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Lesson Info

Speed Changes: Overview

Okay ready to learn about speed, speed changes, freeze frames, slowing things down, speeding them up, variable speed changes, it's all going to be very exciting stuff and if you noticed I said that really fast. We can slow that down and post later, so yeah we're going to talk about speed changes and this is a really valuable tool when editing because you can change something aesthetically for a creative feel but sometimes you need to just change the duration of a clip. Some of the things we're going to talk about is constant speed changes, making it faster slower, maybe playing it backwards, sometimes you need to play something backwards using something called the rate stretch tool which actually allows you to physically stretch a clip making it faster or shorter to the length that you need, it's really a nice little tool that's accessible. Different ways you can create a still or freeze frame and why you would do it different ways and then we're going to end with variable speed change...

s which is you may want to ramp up the speed or slow something down in the middle of a shot, you don't want it just to be constant or jump to a certain speed, so that's what we're going to work with. Initially we're going to talk about just a general speed change and there's a lot of reasons you might want to do that, as I indicated you might want to do that because of a creative thing sometimes things feel really cool when they're slowed down it's very calming, underwater stuff is great, we're going to look at that, just to slow things down for a feel. Sometimes you want to slow things down to see things more precisely you want to deconstruct motion or the action. If you want to do that, sometimes it's better to go back and shoot it at what's called the high frame rate, so it plays back in slow motion instead of trying to stretch it out. As a matter of fact, some of the footage we'll be working with, in the film days it would be called over cranking the camera instead of running at a 24 frames per second, they would run it at say 96 and you play in back in now everything is one quarter speed. We can do that digitally but if you slow something down that you shot at 24, and you made it 96, what are you going to do, repeat those four frames, so there's a challenge in creating video when you don't have enough. So a lot of the new cameras, even phones these days can record at higher frame rates, 120 frames per second, 240. I keep referring to the iPhone because it has a lot of these technologies, I can record a video at 240 frames a second and when I play it back it's 1/10 speed and I've captured every moment of that and that's going to look clearer and sharper. So that's an ideal environment, we don't always have that luxury, but check your cameras to see if they can record faster than 24 or 30 frames, maybe you can record 60 and playback at 24, it's a little better, so you want as much media as possible. But in the case that you don't have that luxury, you can use a lot of these tools. One of the biggest reasons I often will slow down a clip is maybe I have a chunk of narration that's eight seconds long but I only have a six second clip, so I can slow it down a little bit so that I don't have to worry about finding an additional shot. Sometimes you want to speed it up so you can see the entire action so there's a lot of benefits to that so let's just hop right in and take a look at some of these basic techniques, we're going to work with some of the underwater footage that Mike gave us earlier on because it's pretty and when I looked at this I saw a couple of challenges. So I'm going to go ahead and pick a spot, this is a great little clip. So I'll mark an in point and an out point, there that's a lot of fun he's having a great time there showing off for us, I want to point out I marked an in and an out point the duration of this is 15 seconds long, we learned that in an earlier lesson. So I can go ahead, I drag it in and if I go ahead remember I create a sequence, I could match it, it doesn't matter, I really want to keep my 1920 by 1080 30 frames a second going to keep existing. You can actually by the way if you find this annoying you can uncheck always ask, I leave it on because in case I make a mistake I want it to warn me every time I don't want to get complacent. So I bring it in, play this. And he's just having a grand ole time, I'm going to hit the minus key so we can see this. If I wanted to speed this up, I can right click on it, and there's an area called speed and duration. This is a constant speed change, in other words I'm going to make everything faster or everything slower and when I click on this I'll get a dialog box that asks me specifically what do I want to do and I have a couple ways that I can adjust my speed. I can say you know something I want it to be twice as fast and just type in 200% or I want it to be half as fast, so slow it down 50%. And it's directly locked and linked to the duration of the clip. So you'll see if I sped this up to 200% and I hit Enter, that is going to change, it's actually already changed, see it's 735 and we'll see on the timeline when I hit OK, it's half the duration long. So if I played this he's going to seem quite hyper a little bit like your instructor at points, okay. So you know he's just having more fun and it's faster and I could go ahead and do the same thing. And I want to slow it down, speed and duration and this time instead of 200 I'm going to make it 50%, again you'll see it gets longer in our sequence. We also have a visual representation that it's been slowed down right here. I hit Play. And this is a little more fun you can really enjoy how wickedly cute this guy is. So we have that, that's basic slowing down and speeding up but I want to look at that dialog box just a little bit more to explain some of the things that you can choose to make happen and what also does happen. So we slowed it down to 50%, in the same box if I needed something to play backwards I could click on reverse speed and it just plays the clip backwards, and not only can I change the speed I can also change basically direction back to front front to back. The other option I have is instead of saying change it to say 50% I can say you know what, I need this to be just 10 seconds long, I don't care quite exactly what the speed should be, but if I type in a numerical value and we learned earlier that 10 seconds is 1000 we have again those frames we need to deal with. I hit OK, it calculated specifically how much it had to speed up, 151% to be that duration. So they're directly linked to each other. Now I'm going to go ahead and grab another part of this and it really doesn't matter I just wanted to put it at the end here because let's see what happens if you speed up or slow down a clip and there's other clips after it, I mean this could be a potential challenge. So speeding up not as much of an issue, when I speed something up it's 150% now, we're going to go ahead and take it to 200%, what do you think is going to happen? It's just going to move to the left and leave that space. That's nice there's no risk involved. But what happens if I right click and I'm going to go ahead and choose speed duration and this time I'm going to say make it back to its original speed 100%. Well I can tell Premier what I want it to do. Right now this is unchecked, take a note it says ripple the edit, shift the trailing clips, that is not checked. So this clip is going to want to get longer, I hit OK. And what it did was it made it longer, it's 100% speed but I didn't let it move this clip, so what did it do? It cut off the end, so that's an important thing. If you want to slow something down but you don't want to change everything in your timeline and push it all out of sync, leave it unchecked and it will slow it down but you just loose what's at the far end or do you? Or do you? Because remember we learned back in advanced editing the slip edit, this is a great place where the slip edit comes into play because I slowed it down but maybe I want to see a different part of our little feller, of our little fellow there we go, that's so much better swimming. So I've lost the end but now I can go over and we switch over to the slip and slide, it's the Y key for those remember 'cause I kind of wedged it in so I'm going to actually just switch to that with the Y key. And now I can choose what part I want, so this is really a powerful combination of tools because a lot of times you do want to slow something down but you're like I need to be very careful because everything is timed right but maybe Mike is talking very specifically about this bird and I want to just slow down this chunk so maybe we're going here and I want to slow this down. I could go ahead and razor blade it, okay, so we could use the cut tool C Command K would be the keyboard shortcut remember, so we have a little bird (mumbles) Command K, so what I've done is I've just cut this clip apart and I just want to slow it down here, it's going to be a very abrupt slow down but I want you more than seeing the slow down, see what my choices are with what happens here, so I'm going to once again, make sure I have my selection tool, the V key, hit speed and duration, I want to slow this down to 50%. If I leave this unchecked my timing doesn't get messed up. Unfortunately he'll jump at the very end because we have that missing chunk underneath. So in this case I do want this kind of shift down a little bit, so I click on this and I say let it ripple. And ripple's easy to remember when anything ripples it affects the end of the timeline. The best way to remember this is you throw a rock into a pond, it ripples across the pond to the other side of the lake and you have (mumbles). Whenever you see ripple in the video it means you're going to affect the end of the show or the duration of your show. Let's take a look at another area of the dialog box. And this is important especially when slowing things down. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say speed and duration and this area that we haven't really examined and it's time interpellation, so if you slow something down and I had mentioned at the very beginning of the lesson that what do you do to make extra frames when you slow something down, well there's three ways that Premiere can handle it. One is frame sampling, where literally it duplicates frames to slow it down, it feels slower but it's not as smooth. It's much faster for the computer to calculate so you don't have to worry about rendering longer renders and whatnot. So it's nice, if it looks okay, run with it. If you want it to look a little better you can go to frame blending where literally you're dissolving between those frames to create the new frame that will make it look smoother, doesn't add a lot more challenge to the CPU and the renders don't take much longer, so you can use that always by default but I usually like to step down and say do I need to push it this far. If you need to make it look really smooth, you can switch to something called optical flow and this is something that's in aftereffects and this is kind of a brilliant thing but it's really really time consuming. It literally will create brand new video frames based upon the vector and direction and the pixels where their motion is and create new images, new frames, it's incredibly math intensive, so get ready to go either on vacation for a couple of weeks, though it's usually not that long but it can take hours. But if you really need to slow something down and usually this happens when you slow something down to say 20% speed, 30% speed, when you actually start seeing some artifacts, then you may want to go to optical flow and definitely below 20%. But check it first under the (mumbles) 'cause maybe there's not so much motion that it looks bad and you don't have to spend all that time, but that's a very useful thing, you don't have to worry about that when you're speeding up, 'cause generally when you're speeding up you're removing frames. So that's a good thing, so optical flow will definitely give you a much nicer slow-mo but on the flip side it is very time consuming so you do it and then you change your mind and you modify something and it has to do everything all over again, remember the calculations. So it's a powerful tool. Let's take a quick look at some of the other ways you can speed or slow things down. Let's say I have this hole here and I'm going to mark this area I'm going to hit the X, remember we learned that X marks the spot, mark the end point. So I need to fill something that's two seconds and 50 frames 1423, yeah 250, it's probably 60 frames per second, this media for some reason I made it longer. So I'm going to go ahead grab another piece of media here. Okay we've already used this little fellow, this fish stuff is real pretty, going to mark an in point, mark an out point if we look closely this is nine seconds long, this is roughly two seconds long, what did we learn when we tried to do an overwrite edit with four points? You got a dialog box this is which point do you want to delete right? I don't want to delete any, I'm going to change the clip speed so it perfectly fits into that spot and in this case it's going to speed it up dramatically, so I hit change clip speed, I hit OK. It went to the third level because I was playing with it earlier and I left my video there, no worries, I could simply drag it back down, or I can select it and with the option key if you select a clip and the up and down keys will actually move you up and down layers, nice little trick especially when you make a mistake in front of a large group of eight to 800,000 people. So we look at this, it has sped it up, if I zoom in, you will see it determined exactly the amount it needed to speed it up to put that nine seconds into the two second hole, conversely, you could put two seconds into a ten second hole it's going to slow it down, whatever it needs to so that it fits that space. So that's a nice thing, fit to fill, you don't have to do the math, you don't have to do calculations. Now there might be a similar environment where you're working with a clip and let me go ahead and zoom back out. And here I have this clip and I'm going to delete it and I'm going to look at this clip here which is our little fellow and I want to make this longer and slow it down just so it fills that hole. Well there is another tool that you can get to called the rate stretch tool R being the keyboard shortcut for it. And if I select it, now when I go to the edge my trim tool looks a little bit different, you see it doesn't have those arrows, now when I grab something it's not extending the clip, it's actually taking it and in this case grabbing it and slowing it down. There we go and you can see underneath how long it's stretching it and you'll notice that if I zoom in there should be a time change, conversely I could speed up the clip the same way. So the rate stretch tool, allows me to speed up and slow down to fill a space and it's nice it's very quick just make sure you switch back to your selection tool. So those are your basic stretching, slowing things down, speeding things up, making things in reverse all very nice. But what if I wanted to create say a freeze frame? Which is something that we need to do for a variety of reasons, now I have some really pretty footage that they shot and this was shot actually at a high frame rate, it's a dancer that they were doing some photography on and wanting to catch her at a specific moment, okay and I think I have a couple of different takes here, that's my title (mumbles). So I want to catch this on a leap, real pretty stuff. So I'm going to go ahead I'm going to mark an in point here I'm going to mark an out point here, this was actually shot at a high frame rate so when I bring it in you're going to see that it just overwrite our little animals here, that when I play it, it already is slow and by the way our frame size is a little bigger, so what's our solution? Set to frame size, then you'll have the whole thing. But maybe I actually wanted to just get her. I like that actually, I just want to get her, we can leverage what we learned in the previous and I don't need the photographer as much, there was a close-up. And because this was shot at I'm guessing maybe 96 frames a second 120 frames a second, when I play it back at 24, it's very nice beautiful slow motion. I could go ahead and speed it up 500% and we could see the jump. But right now all I want to do is when she's at the apex I'm going to go back, this is the luxury of being an editor, you go oh no I want to make it smaller, I'm going to go ahead and set it to frame size. When she's at the apex of her leap and I need to reset that, we learned about this in the previous class. I want to actually create a hold frame and so to create a hold frame I go to the exact frame where I want it to freeze, she got big on me again, sneaky. And I right click and you'll see there's an option here to add a frame hold and then there's something called frame hold options. Let's look at frame hold options first, so this is we placed the play head or positioned it exactly where we wanted that freeze to happen and we get this choice to say hold on switch timecode, timecode is something that's recorded onto the media but we really don't want that we just want where the play head is. So when I say frame hold on the play head and I hit OK it does something very specific. It takes the entire duration of the clip and makes that into a freeze frame, based upon where the play head is parked, that could also be an out point. Sometimes you want to do that, I don't necessarily I want to see some of this motion, so I'm going to hit Undo, so now we're leaping again, go to the apex up that's pretty, going to right click and this time instead of going to frame hold options I'm going to say add a frame hold. Now it did something different. In this case, you can kind of see how it changes color? She jumps and she freezes at that point up until the end of the clip. So you'll notice if I zoom back all the way, that we have the leap and the freeze, which is nice, maybe that's what you want to do, it's going to last whatever duration that the original clip way, again you can trim this anyway you want if you need it longer or shorter. Let's go ahead and undo that and look at some of the other options again at the apex, right click and this time we're going to choose a third option and that is insert a frame hold segment and this is actually a very cool thing to do, when you do a frame hold segment, what it did was it froze that one frame and then it picks up right afterwards and I can make this longer or shorter, remember we have the trimming tool, so you can jump up and then make this as long as you want, you know one way I like to use this technique, I'll do sometimes a title sequence, we talked a little bit of title frequences with some questions and what I do is I'll freeze the action bring the title on, loose the title and then continue the action. It's kind of a cool way to draw attention to your titles and it's very easy to do with the whole frames.