Using 60p footage without looking like "home movie"?

Hawk Teflon

Hawk Teflon

Veteran
I've seen some people posting some good time ramp videos (skating, etc) where it's very smooth slow motion. They shoot it at 60fps, and conform it to 24fps in Cineform (for FCP). Yet they'll ramp the speed up to normal speed (so speeding it up to 250% on a 24p timeline) when they want it to go faster. I tried that, and when I look at 60p footage at the normal speed, it looks like a home movie. I freaking hate the way it looks. How do people get the 24p look when the 60p is at normal speed?
 
short answer: you don't really. simply put, 60fps has so many frames that the motions and everything look much smoother, and don't have that "film" look I believe you're going for. My suggestion: shoot 24/30fps if you want that look, and then shoot 60 if you want slowmo. just make sure they're the same resolution. Now, if you have a T2i and can only shot 720@60fps, I believe there is a "hack" for it called Magic Latern or something (It's all over this section of DVXUser) that I believe, but am not positive, will allow you to have more frame rate options. Hope this helped.
 
Hawk Teflon said:
I've seen some people posting some good time ramp videos (skating, etc) where it's very smooth slow motion. They shoot it at 60fps, and conform it to 24fps in Cineform (for FCP). Yet they'll ramp the speed up to normal speed (so speeding it up to 250% on a 24p timeline) when they want it to go faster. I tried that, and when I look at 60p footage at the normal speed, it looks like a home movie. I freaking hate the way it looks. How do people get the 24p look when the 60p is at normal speed?
Click to expand...

But depends... You can watch it at normal speed at 60fps.

And you can watch it at "normal" speed at 24fps. That's the case when you see slow motion and normal motion in the same video. The 60fps are combined into 24fps, therefore you don't get that extra-fluid feel, perhaps just a high shutter look and some "artifacts" of frame blending.

So even when you look at 60fps on a 24fps video you still perceive with a home video feel? Well... Maybe that's why cameras have ramping systems.
 
Yeah, it's not a frame rate issue. The T2i has all the frame rates I need (unless they want to add 1080 60p)

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in the original post. Sorry about that. I watched a video a few months back of a skateboarder in a warehouse that looked super smooth. I'm assuming it was shot in 60p because the slow-mo was super smooth, then as the grind landed, it was sped up to what we would consider "normal" speed (but technically if it was on a 24p timeline, it would have been at 250% speed), but it didn't look like the "home movie" thing.

I recently put some footage in a 24p timeline that was 60p, and it looked terrible. I then conformed it to 24p (23.97), sped it up to 250%, and it looked the same.
 
Define terrible!

What is it doing that looks bad. Slow motion in 60P isn't all that slow. What you saw originally may have been done on another program, not just 60 played at 24.
 
I do this all the time, although I don't use FCP so I can't help you with specifics in that program.

But short answer is yes, shoot 60p and yes there is probably some conforming you will have to do in Cinema Tools (I'm guessing?) to make 24p out of 60p. How is ramping handled in FCP? I know in Vegas it is just en envelope on the track that you draw (much like a audio volume envelope) and to get the 60p to play back at normal 24p without looking like crap you have to tell the program to just drop frames.

Again, sorry I can't help you with FCP specifics, but shooting 60p and reconforming to 24p is possible.
 
most of the skating footage is recorded in 30p and ramped via speed graphs in adobe afx, i shot this on a panasonic which records at 30p and then ramped it in afx, added fram blending to make it more slow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9IkF50voq8

You can achieve super slow using twixtor, this was shot on the 7d/60d in 60p then slowed down in twixtor.... (there are scenes in here which are super slow)
http://vimeo.com/17071530
 
I'm astonished that none of the responses here addresses the question. None of them appreciates your problem. Hawk I know exactly what you're talking about; the horrifying weird-fast 60p look. That's what it's supposed to look like when IT'S PLAYED at 60fps. For example when you view these clips in the camera. What I'm not understanding is how you are getting this look in a 24p timeline. I shoot almost always in 60p just so I can have flexibility of slo-mo in post if I want. But if I just need footage played at normal speed, I simply log and transfer the clips, WITHOUT conforming in Cinema Tools (again, it's not necessary to conform unless you need slo-mo––––and–––you can always do this after you have imported the clips), then drag the clips into a 24p timeline, and boom, they play smoothly, looking like they were shot in 24p. Try this first and see if it works. If you're still getting the distasteful 60p look, it stands to reason that you need to triple check your timeline settings to see that they are indeed 24p. It's impossible to get that grotesque home movie look when you are in a 24p timeline. Video plays at 24 frames a second in a 24p timeline, REGARDLESS of the SPEED of the clip. The skateboarding video you're talking about, which has slo-mo and regular speed mixed together–––I'm assuming it has a film look (during both slow and regular speeds) and therefore edited and output in 24p. OH...Also make sure you are not clicking 'yes' if the window pops up that says "your timeline settings do not match clip settings---would you like to change timeline settings to match clip settings?" when you're dragging the clip into the timeline.
 
Wow. Thanks David. I had this same question and either 1. no one understood what I was trying to do or 2. no one knew how to do what I wanted to do. Thanks. I'm going to go try this out tonight.
 
Thanks, David. That's exactly what I was needing to know. I'll check out my project when I get home in a few hours and just make sure that everything was 24p.
 
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