Capturing high-motion action, how to create good slow playback?

[Angelus]

Hi I recently took some recordings of my golf swing while at the driving range. I have a Panasonic PV-DV203 camcorder and you can adjust the shutter speed up to 1/500 s when filming progressive. I tried using the trial version of Adobe Premiere but it was kind of hard to view my swing at the traditional NTSC frame rate of 29.97 fps. I was just wondering if there was a way to capture at a faster fps, because now my swing looks kind of choppy on slow motion playback. Thanks.

[FredThompson]

You cannot change the frame rate at capture.

However, you can use Dynapel's Motion Perfect and synthesize slow motion. Look at their website for demos.

So...you taped ping pong balls to your joints and shot with a black light? Nevermind...

[Angelus]

Originally posted by FredThompson
So...you taped ping pong balls to your joints and shot with a black light? Nevermind...

No, I was just bored and decided to use my camcorder for once :D . Anyways I tried that program you mentioned but everytime I tried to use it, it keeps on crashing when it starts its processing...but I found that just opening up the .avi file in VDub and going frame-by-frame suffices. Thanks

[FredThompson]

Dynapel's tech support is pretty good. Drop them a note about the crashing and maybe they have a solution.

[mustardman]

I attempted to use MotionPerfect to synthesise in-between frames for a video taped explosion. I separated the fields first, but I wanted slower :)

The distortion (the best I can describe it as was twisting, distorting and sort of morphing) was just horrible. I decided it would not work for me, and just went for duplicating the de-interlaced frames until I reached the speed I wanted. I found 4 times slower than normal looked fairly fluid. Any slower and it started to visibly "stagger".

MM

[FredThompson]

You must have been doing something "wrong" and not known it. The reason I suggest contacting Dynapel tech support is your source is progressive.

Motion Perfect does a great job on interlaced source. The difference being your progressive source has half the temporal information of an interlaced source. You'd actually be better off with interlaced source because of that. IOW, progressive is 29.97 frames/sec, interlaced is 2 interleaved streams of 29.97 each to yield an effective rate fo 59.94 fps. Considering your goal is motion study, not so much pristine frames, perhaps you would want to shoot some new source...

[mustardman]

@FredThompson

Very interesting point. I had not considered letting it work with interlaced frames - which, of course, is what the camera produces in the first place.

Because I wanted quite a slow-down, I had assumed de-interlacing & setting the fps from the resultant 50 back to 25 would work (PAL over here). Wrong assumption apparently :)

With that in mind, I will give it another go when I next get an opportunity.

Thanks!

MM