Slow-motion in DV

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Is slow motion possible in DV cams esp. SONY PD100 or Canon XL-1? Do you shoot the scene in a slow-motion setting or is it done during post-production. Could somebody explain this basic question?

Thanks much DK

-- DK (d2r_films@hotmail.com), April 12, 1999

Answers

DK,

Slow-motion will need to be achieved in post. If you are using/going to use Adobe Premiere go to the Clip menu, then Speed. There you can slow down or speed up a clip based on a percentage (100% being normal), and clip length. It looks really nice and has no flicker or strobe effect until you go beyond around 20-15%, and even then it is still very little. I'm sure you can do this with just about every other NLE and the menu sections should be similar also. In the camera you can change the shutter speed which will cause a definite strobe effect and be very blurry, which is still usefull, but does not make for a very accurate slow-motion effect. It also cannot slow speech or sound, where as in an NLE like Premiere, it will slow the audio as well as the video automatically, but you can choose not to slow either one if you don't want to by going through a few extra steps. If you don't know how, but want to know, just ask me. I hope this helps. Best of luck.

-Doug

-- Doug Conant (dc1099@hotmail.com), April 18, 1999.


Depends on what you mean by slow motion. If you just want to take a sequence captured at normal speed and then slow it down you can do it in post in your NLE system, you could also use the playback ability of the DV camcorder/deck as another possiblity.

What you cannot do that you can do with film is film at a rate faster than the standard frame rate. SO far outside of a rather poor implimentation by JVC that divides the stored image into a frame created from a field giving a double frame rate with half the picture available there is no ability to increase the frame rate John Ferrick

-- John Ferrick (Ferrick@postmaster.co.uk), April 20, 1999.


I just finished a commercial of Labrador Retriever Puppies jumping into a swimming pool (for a pet food store). Shot in DV and edited with EditDV on a Mac. It's all in slo mo which is easily accomplished in post with Edit DV. Unlike shooting in film, the video camera doesn't make the slo-mo, the editing system does.

The results are spectacular, even though video slo-mo doesn't have the look and capabilities of film slo-mo. In any case my audience can't tell the difference. Just a few years ago I could not have done this on such a tiny budget.

Hal http://videouniversity.com and http://filmmakerstore.com

-- Hal Landen (video@videouniversity.com), April 22, 1999.


I4m using NLE DVRex-M1 captureboard (DV firewire hardcodec) on Win98 and the RexEdit Software gives you control to playback the clips from harddisk in several speeds, 1/10 to 10x forward, backward, without any rendering process. That4s really fast, you can see the effects in realtime, it4s as smooth as rendered in premiere 5.1 or any other consumer NLE. Only problem: the sound also goes backward or stutter in slomo so you have to edit the sound in any sound editing program.

Ofcourse the final prudoction must be done in NLE, but to check the slomo effects in realtime, saves you a lot of time!

url: www.canopus.com

Johann P. Mettenleiter

-- Johann P. Mettenleiter (hanspeter.mettenleiter@t-online.de), April 24, 1999.


Slow motion in Premiere 5.1 is awesome--just be sure you render it out first because it will smooth it out and interpolate it even more and the 50% speed is just incredible! 50% evenly takes advantage of the 60 field per second rate of video and smooths it into nice 60 frame per second slow mo. Very nice.

visit my website at http://www.geocities.com/~steadicamjr

-- John Brune (jbfine@fortwayne.infi.net), October 27, 1999.



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