A Little Bit More On Slow-Motion Video Interpolation

I think most people didn't appricate the epic shit that was the "Ugly Betty Super-Slow-Mo video" post. Never mind, I will attempt to wow you with this post on it now.

Above is the original clip: united except for the sound being removed. In it, you can see the green-screen error at the beginning (black mark on his hand). I initially thought this was another artifact from the slow-mo process, as I missed it first time around, but no, it's actually Ugly Betty's post-editing problem, not mine.

Below are two versions of the video slowed down. The first is the CGI version that was posted already, and the one below it is a bog standard frame-rate reduced version, to roughly match the timing. To see how epic the CGI AI frame-interpolation is (yes, it really is Artificial Intelligence frame creation!) click on the first video below and the then click on the next. If you time it right the two should be in-sync, if not, pause one until the other catches up. What you'll see in the second video is some very jerky movement, it's a 25 fps video played back at 3.1fps. The one above it is very very smooth and the reason for this is because, between those frames of the second video, the computer (yes, the computer. I'm stressing this point for the uninspired) has actually created new frames to tween between the frames in the original source.. Does that not amaze you, no? Just check out the difference then, go on!




So how was it done? Well this is old hat to competent videographers and digital editers these days but there are still a few people out there (those hanging onto clunky VHS cassette recorders perhaps) that will find this whole thing very interesting. There has to be, the law of averages proves it.

There are three ways you can get these kinds of results (that I know of): 1) get yourself some expensive video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro. Newer expensive softwares come with the super sexy slow-mo algorithms built in. 2) Get a copy of Dynapel MotionPerfect. It's software designed for this very purpose 3) Have a mess around with AVS scripts. Here's a guide to creating suitable AVS scripts, but it's a little out of date and I had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery to get it to work.

The main thing is run the video through whatever you use, multiple times. Perhaps that will be done automatically for you but results will dramatically improve with multiple runs. That is all.