consumer models which do this for short periods of time, although none of them (AFIK) can do this for more than three seconds, and none maintain full resolution (HD resolution) while doing this.

5. Lacking an over-cranking camera, a better way to do slow motion is to use a tool (outside of Vegas) which uses motion estimation to create the intermediate frames. Sometimes these can produce pure magic, and other times, when the algorithms break down, they can produce a Frankenstein horror show. Twixtor is one of the best known. I use free plugins for a free tool called MVTools2.

You can see the results of several slow motion test here. YouTube converts everything to their progressive video and their framerate, so quite a bit of the original differences are not as evident as they are on a TV monitor. However, it still provides a little bit of visual evidence as to the differences between different techniques. The original clip is only about one second long, so don't blink at the beginning of this clip:



I think you should easily be able to see the differences, and will see why I recommend using a motion interpolation tool if you want decent slo-mo, and don't have access to a camera which can overcrank, or if you decide after the shoot has been completed that you need slow motion.

Also, here is a previous post about slow motion:

Slow Motion Using MVTools

Welcome back John... hopefully you are going to stay a while? :)

j razz

Hi Bob,

Looking from my customers needs view point, Adobe suite has two bold ingradients : flash integration and AE (effector). We intentionally have resigned from flash, because usually customers have IT department and all resources necessery to support their internet sites. Furthermore, declaration from Microsoft abut IE9 (no flash), cleans our situation and our offer (effects YES but in movie and NOT in HTML script). Effector is temptation, but we are organised as a team (start new line of software, means for us necessity to buy about 10 licences, learning is additinal cost (huge), especially if english is not primary language).

We will see, what plugin developers will prepare for SVP10 - I hope there will be something new, not another version of well known plugins. I don't know AE plugins, but looking on Twixtor prices, can accept this level (119$ per licence, for PRO noninteractive version).

I agree, that AE is optimised for compositing, especially huge projects. Our projects are usually short (about 15 seconds for outdoor media and about 1 minute for laptop or www (with exception for tutorials) and can't remember project with huge quantity of tracks (maybe max 30, if animate content from layered PSD)). Vegas can cover it. We have prepared templates to copy with 3D composition and manage DOF, so can treat this problem as temporary solved. Actually I need just one thing : SLOMO.

Best regards,

Hi John,

Thanky you for great topic and examples. I have experimented with VirtualDub, because most of plugins can run under Vegas32 with help of Debug PluginPack Adaptor. There is Motion Estimation plugin, but can't understand, how to use it. Maybe it can't operate under Vegas control properly.

Best regards,

I guess I liked the one with motion blur a bit better ( in moving video, via still it looked worse to me ), but maybe that's just me? I will edit my post to state, your mileage may vary.

Dave

" Actually I need just one thing : SLOMO"

Hopefully John Meyer's post above has answered this for you. In summary your options are:

1) A high speed camera.
This is the only real way to do slomo. You haven't stated how fast you are going though. 150fps for sports is a very different problem from 1,000 fps. Keep in mind the need for huge amounts of light when shooting high fps That can cost more than the camera. 500KW of light is not uncommon.
Also keep in mind high speed cameras generate a lot of data very quickly. It is possible to spend half a day off loading a few seconds of footage.


2) Use some form of motion vector interpolation in post.
If you use MVTools, After Effects or some plugin running in Vegas 10 be aware all of these do much the same thing and it involves a LOT of processing. Possibly some of that could be moved to the GPU to speed the process up. I would anticipate needing a fairly expensive video card if that option exists.

Bob.

" Do you know where to download suitable plugin for VirtualDub ?"

try this:

http://avisynth.org.ru/mvtools/mvtools.html

and go to "MVFlowFps"

after a lot of testing this pugin for avisynth gives great results.

you have to install avishnth first (and understand avisynth first). then you can do motion estimation in virtual dub. it is a little tricky to work with text files - but it is freeware !
works great - i did slowmos about 10% supersmooth.

look at this sample what is possible (not from me):

http://vimeo.com/848112