I noticed in the tutorial at about 3:28, when they are selecting the Twixtor plug-in, they also have in there a TwixtorPRO plug-in.

Wonder if this will be made available later on and what more would it offer?

Rob

I've trialled Twixtor Pro in After Effects and it has many advantages over Twixtor if the clip you are trying to slow down has complicated things happening in the background. With the pro version you can 'tell' the software what is meant to be foreground, middle ground and background by use of marker points, splines and alpha masks.

For example, if you had shot a baseball game and wanted to slow down some of the movement of the ball you'd have no problems with either version of Twixtor if the clip involved the ball flying through the air with the sky as a backdrop. However, if the clip had the white ball moving past batsman wearing a light coloured uniform, as the batsman was running past the second-baseman you'd quickly run into trouble with the non-pro version. The edges of the ball would smudge and blend with the uniform of the running batsman, and his swinging arms would smudge and blend with the arms of the second-baseman because the software is trying to create frames and doesn't inherently 'know' what belongs to whom. The artifacts would be obvious in the finished result. With Twixtor Pro, however, you could create alpha masks for the ball and the running batsman, assign them 'foreground' and 'middle ground' so they can be separated from the second-baseman 'background'. You could further inform the software by applying marker points to follow the movement of one item through the scene and/or splines along the edges of your foreground and middle ground objects.

It is possible that some of these features may not be adaptable for Vegas and that's why they've only written the non-pro version for Vegas? Vegas can do masks, but I don't know if the marker points and spline features can be created within Vegas. Someone with more technical know-how than I've got, which isn't hard to achieve, may want to pipe in here.

So if we see examples of marvellous things said to have been done with Twixtor, it is possible that they were actually done with Twixtor Pro.

Caveat!

Most likely, yes, unless it's something moving against a very simple background

In my limited trial of the Twixtor plugin for Vegas, I've found it inadequate in slowing down anything that has any complexity. I'll wager ALL of the demo video on Twixtor's website is done with the Pro version in AE.

I gave up with Twixtor, spent hours trying examples and tests to get it right. In the end, it just did not look correct. Unless the background is a clear blue sky or some equally simple, the effect is hard make looking 'real'. Too many artifacts and/or blurring to the subject. I have seen some good demos, but all are against clear backgrounds!
Anyone have success otherwise? would love to see it work the way it should.

Paul.

Watch this, it may help.

Gallery.

Paul, I tried fiddling around with Twixtor at my old workplace. At first I found it really frustrating and found the downloaded manual fairly opaque, until I downloaded the zipped sample projects available on the Twixtor website. Then it all made sense. If you haven't done that, yet, I highly recommend it.

Yes, it is possible to slow things down even with complex backgrounds, it's just a lot more work than with plain backgrounds, such as clear blue sky. I was using the pro plug-in for After Effects and had to rotoscope the moving subject that I wanted to slow down, to 'instruct' the software that it wasn't part of the background. In fact, I used all of the available layer options (three foreground objects, plus background) because I was trying to slow down footage of a crocodile jumping up to grab a chicken being fed to it on a rope and had problems at the crucial moment, when white teeth from the upper jaw of the crocodile met white chicken, as well as white mouth lining and teeth from the lower jaw.

The finished result can be seen at around 2:12 in this video (the rest was slowed down a bit, but that one clip was slowed down a lot).


The software doesn't 'know' what is what and started to blend the teeth of the upper and lower jaws, as well as the chicken, creating a really weird effect. With a lot of rotoscoping, I created an alpha mask of the upper jaw and head (layer 1), of the chicken (layer 2) and of the lower jaw (layer 3). Then I used points and splines to further distinguish individual teeth as well as the leaves on the background behind the crocodile. I came unstuck with the chicken because the impact of the crocodile's bite caused the feathers to change dramatically in position from frame to frame, making it really difficult to follow the movements with points and splines, so the flight feathers on its wings retained some of the original weird movements. The Twixtored clip is longer than the bit used in the video, and follows the crocodile as falls back into the water, at which point the slowed down splashes of water looked really odd, but I ran out of time to fiddle with those as well.

I had a lot of footage of the crocodile feeding to work on, as my office was on the floor above the crocodile and it was a 30 second dash downstairs with my camera. The crocodile was fed at lunch-time, so I spent a fair number of lunch breaks capturing this. This gave me the opportunity to experiment a bit and, from what little I know, this is what I recommend:

If you have a camera that shoots 720 50p (or 60p) rather than 1080 25p (or 30p), go with the former as it will give you a head start as you'll already be working with half speed. Otherwise, shoot in 1080i and create separate frames from the two fields.

Try to get as much light on the subject as you can so that you can get high shutter speeds (1/800 to 1/1000 is ideal). The software can't generate clean new frames if all it has to work with is blurred originals.

When I next have a project involving slow motion, I'll definitely be buying Twixtor Pro.

Thanks guys, i may revisit this if i get the time.

Paul.

Hi Everybody,

I have used Twixtor for some quick slowmotions by using the default settings.
I find the results not bad knowing that it can be fine tuned and find it better than what I was able to obtain with vegas or Boris Red/BCC 7.

I hope new setting/options will be added to the Twixtor version in Vegas to make it better over time.

If you want to have a look got to: http://vimeo.com/26641482
(slowmotions are between 50% and 7%).

See you.