Have you used this method for smoother slow motion?

[I J Walton]

Howdy, as you know, your interlaced footage consists of fields (upper and lower). using many plugins you can deinterlace and have footage with either the upper fields or the lower ones.

Now, if you were to take these two deinterlaced clips (upper and lower) and put them together so that each lower field was next to each upper field you would have a clip that was twice as long and footage that was 50% slower. This would be very smooth because you have created these extra whole frames from the deinterlaced upper feilds ie; almost like shooting at 50fps!

I am about to try this somehow in after effects, just wandered if anyone else has tried it yet and how does it look?

[stickmurder30]

I never tryed this, but if you try it, I would like to see how it looks. Thanks for letting us know !

[Epsilon]

It wouldn't look great though, because one field is only half the picture, but you could do it. For us in the Americas, we would have 60 fps!

[padawanNick]

I've used this technique before in Media Studio Pro (to get 60fps out of my NTSC video) and it absolutely improved how smooth the slow motion looked. It's not as good as film, but it's noticably smoother, esp. at 25% speed.

The resolution loss is only an issue if you are using a very good pro-sumer or professional camera. Most comsumer cameras have optical resolutions closer to the 240 lines of a deinterlaced frame than 480. The other thing is that if the motion that you're trying to slow is fast, the motion blur also tends to offset the loss in resolution.

In my cases, one shot was a person jumping. The raw shot was a short, running jump in front of a bluescreen which lasted about .75 seconds. Combining this technique with a moving path and some compositing made a finished shot that lasted nearly 3 seconds, where the character "force jumps" over a wide ravine.
The second time I used the shot was for a client that had a video of a karate instructor on a scaffold that breaks about 14,000 lbs of stacked ice blocks. When the guy hit the top block, the rest were broken within a few frames. To make the shot more dramatic I used this technique to get a smooth slow-motion effect out of the break. Client was very happy.

Here's a tutorial on how I did it with MSP. Maybe it can provide some ideas on how to do the same with AE.

Have fun.