Slow-motion from iPhone not importing at correct frame rate

Are you saying that the clip frame speed gets changed at import, or that FCP won't let you create a 120 fps project (which FCP doesn't support). If you mean the former, then let us know specifically what those changes are. These high frame rates are primarily supposed to be used for slo mo.

Russ

Perhaps you could post screen shots of what you're seeing, such as in the Info inspector. FCP will only make projects at standard frame rates up to 60fps. The purpose of shooting at high frames rates is to conform these in a standard frame rate project, 29.97, 59.94, 25, whatever, and use the difference in frame rate to make very clean slomo. I've both 120fps and 240fps media from the iPhone and the appear correctly inside FCP.

Everything seems to be working correctly.

It seems to me that you were expecting the video to play in slow motion in the browser, or in the timeline, without you having to do anything.

That is not the way it works.

Let us say your project frame rate is 30fps. You add your "slomo" video to the project timeline. It will play at normal speed, which means only a quarter of the frames in the actual video will be used. Now use the retime functionality and slow down your video to 25%. Then it will play at one quarter speed but make use of the recorded frames.

By contrast, if you do the same but with a normal 30fps video in a 30fps project, the program will have to make up extra frames that did not exist in order to create the slow motion. FCP X has pretty nifty algorithms for that, but nothing beats the "real thing".

YYou don't see slow motion in FCP when you play back a clip at 120fps. 120, 240, 600, it doesn't matter. One second is one second. Whether the canera has sliced it into 24 pieces or 240 pieces, a second is a second. As I said you don't get slomo until you put the media into a project at a standard frame rate and then Retime it to what FCP calls automatic speed. TThen each frame of your high frame rate video corresponds to one frame of your project. Then your 240fps video in a 24fps project is one tenth of normal speed, and each frame is pristine. This is basic filmmaking. Look at the info inspector in the first screen shot. It shows the frame rate at 120fps. Step through the video with the arrow key. You have to tap it 120 times to go through one second.

JUst to add if you made a 120fps project and put your 120 fps media in it, you would completely defeat the purpose of shooting a high frame rate. You would need every frame of your 120 frames to make one second. To slomo the video to 50% you would need 240 frames and FCP would have to extrapolate that. You would be in exactly the same place as some one who shot 24fps and put it in a 24fps project and wanted to make it half speed. You would need 48 frames for each second and FCP would have to extrapolate that from the available 24 frames.

There is a fair amount of confusion about video shot in the slo mo mode of the iPhone camera. Users can edit in the phone and share retimed segments of video to You Tube…and it retains the re-timed segments, Not so when they bring it into Final Cut, It comes in with all those "extra frames" and needs to be edited. In other words, the retiming that may have been done in the phone app is not naked into the clip that brought into FCP …a good thing, IMO.

Russ