#Slo-mo tips??
13 messages in this thread
After using "halfspeed" in Toasterpaint, movement in my slo-mo segment seemed
very jittery, the overall picture quality also suffered. Is this the nature of
the beast or is there something I can do to make movement smoother and improve
picture quality.
Thanks for your wisdom,
DChip
Chip,
The "half speed" macro in Tpaint essentially doubles each of the fields and
records them to a new clip. Apparently using frames as opposed to fields would
induce unwanted horizontal jitter. Fields (as opposed to frames) do not contain
as much piture detail. WHen all these "fields" are shown together, the effect
will be somewhat gritty and a bit jerky (becuase there isn't really a variable
speed playback, just a mathmatical doubling of images).
At one point early on (I think it was Fred Berney or Gary Kleiner) someone
posted a message here on the forum stating that their beta software
"accidentally" produced beautiful slo-mo when capturing some footage. Sounds
like a bug that should be turned into a feature as far as I am concerned. I
tried the hlaf speed macro and besides the poor picture quality, the render
time was significantly slow. It would make much more sense if Newtek could find
the original bug that created slo-mo capture and made it a digitizing option.
Frank
Frank,
It was Fred with the "accidental slo-mo feature".
I have used the half speed macro in T Paint, and although it was painfully
slow, produced a very nice slo-mo.
Regards,
Gary
Gary,
There's news on the slo-mo front from Atomic. Apparently there is an Arexx
macro that will allow a different speed playback of ANY FLyer clip. Harold is
going to try to include it with upgrades to FG. In the mean time, I will be
testing it in a ruden\mentary form sometime by the end of this week. I will let
you know how it looks. According to Harold, it's flawless, and doesn't require
ANY post processing. The only drag, is that it can't be played back with other
"normal" speed clips within a project. Heck, for those who don't have a Dynamic
Tracking deck, (or the patience to post process with the half speed macro in
Tpaint) the shortest way to slo-mo heaven, would be to use Harold's macro to
vary the speed of the clip while recording the main output of the
switcher..then bring that video back in through an input and redigitize. I
realize it loses a generation, but compared to the gritty look of the Tpaint
half speed stuff, it can't look too bad.
Frank
Frank,
Keep us posted on that one.
Hopefully NewTek will be working more on the slo-mo.
I remember last year at the Wedding Video Expo, every third person that ame by
the NewTek booth asked "does it do slo-mo?" After the negative reply, they
moved on to the next booth.
Regards,
Gary
Frank,
Thanks for the answer. I guess I'm not as crazy as I thought.
DChip
Frank,
It was me that mentioned the "slow-motion bug". But, it was a one time effect
that never reared it's head again.
I agree with you that the slow-mo has quality problems. I tried it on a 20
second scene. Took about 12 hours to render. The people in the scene moved at a
nice slow rate, but when the camera panned, forget it. The scene just looked
terrible.
The only good way to use the slow-mo effect is with a camera on a tripod and
absoluty no camera movement.
Frank, maybe you know, does the Mac Quadra 950 run that much faster than the
Amiga 4000. I am able to do excellent slow-motion on the AVID in less that a
minute for a scene that runs about a minute. Very fast rendering.
Maybe AVID will forget that I have the system. I hope, I hope, I hope.
Fred
Fred,
Discouraging news from Harold at Atomic re; slo-mo. Evidently the "patch" he
had in mind to play back FLyer clips with variable speed, cannot be executed
from Arexx. It can however be done from a hexidecimal command line, but
requires a lot of specific info about the clip, such as it's sector address on
the drive etc. Flight Gear is going to ship without the slo-mo feature for the
moment, but Harold assures me that if he can get some help from one of his hex
programmer buddies, that a module that will be called "Special Effects Control"
will be forthcoming in a few weeks.
Frank
Also remember that even VCRs (professional dynamic tracking) also loose
something when slo mo running.
Ed
"…..After using "halfspeed" in Toasterpaint, movement in my slo-mo segment
seemed very jittery, the overall picture quality also suffered….."
I tried the half-speed, and was thoroughly dissapointed. For one, it took about
5 minutes per frame to render (25MHz accelerator). But most importantly, the
quality of the finished clip was terrible…..looked like a multi-generation
VHS dub, and with thin, dark, closely spaced vertical lines/streaks.
I dont understand why NT doesnt do the slomo directly, without going thru
TPaint. It should be fairly straightforward, directly from the project screen,
and requiring NT to merely add a frame buffer and some fairly standard timing
circuitry. For a couple of hundred dollars more, they could have had a feature
that, by itself, would have sold a lot of Flyers.
Nick
Well, I hate to sound like I'm sticking up for them ;^} but I think slo-mo/DT
type stuff is asking a bit much of both the Flyer HW and SW. I think to do it
right you'd have to hold 4 field before and 4 feilds after the current field's
pixles in buffers, look at the new frame-rate, compute and possibley filter
(for drop-out/spurious data) each pixel to come up with an average new pixel
for each pixel in each "interpolated" field in order to get smooth motion with
no color artifacting. And that is really beyond the scope of the Flyer. It's
basically a pick-em-up, pack-em-up, put-em-down system as opposed to an
interpolator. In fact, if they had real-time DT to VTASC (which is what we're
all hinting at here) there would be enough hw and SW horsepower to be able to
do away with external TBCs.
wmc – via Autopilot!
"I tried the half-speed, and was thoroughly dissapointed. For one, it took
about 5 minutes per frame to render (25MHz accelerator). But most importantly,
the quality of the finished clip was terrible…..looked like a
multi-generation VHS dub, and with thin, dark, closely spaced vertical
lines/streaks."
I used the HQ5 and the quality wasn't too bad. I was more concerened with the
horizontal jitter.
DChip