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Apple Motion 5 optical flow ... am I doomed?

swolff13

swolff13

Hello all -

I've been working a little with Motion 5, and became interested in the optical flow feature it has. Slow-motion has been on my radar for a while, so I figured I'd give it a shot. However, when I dropped the footage in Motion 5 and slowed it all down, the footage looked terrible. Super choppy, globby, like jello. :grumpy: I shoot with a Nikon D7000, at 30fps - the highest it'll go. I am almost positive this is the problem - all the tutorials I've watched have been shot at 60fps, and I'm pretty confident I've followed the other guidelines well.

So! Am I doomed to never being able to use optical flow timing well? Or is there a chance I'm missing something? Does anybody else have some experience with Motion?

Thanks in advance for the help! I have a school project coming up, and any assistance could be a life saver!

-Sam
 
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There are a few factors that influence the performance of optical flow.
Remember: the software has to make an educated guess where a pixel is moving to.

- Busy backgrounds 'distract' the software. It can cause jello-background effects
- Motion blur (sometimes) makes things more difficult for the software: use faster shutterspeeds than normal to get clearer edges on your moving subject
- Lineair sideways movement is best understood by the software. Things moving from left to right and top to bottom or viceversa/diagonally.
- Organic movement: long hair in the wind, splashes of water, etc is very hard to interpret: which hair or which drop is going where? Very confusing for the software. (Just imaging drawing a good animation with such effects: it's hard to make it look natural.)
- Things that enter or leave the frame can cause artifacts.
- Movement towards the camera: when combined with other movement (like arms of a running person) can cause artifacts as well.

(These rules are not set in stone, but some personal findings with AE's equivalent of optical flow.)

Maybe this forum can help you out if you post a link to the footage.
 
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