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Flow motion software to improve the electronic shutter look?
  • @Cbrandin came up with the idea to reduced the shutter effect with a Flow Motion software like Twixtor. I think his idea is quite promising for two reasons:

    – When people see footage shot on RED with HDRx, they generally say it looks more cinematic. I think it's the motion trail generated by the longer exposure for the darker parts, blended mildly into the highlights.

    – Twixtor works very well if you don't try to generate serious slo-mo, but only fill in frames. I used it recently for a well-known video artist, who had her project already shot in 50p to slow things down, but later was still unhappy since her camerawoman made a few turns a tad too fast (it was a very long uncut sequence). So, we tried generating intermediate frames to screen it with higher (albeit fake) temporal resolution. We both tested 1080i50 and 720p50, and she liked i50 the best. After all, i50 is blending the additional temporal information into the motion, and it looked quite smooth.

    So, let's start experimenting with intermediate frames generated by Twixtor and mixed in by different overlay modes, maybe even blurred to some degree and see if we can make electronic shutter look any better. Twixtor ain't cheap, but you can always use the watermarked demo to test our theory.

    Twixtor together with AE will do nearly anything you can imagine. I'd suggest a simple approach for a first try: just generate one intermediate frame for any given "real" frame. If I remember well (I'm traveling right now), you can bias frames to one of the neighbors, so maybe one should generate two, closer in time to the originals. Soften them and mix them in with an appropriate mixing mode, like "soft screen". Play with their opacity.

  • 4 Replies sorted by
  • The longer exposure trail from darks moving on a highlighted background is definitely something the GH2 suffers from. But in other ways, the motion is a lot more appealing than say RED or any of the other DSLRs. If they could just somehow fix that one aspect.

    Definitely interested in Cbrandin's project if this is actually happening.

  • It's not really my project. I don't have Twixtor and have never used it. It was just a suggestion. If this is to turn into a project it should probably belong to @nomad - he seems to be the one who might know how to actually achieve it.

  • Well, actually everybody who knows AE really well could take part by using the demo version.

    I'm shooting this week and will not try the concept until next weekend.

    So, testers are very welcome!

  • @nomad I don't have Twixtor but have been trying the same thing with Gooder Motion Perfect. I doubt the quality will be the same but it's worth trying.

    @cbrandin It's nice to know at least one person in the world other than me doesn't have Twixtor.