how to capture the best slow motion

[daniel_mop]

Hi. I have recently done a wedding video with my XH-A1. I shot the whole thing in 24P, and everything went fairly okay. In the editing process, I did a slow motion of the bouquet toss from the side capturing the whole of the bride and the ladies trying to catch the bouquet. Now, the problem is that the flying bouquet looks choppy. It does not look smooth at all, but it only shows like 7 different positions throughout the whole toss. Is there a better way to shoot something like that, make it into a slow-mo video, and still make it look smooth? Please let me know.

 

[Beeblebrox]

For true slo-mo, you shoot a very high frame rate and then slow it down to 24fps in post. A lot of cameras these days can shoot 60 or even 120 fps. My camera does 60, which makes for some pretty decent slo-mo.

 

[grinner]

ditto. The fater rate ya shoot at, the better for nice slow mo. If your camera can't shoot at fast speeds, just stay in 30 fps preset (no shutter) then use AE to time warp it. If you have an Avid, Fluid Motion works ok most of the time, depending on the action.

 

[Will Vincent]

You really want to use both a high frame rate AND a high shutter rate for slow motion.. if you can't adjust the frame rate, most likely you can adjust the shutter speed. Set that to the fastest setting possible, and you'll get fairly crisp images on every frame. Then in post the software you use to slow it down should be able to create the inbetween frames for silky smooth slow motion.

AE has this ability, and there are some plugins available for it that offer even higher quality interpolation.. I'm sure there are options on the mac side as well, with and without shake.