Could you explain this? To a layman, it seems that with 60p you could very easily just cut the speed in half. Or do other speeds. Why does 60p behave differently? Curious to learn more about this.
What I mean is that unless you are shooting with a shallow DOF (background blurred) the resolution is very low, and the artifacts when shooting high-detail regular patterns are terrible. Do a search for canon Moire and Aliasing and you'll see what I mean. Or take a shot of a screen window in focus and you'll get some psychedelic craziness! The same is true when you're shooting trees and leaves, but it manifests itself as looking like lower resolution. Yes, you can just conform 60p to your project frame rate and get a nice 50% or 35% slowmo. But, if you're finishing in 1080p, after smoothcam, the zoom in is like 160% so it ends up looking really bad for aerial work. I use it often on the ground with a shallow DOF though. (Course, not anymore now that I use the GH2)
Eh Up YH. So is there a blog or specific instructions on the set up for getting footage you can slow to these speeds?
Dave
They have their settings on vimeo. ALL you have to do is eliminate motion blur. I think they used 1/1000 shutter speed.
What does Mercali offer that the standard FCP plugin SmoothCam doesn't? Or does it just do it better? I have found that applying too much SmoothCam results in too much zoom and therefore blurs the resulting image. The other side-effect is that 1920x1080 video has to be exported at 1280x720 because, presumably as a result of the zoom-in after applying SmoothCam, all sorts of jitters and mess are introduced.
Do you know what sort of shutter speed was used to reduce motion blur?
Choice of shutter speed in general is a tricky one because leaving at 1/50th (for 25fps) is certainly not quick enough for the majority of helicam requirements but anything above 1/120th starts to lend a slightly unnatural feel to the video.
I don't use Mercali, but I think it will vary the zoom amount and/or synthesize the edges so you need less zoom-in.
The thing that I see A LOT, is if you are planning to post stabilize, you MUST shoot at a high enough shutter speed to eliminate motion blur. Otherwise, once it's stabilized, you'll see one or two frames that all of a sudden have blur, and that looks bad.
Once you have stabilized, then, you need to go back and add motion blur as if it was shot at 1/50th (24p/25p) or 1/60th (30p).
It's a pain, but it is the only way, that's why having a very smooth platform, top notch flying skills, and a great stabilized gimbal is an ideal situation, so smoothcam is just used to polish already very stable footage.
Twixtor is a huge pain, and I have spent many hours waiting for it to render, only to find out I needed to change the setting and render again, but other than the Optical Flow feature in Motion, it's pretty much the only game in town for hyper-slowmo, and it can produce great results.
A few years ago I shot a film at 4fps and used twixtor to fill in the 'missing' frames. Not related to aerials at all, but kinda fun.
http://vimeo.com/19553068
