Slowmovideo for Windows

[Francesco Carzedda]

Good morning,
after seeing the prices of Adobe Premiere and Twixtor I tried Slowmovideo for Windows, and this is the first experimental result:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOurZm2nynM[/youtube]

A Spanish friend, a good filmmaker, says that results with water are even better than Twixtor's.

It doesn't need installation but just extraction.

Please download
http://slowmovideo.granjow.net/builds/s ... _win32.zip
and unzip it in a directory.
Then download and unzip
http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win32/ ... -static.7z
in the same directory.

Your directory will look like:




Simply launch slowmoUI.exe (it is easier to create a desktop icon or a shortcut) and draw on the cartesian grid considering that original video runs from bottom top and the output video from left to right.

This is a curve of a very slow sequence:



Finally, a quite long but very good and complete video tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzZYjWeONP0

[Steve Grisetti]

That is very nice, Francesco.

But have you tried the Time Remapping tool in Premiere Elements 11? It does an amazing job blending frames when creating slow motion.

[Francesco Carzedda]

Vegas too has slow motion effects but starting, for example, from 30 (or even 60) fps, the output is not fluid.
Slomovideo interpolates and renders fluid sequences.
I didn't consider this aspect in my first post, sorry

[_Paz_]

Smooth and not pixelated as my attempts at slow motion in low resolution were.

What number of frames per second was the original footage shot, Francesco?

[Francesco Carzedda]

Paz, it was 25 fps.
Consider that I reduced it from mp4 to mp4 at 1/3 of its weight (to save memory) and, by mistake, from 30 fps to 25 fps.
I consider Slowmovideo's performance very good (especially compared with the price, hehehe).

[Francesco Carzedda]

Hallo,
this is my best achievement with Slowmovideo:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjM9JPS4AJ8[/youtube]
I am glad to share that now I am a canonist too (my 600d arrived last friday).
The reason the video is so fluid is that I shot at 60fps, at 50 fps the background trembled.
The speed is 10%.

[Steve Grisetti]

Sort of looks like you're doing tai chi, Francesco!

[Francesco Carzedda]

At that speed everybody would knock me out with a finger
I chose the hand movements because they are the most difficult shots to slowmo...

[momoffduty]

Looks good Francesco. I don't see any artifacts with the slowmo. Free is a good deal. I would love to have twixtor, but too pricey. And congratulations on your new Canon! Looking forward to seeing your footage. Great view out your window.

[Dave McElderry]

So many toys, so little time. That's really intriguing. Great application, so many possibilities!

[Francesco Carzedda]

Cheryl, I strongly recommend that everyone who likes to create slowmos download and try Slowmovideo.
I'll keep on working on it and keep in touch about the results.
I attach a copy (with links) of the first comment.

Dave, I found two further resources:

1) (Apple) "Optical flow" for (apple) Final Cut:
http://www.crumplepop.com/blog/?p=85

2) AvySynth (as well as VirtualDub and MVTools2) seems to be a good resource too:
http://www.grcvisuals.com/slow_motion_tutorial.php

Both the tutorials give information on how to shot (which is the first factor) to create a good slowmo.

[Francesco Carzedda]

Nice results also with After Effects and "Time warp" :
http://nofilmschool.com/2011/04/canon-7 ... ing-video/

[momoffduty]

Thanks Francesco for the AE tut link! I'll try that out soon.

[Kent Frost]

If you're not going to use a frame-interpolation program like Slowmovideo or Twixtor, the key to doing natural fluid slow motion video is to pay attention to percentages. For example, if you're working on a 24p (23.976p) timeline and you have 60p (59.94p) footage, you want to slow your playback on that clip down to 40%, which will equal the 23.976p framerate.

As an added Sony Vegas tip, another thing you'll want to do is right-click the clip in the timeline and click "Properties" and be sure to disable resampling. If left enabled, this function will blend the frames, creating what I consider to be an unattractive "frame ghosting" effect.

[Kent Frost]

As a matter of fact, I've been itching for Canon to hurry up and come out with a dSRL that offers 60fps at full 1080p resolution.