The best way to slow down your video, Twixtor from Re:Vision Effects

 

Twixtor

While Premiere has the ability to slow down your footage, and it has a newer higher quality version called Optical Flow (called Pixel Motion in After Effects). It is certainly better than plain frame blending, but it is not the highest quality slow motion you can get. For the highest quality post slow motion the answer has always been the expensive but worth it TWIXTOR from Re:Vision Effects.

Clip speed in Premiere Pro is in the Clip Menu.

This brings up the Speed Panel, and for best results select Optical Flow from the drop down menu.

Twixtor comes in 2 versions, Standard and Pro and is available for a variety of platforms. The version I use is the After Effects/Premiere Pro version. The standard version is $329.95 and the Pro version is $595.00, both fairly expensive, but as I have said quite worth it.

The Pro version gives you the ability to really tweak what the auto track does, lets you use matte’s and alphas to enhance your tracks, as well as splines, and the ability to work with motion vectors from a 3D system. If you have a really important shot to slow down the Pro version is certainly worth the extra money, though you may get away with the normal version. And they have video based tutorials for their effects on their sites, and they are really worth going into to learn the ins and outs.

Twixtor shows up in your Video Effects RE:Vision Plugs-Ins (RSMB is ReelSmart Motion Blur which I plan on talking about in a later post).

The first thing to realize when working with twixtor is it works based on the whole clip as it can see it, so to specify the in points you need to Nest (in Premiere or Pre-Compose in After Effects) and in the sequence the sequence needs to be longer to work on the extent of the clip, so you might want to double or triple your clip in that nest/pre-comp.

This is the clip in the sequence with playhead parked on first frame

First frame of clip I want to slow.
Twixtor Effect Added

Speed Changed to 20%

First frame becomes first frame of clip.

So nest your clip in timeline

If you want clip longer as slow, you need to lengthen it, so double clip next to open. Since I want 20% speed, I duplicate clip 5 times.

Put twixtor on Nest in original sequence.

Here are the settings I am using. I always use GPU as I have a decent one and that speeds things up, but it is much slower within Premiere than within After Effects. Different settings will give you different results, so play around for sure. I ususally got for Motion Weighted and Smart Blend, and add a little Motion blur Compensation though it really slows things down. I have also set my Image Prep to Delinearize.
I did a video to demonstrate, it is UHD and shot 59.94 but is in a 23.976 Sequence, I have shown the footage as if 23.967, then slowed down, then slowed down to 20% using Premiere Pro’s time interpolation with Frame Sampling then Frame Blending, then optical flow and with Twixtor. This isn’t ideal footage, but Twixtor still looks the best. Of course this is recompressed by YouTube, but you should get the idea.

PremierePro.Net by Jarle Leirpoll is an awesome resource

 

I was watching a Maxon series on Red Giant Universe, and one of the presenters was Jarle Leirpoll, who I hadn’t heard about. I quickly went and checkout out his web site Premiere Pro.net and it is an awesome resource.

He wrote a book on Advanced Premiere Pro Editing Techniques called The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro.

And he has a Free PDF book on making MOGRTs or Motion Graphics Templates in After Effects for use in Premiere Pro. 

Certainly a resource to check out.

Sofi Marshall’s Ultimate Real Time Remote Editing Workflow and how I am considering adapting it to my workflow

 

Sofi Marshall, Editor, Writer and Workflow Expert has an awesome post on the Ultimate Real Time Remote Editing Worklflow. You can check out her IMDB page to see her experience, which is extensive.

Now I talked a bit about this in my recent post on Work from Home thanks to the Covid-19 Pandemic. And I have been thinking about getting a workflow working because I would like to be able to work from home as much as possible.

And I too loved iChat theater in Final Cut Pro 7. It was amazing technology that worked really well when the entire Internet was so much slower.

As for the Workflow, obviously the BlackMagic Web Presenter has been updated to the Web Presenter HD to include the front panel, but there is another option as well that is either the ATEM Mini or the ATEM Mini Pro which are switchers and include picture in picture abilities.

Now the Mini Pro includes the ability to stream directly to YouTube, FaceBook or Twitch (or I guess you program some others like Vimeo but it isn’t easy, nor is that going to be all that secure) but the Mini for $295 seems like a viable alternative as it has the USB port to act as a web cam and it has multiple sources possible, so if you have a camera with an HDMI port and I have an old GoPro Hero 2 which has mini USB out and a usb for power.

Personally since I have an BlackMagic Ultrastudio 4k, I would hook this up to the ATEM Mini as my main source, and the GoPro as my personal camera, and then I would hook up the ATEM Mini to my Windows Surface and run Zoom on there to save resources on my editing Mac.

The one issue is the single HDMI out on my Ultrastudio 4k, so to get it to my monitor, I would have to take the HDMi out of the switcher which will likely put it on more of a delay from what I am editing, but this would only be necessary when live streaming.

And because of the Ultrastudio I would not be streaming any of my desktop, but the direct output from my editing system, though I would still uncheck disable video output when I background, so the output signal remains as a source.

Now with using my Windows Tablet as the zoom machine, I will have to use it as the audio monitor as well (though that precludes all the setup with Rouge Amoeba’s LOOPBACK which makes things easier) though not sure how great it will sound through the headphone port and have to check audio levels using the ATEM Software Control (which should work fine on Windows).

Best would be to cut off audio to the gopro and use a good mic through the switcher’s microphone ports, but that is of course an extra expense.

And honestly I should probably run the audio out headphone port into my Emotiva-XDA-1 and it’s connected heaphone amp, just so I can control the volume better.

Of course I have to hook it up and try it to see how it works, and if it didn’t I could do it all from my iMac, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

 

EDIT: Awesome, so Sofi Marshall has done a small update to the post to add the ATEM Mini as an option. Basically it works the same, with the ability to do picture in picture form multiple sources, but it has one downside. The ATEM Mini can only accept 1080 inputs, while the web presenter can accept 4K inputs, and the ATEM Mini is a bit larger as well. Good to know.

EDIT: OK so maybe the Web Presenter is the better solution. It has SDI, and I have SDI to spare on my Ultrastudio 4k, and it accepts up to 2160 60p video  and exports up to 1080 60p. The ATEM mini and Mini pro accept up to 1080 60p video, so it wouldn’t accept a UHD sequence direct from Premiere, but I would also lose the ability to have a camera on me via the switcher. Hmmm.

 

 

In Premiere Pro and AVID as well, the most important thing to remember it to save all the time

 

Now some people will go without saying that saving is important in editing, and yes there is an auto-save.


And you do want your auto-save set as it will save your ass some time because of a random crash, but more important is to get yourself saving as much as possible.

It has become such second nature to me that I just hit command-S all the time, in fact when moving to Final Cut Pro X, I kept dinging the computer as there is no save, it is just supposed to save every time you make a change, but I am so ingrained to save that I kept trying to do it anyway (and it isn’t like final cuts lack of a save has always worked for me, as I have crashed and lost quite a bit of work in Final Cut Pro X as well).
And sometimes saves can take a while, especially fi the project is huge, but it is always worth saving as much as possible because otherwise you will crash and lose something, and you never want to do that.

So remember to save all the time and often, don’t let it fall to the auto save.

A Keyboard based Launcher for After Effects, check out Andrew Kramer’s VideoCopilot FX Console

 

So recently I wrote about the awesome Mac keyboard based launcher LaunchBar from Obdev, and now I am writing about something Andrew Karamer wrote from Video Copilot wrote for After Effects called FX Console, which is the same type of thing for After Effects, he calls it a Work Flow Plug In, and it is free.

It blows away that this is listed in their Products, but must be searched for. They really need a free section for his awesome free products, to go along with his amazing paid products, that I will write about later.

This plug in just adds a quick new way to use a keyboard to add effects & presets, and create FX Shortcuts, and export Snapshots as PNG. This is a must use plug-in that will always speed you up, and once again when I get on a machine that doesn’t have it installed, I feel stunted.

Anything that speeds up your workflow is always a good thing, and this can speed up your workflow each and every day. And because of this I would easily pay for it, but it is free. So there is no reason to not download and install it.

My favorite keyboard launcher, LaunchBar will speed up everything outside of your editing and graphics software

 

So I have written about LaunchBar in the past, but now I am writing about it as something to speed up your workflow when using editing or graphics software. I have been using the amazing LaunchBar from Objective Development for years, and whenever I am in an office using a computer there I feel stunted by not having it.

Now LaunchBar is a tool that does so many things, but my favorite is to the ability to launch application using keyboard shortcuts, and it will learn your shorcuts quickly to speed things up. You hit a quick keyboard shortcut, which brings up LaunchBar and then you type your keys and if the application shows up hit return or push to the down arrow and select what you want to launch. After selecting the thing a few time LaunchBar learns and moves your choice to the top of list.

So to launch I hit Command-Space and the last app I launch shows up, if I want to launch it, just hit enter and it launches.

Or more powerfully you type the initials of an app, and LaunchBar will give you a list, and you select what app you want.

If I want Word, I try Wo or MW.

Then select the App and return and it will learn your initials and move the app up the list and eventually to the top.

This way I can launch any application without ever touching the mouse, and this is HUGE! IT WILL SPEED UP EVERYTHING YOU DO ON THE COMPUTER OUTSIDE OF YOU EDITING OR GRAPHICS APPLICATION!
And Launchbar does so much more. You can do calculator functions, instant web searches, go to web sites, create e-mails from contacts, merge files, check your ClipBoard History, and it is all customizable.
LaunchBar is the so worth $29 or $49 for a family license. It speeds up everything I do on the computer and it can speed things up for you as well.

So Apple killed the iMac Pro, now it is all about seeing what video options M1 Macs have

 

So I got an iMac Pro because my old Mac Pro 4,1 died, and there was no new MacPro out as of yet. It was obviously a stop gap machine, and it’s only ugprade was removing the lowest multi-core version and an upgrade to the Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB from the Vega 64 16GB, which is just a slight speed increase.

And the latest 27 inch iMac can in fact beat the performance for the iMac Pro. The top of the line can be upgraded to a 3.6GHz 10 Core Intel-Core i9 with turbo boost to 5.0GHZ, it can have up to 128GB of RAM, up to an 8TB internal SSD, an the top video card is a Radeo Pro 5700 XT  with 16GB of GDDR6 Memory. This machine should smash the 10 Core iMac Pro in performance, and the Xeon’s never really added anything to the Mac except multi-core and the ability to have dual processors. And you can even get the Matte finish from the MacPro displays for half the price, which is impressive, but they need a second display like that to match the price and look.

It is likely that the next M1 or it’s follow up chip will be an iMac, but the first M1 machines not only share video memory with the main memory, but also stop at 16GB of total RAM. And sure the performance of them has been impressive, but for heavy pro work Apple had better be doing some form of video card to really push the video end and GPU performance, and we have seen no sign of it, but I would hope that a high end iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro would have it to push the video performance.

Video editing software needs a separate GPU with it’s own memory, lets hope Apple agrees.

I was accepted to the Adobe Speech to Text Beta for Premiere Pro, can’t wait to give it a real run through!

 So I applied to the Adobe Speech To Text Beta for Early Access, and was accepted, woohoo!

I didn’t realize it is locked to your account and will work in both Premiere Pro 15.0 and Beta based on my Adobe ID, I thought it would only run in the beta, so this is great news.

I am currently cutting commercial and direct response shots, and with testimonial this feature will be invaluable!

I will be reporting on it as I try it out. I have been very excited about this feature for some time.

I can’t believe I didn’t know how to paste unformatted text until I read this post from OWC, I always just used TextEdit

Dennis Sellers at OWC Rocket Yard has a post on how to paste non-formatted text on your mac, and I can’t believe that I never knew the keyboard shortcut Shift-Option-Command-V to paste without formatting.

I always used Textedit to past into and turn it non-formated.

This is huge, I always have issues with pasting formatted text, just as the article talks about.

Some really cool online editing tools at EditiingTools.io

EditingTools.io is a very cool web site with some very useful tools online. You might not need them right now, but when you do it is going to be great to remember they are there.

EditingTools.io is a collection of generators, scripts, converters and machine learning applications made over the last years for various projects & productions. 

They accept donations to keep their free tools online.

There are some very useful tools for converting or combining AVID Log Exchange files or ALE files.

XML to Splitscreen XML to perfectly do split screens.

A very useful Marker Converter to convert timeline markers from Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Frame.io, SubRip Subtitle, CSV, PDF and more.

A subtitle tool & converter.

A tool to generate an Editor’s Codebook from ALE files.

A Music Cut Sheet creator from XML files (woohoo, awesome if you have to make them).

A Edit Shot List / VFX Shot List from XML.

And so much more. These are great tools to know about in case you need them.