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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.