How to get good slow motion w/FCPX?

In order to get smooth slow motion in post you need to shoot it for slow motion otherwise you will run into these limitations. Really good slow motion shooting is usually done at very high fps with special cameras like the Phantom but that comes with a very steep price.

Your GoPro shoots 720p60 which means the footage contains 60 progressive frames per second, so if you slow it down by 50% you get good slow motion. But try this: drop your 60p footage on your 24p timeline and choose "conform speed" from the retiming menu. That will give 40% speed that looks pretty good. Then try to slow it down further with optical flow .... but you will see the limitations quickly.

Some people also play with the shutter speed when shooting for slow mo but I don't know if the GoPro has options there.

If you want other options look into Twixtor or Lock'n Load.

The Canon Vixia shoots interlaced footage (60i) which means that you get 60 interlaced fields per second that create 30 frames. This clearly does not help and to my knowledge you do not have a 60p option with that camera.

As far as the 60i footage is concerned :

You can try Jes deinterlacer

http://jeschot.home.xs4all.nl/home.html

There is an option to slow down the footage by interpolating the fields into frames.

It's similar to what you're doing with go pro (conforming 60 to 30) but you do loose some vertical resolution if you stay at 1080, it looks pretty good tho.

If your final output will be 720p you'll never see the difference.

If you like the software don't forget to donate a little something. These little 3rd party apps can sometimes save the day.

Good luck

g

You're right. I all but forgot about JesDeinterlacer. Excellent piece of software.

I don't know of any tutorials but they do have a forum on their website.

You can also click on the (?) wherever it appears in the program. Lot's of info there.

For what you want to do it's pretty simple:

Under the project tab, make sure "deinterlace" is the function, select "Both Fields", select "double movie duration". That's pretty much it.

Do some short tests and experiment with other parameters.

best,

g

I'm a bit short having time for my tests, but what I found out so far.

• avoid any 'natural motion blurr' in your recordings

• if optional on your device, select super-short shutter speed (<1/1000th), depending on 'action' in front of cam (ever wondered why those demos are preferred in bright sunlight? 😉 )

• avoid too high 'angle speed' = too fast too close: if the picture content changes too fast btw. frame#1 and frame#2 the eye is not able to blend the content = stutter

• Optical Flow: excellent on small angle speed, failing on fast angle speed or rotation:

watch my short demo here (YT-link) testing speeds and blending modes:

(recording 720/60p, ~1/1000th shutter speed, Project setting 25p)

• notice the perfect blending of motion far away from cam (player girl in green)

• notice the unwanted 'warp' effects around the player in blue close to cam, esp. legs

• notice the 'wobble' of rotating ball in 10% slowmo ... that is beyond Optical Flows skills 🙂

What I've seen so far from the famous TWIXTOR plugin for FCPX/Motion5, it lacks the 'plus' features (e.g. seperating background/layers) and has to be handled as unconvenient as the old version for FC/e (copy/paste clips to lengthen etc). Info: the vers. of Twixtor for FC/e and FC/p differed dramatically!

=> imho, the actual vers. of Twixtor4FCPX isn't worth the 300$ (yepp, three HUNDRED) …

and my personal opinion upon marketing: a plugin shouldn't be more expensive than its host 😁