Optical Flow Questions

Hello again, I use FCPX's Optical Flow feature to smooth out slowed-down footage from 60fps source material.

In general it works better than frame blending, but there are always artifacts surrounding stationary assets in the footage that don't seem to show up when using the same feature on Adobe Premiere. Is there a follow-up post-process to remove these?

Also, I was also curious to use the feature to smooth 30fps footage to approximate 60fps. Unfortunately, even though my source footage is 30fps, it is encoded at 60fps (capture card, no way on this model to lower to 30fps capture). Is there a way to make Optical Flow still work towards this purpose? Would I need to set the project properties to something specific, or recode the footage to be both 30fps on the file itself?

Thanks!

What do you mean the footage is 30fps but encoded at 60fps? Did you transcode your original to be 60fps?

If you're going for in-camera slow motion, you film at 60fps and place that into a slower fps Project. You seem to be doing the opposite. I don't understand what you're doing.

Ben Balser wrote: What do you mean the footage is 30fps but encoded at 60fps? Did you transcode your original to be 60fps?

If you're going for in-camera slow motion, you film at 60fps and place that into a slower fps Project. You seem to be doing the opposite. I don't understand what you're doing.

I'm sorry, I tried to explain it the best I could in the original post. I guess I can give more details to help to be more specific. I am recording footage from an elgato 4K60S+ hooked into a Nintendo Switch. The specific game that I am recording only "plays" at 30fps max, but the capture card is recording at 60fps. 

I don't know how to properly half the encoded frame rate of the source footage without losing time/odd frames, which i would need to do in order to import the 30p footage into a 60p project to attempt the optical flow trick.

If the capture card only does 60fps, that's what you're stuck with. You can't magically make it 30fps for slow motion. 30fps has to be the recording rate. The rate of the game means nothing, the rate of the recording is everything.

Ben Balser wrote: If the capture card only does 60fps, that's what you're stuck with. You can't magically make it 30fps for slow motion. 30fps has to be the recording rate. The rate of the game means nothing, the rate of the recording is everything.

That's what I was afraid of, a shame I can't change the recording rate, then. Thanks for clarifying.

OpticalFlow is typically the kind of things introduced with FcpX that Apple has let go in the trashcan by not updating it and making it better like the competition did (even the Avid scourge does a way better job)

Same thing goes with every feature in Motion thats is not strictly "graphic related", (like tracking, etc.. )

For smooth slowmos give a try at Twixtor... as a plugin

Does the help at all? I use it quite often if I have a couple of progressive shots in an interlaced edit

www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/1731-...e-in-final-cut-pro-x

Stu Wart wrote: OpticalFlow is typically the kind of things introduced with FcpX that Apple has let go in the trashcan by not updating it and making it better like the competition did (even the Avid scourge does a way better job)

Same thing goes with every feature in Motion thats is not strictly "graphic related", (like tracking, etc.. )

For smooth slowmos give a try at Twixtor... as a plugin

That's a shame, but it aligns with what I've noticed on some of the program's features, too. Tracking is an absolute PITA natively. I would try Twixtor, but can't justify that kind of money on a plug-in. Thank you for the suggestion, I'll keep them in mind in the future though.

peteramwiggins wrote: Does the help at all? I use it quite often if I have a couple of progressive shots in an interlaced edit

www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/1731-...e-in-final-cut-pro-x

Thanks for linking, I'll see if I can modify that strategy for my purposes.