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Final Cut Pro X and Twistor

Sdahe

Sdahe

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 26, 2007
1,722
23
San Juan, PR
Hello Guys,

Sorry if this is not the right place to place this thread. I'm trying to do some nice slow motions clips from a video a recorded with my GoPro. I have FCPX and one of my friends gave me his Twistor app so I can test it. The thing is that I can't find a decent tutorial anywhere. Is there a step by step tutorial on how to use this plugin in FCPX?... I've been looking and looking since noon... I'm about to give up on this Twistor app.

Thanks!!!
 
D

diamond3

macrumors 6502a
Oct 6, 2005
882
375
FCPX has a decent built in slow motion. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do it. Just search Optical Flow Final Cut pro X tutorial.

A quick guide. Put the clip in your timeline, press b for you blade tool and cut the portion of the clip you want to slow down. Press A and click the clip you just cut to select it and hit command+R to add the retime option above the clip. It will show 100% by default. Just click the two vertical lines above the clip and adjust the clip to the right to extend the clip (thus retiming for a slow motion effect). Once you have the speed you want, click Modify in the menu bar; video quality; optical flow.

I've never used Twixtor so I can't help you there. But maybe for your sake, FCPX is good enough.

There are a few good steps that you should try to take when shooting slow motion. Try to get a high contrast background that is as basic as possible. For example the sky works great because it's easier for the programs to create frames that look good.
 
Sdahe

Sdahe

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 26, 2007
1,722
23
San Juan, PR
diamond3 said:
FCPX has a decent built in slow motion. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do it. Just search Optical Flow Final Cut pro X tutorial.

A quick guide. Put the clip in your timeline, press b for you blade tool and cut the portion of the clip you want to slow down. Press A and click the clip you just cut to select it and hit command+R to add the retime option above the clip. It will show 100% by default. Just click the two vertical lines above the clip and adjust the clip to the right to extend the clip (thus retiming for a slow motion effect). Once you have the speed you want, click Modify in the menu bar; video quality; optical flow.

I've never used Twixtor so I can't help you there. But maybe for your sake, FCPX is good enough.

There are a few good steps that you should try to take when shooting slow motion. Try to get a high contrast background that is as basic as possible. For example the sky works great because it's easier for the programs to create frames that look good.
Click to expand...
WOW thanks!.... I'll get some footage tomorrow to test it
 
F

floh

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2011
460
2
Stuttgart, Germany
Two more things I want to add to that:

1. The default way FCPX will slow down your footage is by copying frames. That can look very choppy and not as smooth as you want to. Be sure to change that into "Optical Flow" and make it look much smoother. To do that, mark the clip you slowed down, and click at the Retime-Button above your timeline. The dropdown menu will look like this, but translated from German to English ;):
Retime Menu.png
Then from the submenu "Video quality" choose "Optical Flow". This will be slower but give you way better results.

2. This works fine to slow down your footage to 50%, maybe you can get good results at 25%. If you want to go super slow motion, Twixtor is actually what you want to do. There is a reason why this plugin costs more than all of FCPX. The first link when I put in "Twixtor FCPX" into youtube was this one:
Tutorial
Doesn't look too bad for me. Maybe you really misspelled it and were searching for "Twistor"?

Good luck!
 
D

diamond3

macrumors 6502a
Oct 6, 2005
882
375
floh said:
This works fine to slow down your footage to 50%, maybe you can get good results at 25%. If you want to go super slow motion, Twixtor is actually what you want to do. There is a reason why this plugin costs more than all of FCPX. The first link when I put in "Twixtor FCPX" into youtube was this one:
Tutorial
Doesn't look too bad for me. Maybe you really misspelled it and were searching for "Twistor"?
Click to expand...

If you adjust the time through the menu, you are limited on your percent to slow it down (50, 25, 10%). But if you adjust the clip by stretching it out in the timeline, you can go down to 1 percent or maybe even lower. I'm not saying they are exactly the same, but comparison tests between twixtor and FCPX w/optical flow are fairly close. For a beginner, I'd start out using FCPX to see if it gives you the desired results.
 
D

diamond3

macrumors 6502a
Oct 6, 2005
882
375
Also, I should have mentioned that you will get much better results if you don't record in 1080p on your gopro. Step down to 720p so you can record in 60fps. This will provide a significant improvement when slowing down the clip over the 30fps in 1080p. You can even drop down to WVGA and get 848×480 at 120fps.
 
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