Slow Motion with photo morphing software Posted by juhartik - 11 May 2011 06:05 There has been some discussion(s) in this forum how to make slow motion effect. Most of the NLEs does not offer any tool for that, LW is not an exception. Twixtor (not free) is one possibility (not sure if it works in Lightworks yet). I used normal photo morphing software (FotoMorph) and I think it worked out quite well. What I did: - Export wanted frames as picture sequence (I exported 5 or 6 frames) - Import frames in your favourite morphing software (I used Fotomorph, free) - Create image sequence, set control points, export as image sequence - Import created iamge sequence back to Lightworks - Add it to edit and trim clips to match in/out points Result (Lightworks + Fotomorph): (between real frames there is 36 calculated frames, original footage was 30fps) -Juha Posted by Greg_E - 11 May 2011 14:05 You can slow down the video in Lightworks, but it is not going to be as good as Twixtor. I tried the demo version of Twixtor for Premiere and After Effects but it will not function as a plug in for Lightworks 1 / 7
(causes a crash while launching LW) Posted by juhartik - 12 May 2011 05:27 Greg_E wrote: You can slow down the video in Lightworks, but it is not going to be as good as Twixter. I tried the demo version of Twixter for Premiere and After Effects but it will not function as a plug in for Lightworks (causes a crash while launching LW) Slowing down video using Advanced /% is only usable if source material permits to do so. That means that you need to have some extra frames in source material to get nice slow motion. 7D has possibility to record in 60fps so one could slow down playback rate to 50% still having real footage played for every single frame. 5D can only film maximum 30fps so there is no extra material to do decent slow-mo by just slowing down playback rate. In the sample there is less than 1 frame of real footage played in one second, other frames (36 between real frames) are calculated "fakes". Twixtor does exactly same thing. Thanks to LW's handy image sequence export/import it was easy to use external (free) photo morphing software to achieve similar result what Twixtor does Posted by Greg_E - 12 May 2011 13:38 Hopefully Twixtor will be able to work in Lightworks in one of the future version. Posted by Kreatief - 16 Jun 2011 09:42 2 / 7
This is so awesome. Thanks alot for this hint with fotomorph. I will try it asap. Posted by shaunthesheep - 16 Jun 2011 13:41 What is the link to the fotomorph software? Posted by Kreatief - 16 Jun 2011 14:13 I guess this one: www.diphso.no/fotomorph.html Or found here: fotomorph.softonic.de/ Posted by juhartik - 16 Jun 2011 17:59 www.diphso.no/fotomorph.html Posted by Kreatief - 17 Jun 2011 07:19 Is it possible that you explain in detail how you did it? I am interested in the details of how you created the sub images and how you reimported it into lightworks at the right position so that it fits together well. Posted by Devine1-17 Jun 2011 07:29 Just curious... Couldn't one slow down video footage in Lightworks, export it (avi or mov)and then re-import it into the final edit? 3 / 7
My thinking is as follows. If I understand the problem with slowmotion is that one is changing the frame rate when slowing the footage, (footage recorded as 30fps becomes 15fps at 50%). If one then exports that 15fps clip at 30fps, will the exported clip then be at normal speed again or at the slower speed? If there are missing frames, is there not a feature in LW that allows one to find filler material? So instead of using the advanced % one could split the video clip into several segments and copy additional footage as fillers. They would have to be really small segments I suppose, so as not to have a "jerky" effect. Just trying to learn. Posted by juhartik - 17 Jun 2011 15:52 Kreatief wrote: Is it possible that you explain in detail how you did it? I am interested in the details of how you created the sub images and how you reimported it into lightworks at the right position so that it fits together well. Tutorial video would tell more than zillion words in this case I think Well.. You need to select part of clip what you want to slow down. You need to export couple frames (my sample had something like 6), I did this by creating new edit and cut the clip to have only these 6 frames and then exported it as image series (just click the export button and choose correct format). After that you will need to create morphing sequence from these frames, like: 1->2, 2->3, 3->4, 4->5, 5->6 Depending on the morphing software you might need to export all frame-pairs one-by-one. Fotomorph can create sequence (you can create whole sequence with many input images inside one project) so it is a bit easier. Export projects as jpegs. After you have exported sequence from morphing software, just drag all of the images (no matter if there is hundreds of them) to Lightworks and it will combine them automatically (and treat is as single clip). Rest is just basic editing, cut the original clip half and insert slomo-part between them. Then just trim it to 4 / 7
match original footage. Let me know if you have spesific questions about some phase, I think I can't explain this any better, unless I find some time to make that tutorial video -Juha Posted by juhartik - 17 Jun 2011 16:14 Devine1 wrote: Just curious... Couldn't one slow down video footage in Lightworks, export it (avi or mov)and then re-import it into the final edit? It is not that easy. Problem is that material is just not there. One frame could have your face pointing left and next frame has your face pointing right. When you play it 1:1 to original fps it looks just fine and everything happens in same speed than happened when filmed. If you want to do slomo, best way is to capture everything in higher fps and play it slower. All the information is there, no problems. However these cameras cost a fortune (in my example you would have needed a camera which will capture video in 1000fps). Cheap way is to calculate frames which looks like they are original and belongs to sequence. Twixtor does exactly that. It morphs images to make it look like belong to original image sequence. This is however not very easy (mathematically) and sometimes not even possible (due too much missing material between frames). In face example (1st frame face pointing left, 2nd frame face pointing right) you need to calculate image which has your face pointing towards camera to make slomo look good. 5 / 7
Other ways are: - blending between frames, however this doesn't look very good on most material as it creates ghosting. - Repeating same frame many times (this is what most programs do, including Lightworks). In my opinion this looks better than blending but can be used only when slowing doing little amount. Posted by Kreatief - 20 Jun 2011 11:26 Thanks for the reply! I still have problems with the morphing. When I select a morph sequence and create those 5-6 sequences for each frame pair, the calculated pictures are morphed, so its looking something like this: This image is hidden for guests. Please log in or register to see it. how to get those clean images in between the real ones? Posted by Devine1-20 Jun 2011 12:59 I'm sure Juhartik will be more accurate than I. The last time I morphed images I had x number individual frames per frame pair (i.e. you might have a something like 36 individual images exported from the morphing software). So when you import the *.jpg's into LW you'd be importing individual frames for each frame pair but you'd import them as sequential *.jpg's (i.e LW automatically joins them together) I think under the "transfer" column you'd leave it as 'straight' and under the "video encoding" you'd set it to 'transcode' It was quite a while ago that I've done this, so my memory might not be accurate. 6 / 7
Posted by Kreatief - 20 Jun 2011 13:20 I am not sure if I missunderstood you or you me: The picture shown above is one of the calculated pictures by fotomorph. So all the let say 36 calculated pictures from fotomorph look like the one shown. If I import those images and put it into my edit, it doesnt look clear but like two pictures in one. But thats not what we want, right? Am I missing something? 7 / 7