Sunday, September 9, 2007

Slowmo and Speed Up Effect 300-style










Here's my attempt at the 300 style special effect. It works quite well for the HV20 with its high resolution picture and choice of manual settings. Good light is important to allow TV-500 or TV-250 mode. This eliminates motion blur. Shoot from a stable platform to reduce obvious rolling shutter. Then capture your 60i.

Convert your 60i to 60p using your choice of deinterlacer. Smart Deinterlace based on VirtualDub's works quite well. As for the codec, choose one that supports 60p such as Lagarith/Uncompressed AVI, WMV or H.264. Then feed the clip to an NLE that can do velocity envelope/time remapping. Speed up/ramp up the broad movements while at wide. When you find the terminus of an action, back off a bit then slow down to at least half normal speed (I like to go down to 0% in a V or U for Vegas velocity envelopes). Keep that for a few seconds then return to normal. To accentuate the slow mo portion, use digital zoom to the area of action.

Sony Vegas example:

http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/9803/300stylevegassettingsls7.jpg

References:
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=64785&page=2&highlight=ghost
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=93587

10 comments:

Brian Boyko said...

Quick question: Where's the music from?

picolas said...

how did you achieve this aspect ratio???

picolas said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike said...

Sorry for the late reply. Blogspot doesn't tell me when a comment is posted.

Brian,
CC Music: Silence - L'autre endroit
www.jamendo.com

Picolas,
You need to go into your project settings and change the resolution manually (used 1280x540 in my case). Then in each clip I changed the camera aspect ratio to the same dimensions then saved it.

picolas said...

does this stretch the image or crop it or does it actually shoot that way?

thanks

Mike said...

Picolas, it's a crop. The HV20 produces as 1440x1080 anamorphic image (usually converted to 1920x1080). So it gives me a bit of room to play around with a 720p image . I cut the top and bottom a bit to give my virtual camera some room to do the zoom/wide shots that accentuate motion.

Zeroc said...

is this shot from an HV20????

Mike said...

Yes, it is shot from an HV20.

Rnald Nzareno said...

how do you do velocity time/remapping on sony vegas 8.0?

Mike said...

Ronald, select the clip then Insert -> Video Envelopes -> Event Velocity. This will add a blue-green line to your clip that you can add points and slide up/down to change the speed. Watch the end of clip marker as the overall clip remains the same size and must be aligned manually depending on what changes you make. Sound doesn't match the velocity by default. You'd have to adjust it separately.