Today I found myself in the midst of an edit in which I had shot a series of spit-takes at 60 FPS with the intention of playing them back at 24 FPS to achieve the elusive “Overcrank” or “Slowmo” look.
Don’t ask me why a Christmas promo video needs a series of overcranked spit-takes.
This is really cool feature of DSLRs and really almost all of the newer video cameras; shooting something at 60p and conforming the footage in post to 24p for a slow-motion effect. It’s not exactly Time Warp (I think they shoot things at 10,000 FPS) but it’s still cool.
I realized halfway through this morning that I had completely forgotten how to do this in Final Cut Pro. I had to re-learn the whole process and figured that if I wrote this post about it, then the next time I forget, I could just go back and read this.
Here’s my work-flow for overcranked footage in Final Cut Pro:
Sweet overcranked spit-take!
This is what I did:
- Shoot some spit-takes at the 720p 60 setting on the camera.
- On my CF card, make a folder in which to put everything I want to conform to overcrank.
- Open Cinema Tools go to File>Batch-Conform and choose the folder I just created. I conformed the files to 23.98 FPS.
- Find the overcranked footage in the “conformed” folder in folder I created in step 2.
- Open MPEG Streamclip (or whatever you use to re-compress your 5D/7D footage) and recompress the files from the CF card to my scratch disk for the project.
The above process is not the only way to do this.
In fact, the tutorial I used when I originally figured this out does it differently. If you know of a better way, please tell me and you will receive an honorary gold-star.
Very cool,
busy investigating the option to go DSLR. Well as soon as I convince my wife and sell my Panasonic
Interesting that you went into Cinema Tools to conform the 60fps into 23.98fps – is that really necessary. I would have expected that you just import into 23.98 timeline. Then again I have never had the pleasure of overcranking.
Last week I filmed some cooling towers being demolished – was cool to see that someone filmed it @ 120fps on a RED One. Although the result was killed by watermarks – there was some cool slow mo and reverse thrown in.
Investigate away.
But before you sell your “real” video camera you’ll want to consider all of the issues shooting DSLR creates.
http://churchcreate.com/5-tips-for-the-hd-dslr-work-around/
Did you actually get to work with the RED footage? If you did. I’m jealous. I’ve always wanted to get to play with a RED camera. The DSLR’s H.264 compression makes its footage fall apart pretty quickly in post.
You did this with the 5D MKII?
7D Actually
Sorry for the false advertising.
Can you tell the difference?
There actually is a difference. 5D doesn’t shoot 60 fps and the 7D does, so the 7d puts you at an advantage for making slow mo
Ah, I see, I was also operating under the assumption that the 5D firmware update gave it the ability to shoot 720p 60.
Apparently that isn’t true?
I don’t actually use a 5D regularly and was writing based on what I thought I had read.
#fail
Nice. I was in a creative meeting the other day, also for a christmas video, where we discussed wanting this affect. I’ll pass this on to our team.
Wanting spit-takes or slow-mo?
Just kidding. Glad to be of service.
Just saw this video on Vimeo, thought it applied.
Apparently this AE plugin makes your 60p footage look like it was shot at 1000FPS
http://vimeo.com/13557939
You can’t shoot 60p (59.97) with the 5d Mk II.
Noted.
The title needs to be changed to; “Slow Motion via Final Cut Pro and 7D”
My bad.