iphone 6 slow motion import

You want to set your project up with custom settings and a frame rate lower (say, 29.97) than what the iPhone shot. Then for the section you want slo mo in, choose Automatic Speed from the Retime drop down.

Russ

There is a misconception about the "slow motion videos" in iPhone.

In fact, they *really* are videos recorded with a high frame rate (up to 240fps in iPhone 6).

They are *not* in slow motion per se - even though the iPhone software may play them as such.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that there is no such thing as slow motion videos. There are videos played in slow motion.

What happens when, say, you drop your 240fps video in a 24fps timeline, is that it plays at normal speed. This is as it should be!

The big deal is that, since your clip has all those extra frames in it, you can use FCP X to slow it down (up to 1/10 the original speed in my example) and it will use all the real frames the camera captured. Plus, you can use all the retiming features in FCP X to obtain perfectly smooth slow motion.

By means of comparison, if you slow down a video recorded at the same frame rate as the project it is in, FCP X has to make up extra frames that did not exist. Even though FCP X has some great algorithms for this (like "Optical Flow"), it can't match real captured frames.

that is indeed correct, I slowed the video to 10.9 percent and got it looking perfect (doing maths by 25 frames per second, 240 frames what percent do I need to slow down to).

I am not even able to import movies from the iPhone 6 into FCPX !! It will just not see them as valid input. So if you say you can, my question is: how did you do that ? I am using FCPX 10.2 and OSX 10.10.3

What exactly happens? When you connect the phone to the computer, does it appear under cameras in the import window? Popup on the right, if you select Video, what do you see in list view? What happens when you select a clip? Can you play a clip?

Hi Tom, thanks for answering. I copied the video's to hard disk and try to import from there. I can select the video in the import window, but FCPX just does not recognize tit as valid input, although its format is H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is supposed to be a supported format. I get a message saying there are no importable files. Consequently I cannot play it either.

"Funny" thing is the video can be imported into iMovie, but I don't want to use that

How are you copying the video to your hard drive?

Open the video in Quicktime Player, press Command-I and post a screenshot of the Movie Inspector.

I used Aperture to copy photo's and video's from my iPhone and then exported the original video's from Aperture to a hard disk, where I keep all my video footage

The frame rate is nonstandard, and certainly not what you would expect from the iPhone.

Still I would expect that FCP X would import that.

If you still have the video on the iPhone, import it directly into FCP X.

Don't do this. Aperture knows next to nothing about video. Assign where you want to import the media in FCP and import it using the import window. That's the best way to go.

There are some remarks about this

• I like to keep all my video footage as files, external to FCPX, not inside an FCPX library. Reason: data size. The raw data is consuming only 10% of what it would cost me if I would import directly into the FCPX library. I always import into FCPX while leaving the files in place, thus keeping the size of the library to the minimum. and only create optimized media when necessary (to a location outside the library) and delete that data after finishing the video editing
• The video opens perfectly in iMovie, including the slo-mo markers, so that is suggesting Aperture does not do anything with it except loading it to disk

What, in your view, is different when I import it straight from the phone ?

1. You absolutely do not have to keep you're media inside the FCP library. Ever. You do not have to leave it in place. You can assign on every import exactly which folder on which drive the media is going to go into.

2. iMovie and the QT player are designed to display high frame rate video as slow motion. FCP and every professional video application treats frame rates as real time. One second at 15fps takes exactly the same amount of time, one second, as video at 240fps. You use the high frame rate to make slomo. FCP imports media correctly in its native frame rate. I guarantee your video was not recorded at 43.19fps. That's a fudge in QuickTime, and it makes the video useless in a professional video application without further processing.

OK, problem solved. Cause: the userid I use to do FCPX did not have permission to access the video's!! Instead of issuing an understandable message (like any other decent piece of software) it just says the file cannot be imported and will leave you in limbo. Only when I tried opening it with VLC, it was clear that permissions were the problem, because VLC said so.....

Thanks for your help anyway

1. You absolutely do not have to keep you're media inside the FCP library. Ever. You do not have to leave it in place. You can assign on every import exactly which folder on which drive the media is going to go into.

"Leaving in place" is the FCPX speak for linking to files outside the FCPX library. That is my normal way of importing

2. iMovie and the QT player are designed to display high frame rate video as slow motion. FCP and every professional video application treats frame rates as real time. One second at 15fps takes exactly the same amount of time, one second, as video at 240fps. You use the high frame rate to make slomo. FCP imports media correctly in its native frame rate. I guarantee your video was not recorded at 43.19fps. That's a fudge in QuickTime, and it makes the video useless in a professional video application without further processing.

Agree. Now I am able to import the video into FCPX, I can reduce the speed to 5% and still have a smooth video