Motion FX's in After Effects

I generally hate using slow motion in FCP because I don't like the results of FCP's frame bleding. Frame blending basically just makes up new frames by blending frames together--sort of like little dissolves. This especially doesn't look good with interlaced footage which is what I mostly work with because you have to add on the look of deinterlacing, which basically leaves you with half of your picture because it throws out every other line of video.

There's a better way of doing slo-mo called interpolation. Compressor actually will do interpolation, and it is why Compressor does good conversion from PAL to NTSC (if at shockingly slow speeds.) But Compressor is not set up to do interpolation for slo-motion. There are some workarounds, but if you have After Effects 7, then I think it is a better workflow.

With After Effects 7, Adobe introduced a new setting to frameblending called "Pixel Motion", which is interpolation. With interpolation, the software looks for what areas of the image are moving and figures out what the in-between steps would be based on how fast and in what direction those moving parts are moving. It's more processor-intensive but the results are superior to the frame blending.

So how do you turn on interpolation in After Effects? There has always been frame blending switch in After Effects, but now it has three settings--off, draft, and fine. Draft is regular-old frame blending like FCP does, and fine is interpolation. Make sure to turn on frame blending in your rendering settings or otherwise AE won't do anything when you render.

With interlaced footage, also check you footage interpretation. According to Stu Maschwitz in his book "The DV Rebel's Guide", use the Preserve Edges option for footage interpretation to insure that "jaggies will be reduced." I don't know what that means by I defintiely trust Stu 100%. This post is basically a note about what I just read in "The DV Rebel's Guide." The book is for aspiring action-film makers, but it is chocked full of awesome advice on getting the maximum out of Adobe After Effects. This info came from a chapter on creating slo-mo effects. He says shoot your movie in 24p but your slo-mo shots in 60i (interlaced), which is sort of like overcranking a film camera. Stu has a blog ProLost with a link to his book. Lots of great stuff in the book. I'm going to try and write down notes for myself here on the blog, but there's no way I could get down all the great things in the book. For any lo-budget independent who want to make a "video" for theatrical purposes, this book is a must-read.