How to watch slow motion footage

Stratospheric · Jun 11, 2017

Hi guys

I'm using a PC and have just taken some 120 FPS footage but don't know how to watch it as it is being shown to me in Windows media player at normal speed. I want to show the client the footage before editing it but don't know how to view it. Can anyone advise?

Many thanks

InterMurph · Jun 11, 2017

You will likely need to drop the footage into a 30-frames-per-second timeline in your video editor, then export it.

Stratospheric · Jun 11, 2017

Can anyone tell me what the point of 120 FPS is if you can't watch it natively as slow motion footage? This is my first experience with slow motion so I'm not used to working with it.

Steelej · Jun 11, 2017

You're not actually recording slow motion, your recording normal motion at 120fps, it needs to be slowed down in an editing program to become slow motion. All very standard stuff so the point is you get smooth slow motion when slowed down by the right amount in your editing program.

John

Stratospheric · Jun 12, 2017

My friend who does the flying has got a iMac and on his computer he has got a video player where you can slow the footage down directly in the footage from the inspire 2 so he was saying "surely you have that on a PC?" That's where the confusion has come in.

imax · Jun 12, 2017

In Windows Media Player, right click in the play window and move the mouse to enhancements, another menu will pop up. From that menu, select Play speed settings. This will bring up a pop up window where you can adjust the play speed. Drag the slider to 0.25 (you may need to uncheck the snap slider to common speeds box). This will then play 120FPS at 30FPS

Shawn Esplin · Jun 12, 2017

To answer your other question, why else would you use a higher frame rate, the standard frame rates we use (24, 25 and 30 or a small fraction off of those) is significantly below what our eyes can keep up with.

Early films ranged from 12-40 fps, but eventually we settled on 24 for film, 25 for PAL TV and 29.97 for NTSC TV, all for cost and technical reasons, not because they produced the objectively best results.

Today we have the ability to shoot and play back at high frame rates, and although it tends to look strange to most people since they're not used to it, some people are starting to shoot for playback at higher frame rates like 48 or 60fps.

With a 120Hz+ monitor 120 fps may be more than we need to completely fool our eyes into seeing a completely continuous scene instead of a series of frames (which you can often distinguish when a shot pans, etc.), but it's still possible we could end up shooting everything that fast in the future if people's tastes change. I'd say 48-60 at least is very likely to be widely adopted in the not too distant future, but I would guess not in the next few years, at least for older audiences.