Optical Flow Retiming Question

I have a quesdtion about retiming clips in FCPx. I have a mov imported from my DSLR (H264). I reverse and slow down the clip. All is good so far. But when I switch the retiming to Optical Flow, it only shows the first frame of the clip (the first frame of the imported clip, even if that section is not in the storyline). Optical Flow does work if the clip isn't reversed. Does Optical flow only work on clips going forward? I can always render an intermediate clip, but hoped it could be done within a single project.

To the bug report? No, I don't think you ever get replies to bug reports sent to Apple. You just have to wait for the next release and hope.

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Optical Flow Retiming from FCP question

Hi, I was reading a tutorial about optical flow retiming and it said to slow the clip down in FCP first then send to Motion and apply optical flow retiming.
But I did two tests, one was the above and the other was to send the clip to Motion with no retiming and to slow the clip down once in Motion, then apply the optical flow retiming then save as a Quicktime movie.
The results looks noticeably smoother slowing the clip down inside Motion then slowing it down in FCP then sending it to Motion.
Is this the best way to do it?
Thanks!
FCS3 latest updates.

Patrick Sheffield wrote:
If you slow it down in FCP, then send it to Motion, you need to alter the retiming method to be optical flow once you're in Motion. Also unless you've set (via ⌘0) the sequence to render Motion projects at "Best", FCP won't use the optical flow when rendering the Motion file.
In other words, it is exactly the same, provided you ensure the slow down is rendered in FCP using Motion's optical flow retiming... (see above).
Personally, I slow it down first in FCP as that allows me to adjust the timing, duration, etc... then I send it to Motion for optical flow processing...
Patrick

Optical flow retiming - HDV, ProRes, or AIC?

Which format would yield the quickest result for optical flow retiming of footage shot in 1080i HDV? HDV, ProRes, or Apple Intermediate Codec?

not HDV .... use ProRes or AIC. For what its worth, AIC has the lower data-rate so may offer the best performance. Run a couple of quick tests on a 10" clip rendered out to each of the 2 formats and post back with your results

Optical flow retime not working

i am using a backup library and event for a project and now the projects retimes with optical flow with 24p photage are really stuttery, they where not this way in the original project ... any idea why? Ive tried different thinks but i am still getting the same results.

This problem has also crippled my normal workflow for the past few months, but thankfully I think it's been fixed. I ran the latest OSX software update 3 or 4 days ago (I think it's at 10.8.2 now), but was relulcant to check if optical flow was fixed because the notes about the update mentioned nothing about it. Yesterday, however, I dared to try using Optical flow on a clip just to humour myself, but it worked! Try running Software Update and see if that works for you.
I'm still a little upset though that thoughout the past few months where FCPX users on Mountain Lion complained about this problem, Apple never said a word about acknowledging the issue, that a fix was on the way, or announced that the issue was fixed. I for one sent about 5 feedback bug reports every 2 weeks about the problem and never received a single response.

Optical Flow glitch

I'm having a weird problem with optical flow retiming. I've got a bunch of h.264 videos that I'm editing in FCPX and have transcoded to optimised media (ProRes). I'm using optical flow to do ramped retiming - it looks mostly good but every now and again (about once a second) there's a video frame that looks out of sequence resulting in a very distracting jitter.
The h.264 files are 59.98fps and the project is set to 29.97fps.
I could export the video retimed then cut out the rogue frames to work around the problem but that sounds pretty tedious.
Has anyone else come across this problem and if so was there a solution?
Thanks in advance..

I'm having the same problem, although I'm using h264 footage unconverted.
It's like every few frames, a frame appears that takes a step back in the action - the resulting movement is very jittery. I haven't yet found a solution. I'm worried the optical flow in FCPX just doesn't handle some footage correctly. My footage is 10 ft behind a person jogging, both the camera and subject are moving forward.
Hopefully someone knows of a workaround.

Optical Flow-Motion or not?

Hi everone, Just a quick question, if i want to slow down a clip in FCP X do i need motion to use optical flow? I can see it in my menues but its always greyed out? If i need to install motion then thats fine, but just want to make sure im not doing something daft in FCP X.
Thanks in advance!
Greg.

You don't need motion to use optical flow. Select the clip you want to slow down. Then from the menu bar choose modify>retime>slow and the amount. You can also use the retime button on the tool bar. Once you have selected a slowdown percentage the optical flow choice will be available under video quality.

Can't get Optical Flow to render

I've read a couple of posts about other people having this problem, but they don't seem to apply as I can't find a workaround. I'm running FC 10.0.8.
If I render my timeline (about 15 minutes), the entire timeline renders, except for about five seconds that are in slow motion. The orange bar remains above that section even after the entire timeline is rendered.
After reading the other posts, I know the following might be relevant: I'm editing optimized AVCHD footage. There is no speed ramp. It's just a clip at slowed to 50%. The clip is completely separate (it's not just a selected range--in another post, somebody said just selecting a range was their problem).
I also tried creating a new project, bringing in a short clip (and nothing else), slowing it to 25%, and rendering all. The percentage display counted up to 100% like the clip was being rendered, but, at the end, the timeline still showed orange above the retimed clip.
I should say that I don't know if the clips are actually rendered properly in Optical Flow. I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference. All I know is that the timeline is still showing orange above them, so I'm presuming they aren't.

Russ--
Funny thing. I decided to test this by taking the same very brief clip and putting it into a timeline three times in a row. Then I made each slow motion 25%. Then I left the first normal, made the second frame blending, and the third optical flow. Then I exported the master file.
I guess I can see a difference, but the optical flow section actually looks kind of blurry to me.
Then I went back to the timeline and chose Modify> Render All. And FCX rendered the entire timeline, with no orange above any portion (not even the Optical Flow portion).
So I don't know what to think now. I don't know what the problem was, or if optical flow is any better than normal or frame blending. Maybe I need to try it with some different footage?

What is it best to feed Motion for good slow motion with optical flow?

What I mean is: what type of footage does the retiming work with best? I shot some footage in 1920x1080p using a shutter speed of 1/1000 under the assuption that having each frame as sharp as possible (little to no motion blur) would improve the vector analysis of optical flow. Unfortunately, the resulting slowdown isn't very smooth. (50% slowdown is decent but not great and anything slower looks choppy). I don't know if this was due to the shutter speed and progressive frames or simply the nature of the material (A swimmer doing the butterfly stroke, i.e a lot of splashing water) My first test for opticalflow retiming was 1920x1080i at 1/60 shutter (pouring water in a glass). Results were a bit blurry but a lot smoother. Any tips? (interlaced or progressive? slow or fast shutter?) Thanks.

http://panasonic.co.jp/pavc/global/videocamera/hd/global/products/hdc-sd9/
Thanks for tip David. I work at a middle school, we shoot a lot of district functions with three cameras then use the multiclip function of FCP. If I bought three of these cameras do you think they will work well in that environment? here is our workflow:
1. Sync cameras with a clapper at the start of show.
2. Import into FCP
3. Mark inpoint at the sound of the clapper
4. Create the multiclip sequence and edit
We have done 50 or so shows like this with 14 year olds as the editors and the results are very nice. I would like to move to the hard drive based camera. Being in education we are on a tight budget. Think three of these camerass would work in this environment?
Thanks so much for your expert advice.

Optical Flow in 10.0.6

Optical flow will not render when using speed ramp or Hold Frame. The orange render line never moves and the dashboard timer doesn't indicate any activity. A normal speedup or slowdown seems to be fine. Anyone seen this?

Kind of interesting result. For adding slomo to clips that had no retiming optical works fine in 10.0.7. But for clips previously retimed using normal, optical doesn't seem to work when you try to change from normal to optical flow.

No optical flow going from FCPX to Compressor

Using Compressor 4.1.3 and FCPX 10.1.4. When I export a project from FCPX to Compressor, and the project has some clips with Optical Flow, Compressor does not render those clips using Optical Flow. Using "Apple Devices HD (Best Quality)" setting.
I searched for similar questions, both here and in the FCPX forum, and didn't find any similar questions, which leads me to believe that either I don't know how to search properly, or I must be missing something obvious.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Your experience matches what others have reported. Alternatively you could export a master file and bring that into Compressor to apply your settings. In other words, skip the Send to Compressor workflow altogether. Or export directly with ATV settings from FCP X
Russ

Exporting variable speed slo mo to Motion for optical flow, how?

Greetings,
I have FCP 7 and Motion 4. I am new to using Motion. I want to either export a variable speed clip from FCP to Motion and add the optical flow feature, or build a variable speed change in Motion, but I can't figure out how to do either!
The 20 second clip is in reverse-slow-mo, and progressively gets slower (from -38% to -4%) as set in FCP using keyframes. When I "send" the clip & it opens in Motion, the in-out points aren't recognized, (the whole unedited clip shows up) and when I set the timing to "variable" in the inspector, (under "timing", for time remap) the clip disappears in the timeline altogether.
I've also tried to create a QT of the clip as 100% but in reverse (just to have less to build in Motion) but I cannot figure out how on earth to use the graph in Motion (under time remap, variable speed) to create a variable speed change to progressively slow down. This is the key issue for me-- how to create variable speed change in Motion??
I tried one other thing in Motion, the "add behavior", and added "Speed Change", couldn't figure out this method either-- how to make clip progressively slow down, and also how to apply the optical flow to that speed change (seems optical flow only works with time remap method?) Any help would be greatly appreciate.
AKJ

Although it does occur, the media isn't ALWAYS mangled... did you try workflow 1 above?
As far as I can tell from your description, baking the speed change in before sending to Motion is not going to work as the clip will already be retimed.
I agree, changing versions mid project is a bad idea. When faced with this recently, I bought a $50 500gb hard drive, installed Leopard and the new version of Final Cut Studio onto it, booted into that drive, opened up a COPY of my project in the FCP7 and did what I needed.
I found no issues, so just continued in FCP7. However, if I did find issues, I would have done only what I needed the new version for, then rebooted back into the drive with FCP6, opened my original project, then imported the results.
Patrick

Optical Flow in Shake

Who might have some experience using Optical Flow in Shake? I am retiming a shot that is a pan of a brick wall. I am getting some major visual artifacts in my renders. The bricks tend to stick or blur at the edges of the frame. I am currently rendering out a shot with all the "best" settings.
My retime mode is "Adaptive"
Motion is "Best"
Deinterlace is set to "Fast"
AlwaysInterpret is "On"
BackwardFlow is "On"
Flow Smoothness is at "100"
Flow Precision is at "50"
After this one I am going to try turning off AlwaysInterpret and see what my results are. Does anyone have experience with other software? Does Twixtor do a decent job? How about Optical Flow in After Effects?
Any advice on mixing different settings? The Optical Flow algorithms seem to be unable to handle repeating patterns well.
Any advice is appreciated.
Eugene

Hi there,
I had the same problem and fixed it by changing the retimemode to Nearest.
Ziggx

Optical Flow & SmoothCam together?

I've applied the Smooth Cam filter to some clips in FCP and I'm sending these clips out of FCP to Motion to apply an Optical Flow speed change but when they come back I've lost my Smooth Cam filter on them and can't apply a new one since they come back from Motion as .motn project files.
Do I have to slow them in Motion and export them as a movie and bring that into FCP and then add the Smooth Cam filter again? Is there something I'm doing wrong?

the way I've heard it, optical flow is the same engine at use in both Motion's retiming and FCP's smoothing operations. Seems you'd only need one analysis pass to accomplish both tasks but I can't find anything on Apple's site that suggests that is so.
See page III-467 for how to export the rendered clips out of FCP. Once you have stabilized the shot, you can apply retiming to the newly created media file but it doesn't look like you can do both without rendering at least one first.
Hope you hear from a Motion wonk soon.
bogiesan

Hi, I'm doing a poor man's morph project on my motion 4 . It works perfect while on motion , but when I try to import it to tcp it will transfer the photos but not the optical flow fx. what am I doing wrong?

Hi I don't know if I was able to send this question before but here it goes again. I'am doing a poor man's morph project on my motion 4 program, and it works great while in Motion, but once I try to import it to fcp, it will import the photos but not the optical flow fx, what am I doing wrong? I appreciate you help

Decided to use cmd A to select all the icons on the desktop and then looked for a right click option. There it was - the option to move to a folder. I now have them all in this folder which tells me it holds 157 items. Now you know why I needed to know LOL
Thought it might be of help to someone.
Cheers Mally

Apply optical flow to like 50 clips (batch filter)????

Is that possible? Maybe I should have posted this in motion, but i just dont know. I have like 50 clips that I want to slow down, is there a way to add like a batch filter for optical flow to slow them all down at once or do i have to do them one by one in motion or something?

From here:
"Flexible retiming controls in Compressor let you speed up, slow down, or fit your video to a time duration."
Adjust "retiming" to suit. Build a Compressor droplet.

Optical Flow Retiming Question

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