Commercial EPIC shoot next week / Slow Motion Q

[Chase Smith]

OK, I have a shoot next week shooting on EPIC. I am familiar with this camera, but I am not familiar with high frame rate with this camera. We are going to be shooting mostly all at 120FPS to be able to use both the real time and do speed ramping in post. Here is my question.

What is the best way to go about using 120FPS on the EPIC?
-Should I shoot 120FPS in Varispeed with 24 timebase(final output timebase) If I do this, how will the shutter look when playing the footage back at realtime? Does anyone have any examples/tests online?
-Should I just try my best and shoot what I think needs to be 24 and what I think needs to be slowmo at 120 and switch back and forth?
-Can I shoot 120FPS not in Varispeed? Simliar to shooting in 60p and then conform it in post?

Am of course open to ideas.

Thanks guys!

 

[James McLellan]

Yes shoot 23.98 timebase and overcrank to 120 fps. If I understand you correctly, depending on the look you are going for, pulling out the 24 frames for real time footage may look odd as the shutter will be so high. You may want to test that out. Notice that PJ shot at 1/72 and not 1/96. I believe this was to protect the 24p screening from looking too strobie. Otherwise conventional wisdom would suggest they would have shot 1/96 or 180 shutter at 48fps.

My 2 cents.

 

[Chase Smith]

Thanks James!

 

[Wey Wang]

If you are uncertain about when you plan on doing high speed and when you plan on doing regular 24, I would just shoot a take at 24 for safety. Light for 120 and then drop in a ND6 when you switch to 24. Best of both worlds.

I also wouldn't worry too much about the shutter. You can add motion blur in post if you're ramping the footage. You may want to consider doing some tests with the new beta firmware, which does ramping in camera. But be warned, it is a beta release, which may have issues.

 

[Chase Smith]

Great idea, thank you for replying. I am nervous about using beta firmware..

 

[James_Mills]

I also wouldn't worry too much about the shutter. You can add motion blur in post if you're ramping the footage. You may want to consider doing some tests with the new beta firmware, which does ramping in camera. But be warned, it is a beta release, which may have issues.

See, this is where I get confused. If I'm shooting an entire project at 48fps or 120fps but plan on having most of it at 24fps output, should I be putting the shutter at 180 for the higher framerates instead? Like if I want to shoot the whole thing at 48fps to give me the option of ramping, should I be shooting at 48fps and 96th or daresay 48fps AND 48th shutter just so my my 24 frames a second stuff works better? And does this apply to 120fps too, because I think 240th of a shutter looks really jarring when ramped to 24fps...

Also, if anyone can help, I have one more question: I own a scarlet and obviously prefer 60fps over 48fps for slomo, but will shooting an entire project at 60fps not ramp as well as 48 or 120 just because it's not even divisible by the native 24fps??? I've shot a few things at 48fps and 96th shutter and they've turned out alright, but still seem a little weird to me (not as fluid as television ramping I always see), so I imagine framerates even higher should look weirder but on tv and movies they always seem so perfect...

On that note, isn't there a new setting on the EPIC and Scarlet that allow you to just hit a button while recording and it instantly goes to ramp mode? Does this allow you to shoot at 24fps and 48th shutter and then just instantly go to 48fps 96th shutter? Or does the shutter stay the same? And has anyone had success with this?

Lol, my one question turned into many, sorry guys...

 

[David Battistella]

I wrote about this a while back.

http://library.creativecow.net/battistella_david/Film-Style-Slow-Motion/1

i think you can squeeze 120fps out of 4k. I would not go below 3k if you can avoid it.

red works like film.

Set the TIMEBASE to 23.98 or 24
Set the frame rate in FPS to anything from 24 to 120. When you want 24 shoot 24, when you want high speed switch to high speed. It's not like a dslr, you footage will look messed up.

everything plays back in a 24 frame timeline.
Thus a 24fps shot frame plays at 24 FPS and one second filmed takes 1 second to play back.
a 48fps shot takes two second to play back one second of action
a72fps shot takes three seconds to play back 1 second of action.
96 is 4 seconds
120 is 5 seconds, etc.

with red you are not slowing down frames, you are actually capturing more frames than the human eye can see.

David

 

[Paul Russell]

Posting footage shot at 300fps to 25fps in Premiere didn't look strobed at all when I did it. However, flourescent and LED lighting will strobe at high frame rates.