As I said in yesterday’s article, most people shoot with the Canon 7D at 60fps for a dreamy slow motion effect. The video rate is then slowed to 30fps (or 24fps) while keeping all of the frames intact. I tried this technique with Pinnacle’s Studio HD and found a bug.
Change the Default Project Preferences
When importing different screen sizes and frame rates, you need to change a setting in Studio HD. By default, Studio HD will use the screen dimension and frame rate from the first clip imported into a new project. By changing this setting to Use this format for new projects and selecting 1920×1080/24p, you will always start with this setting for new projects.
With this setting changed, you can import any video clip of any screen size and film rate, and Studio HD will conform it to the project setting. Simple.
Speed Filter for Slow Motion
In Studio HD, you apply the Speed filter to either speed-up or slow-down the video. Really two-sides of the same coin.
Unfortunately, the Speed Filter has a serious bug when handling frame rates above 30fps. As shown in the top screen capture, when the Speed Filter is applied to video with a film rate of 60fps, Studio HD looses track of the clips boundaries. In my case, the playback cursor jumped outside the clip boundaries and could not be reset while the Speed filter was in place.
Work-around for 60fps
If you do need to slow-down video shot with 60fps, you will need to convert it first. In Studio HD, you will need to create a new project just for this process:
1. Create a new project with the setting 1920×1080/24p
2. Import your video with 60fps
3. Drag the video with 60 fps on to the timeline
4. Click the Make Movie tab, and generate your movie at 1920×1080/24p. This will convert your video to 24fps.
5. Import the converted 1920×1080/24p version of the video into your real project.
You can now drag this clip to the timeline and apply the Speed Filter to it. Yes, Studio HD ignores those extra frames. Fortunately, the Speed Filter does a great job converting video at 24 fps or 30fps into slow-motion.
So, if you are planning on using Studio HD, just shoot your video at 1920×1080/24p. You will be happier with the results produced by the extra resolution, slower shutter speed and slower ISO. Take a look at yesterday’s article for more info.
Other articles on Pinnacle’s Studio HD:
Canon 7D / 5D Mark II Tips – HD video editing the easy way
Canon 7D – Tips on Editing HD Video
Thanks For This Post, blog was added to my bookmarks.
THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I worked on this for daaaaayyyyyyyssssssssss to find out this was the problem . i had no idea what it was!!!!!!!
It drove me crazy! Happy to help.
It didn’t work for me, i have the same problem with 1280×720 on 50fps 🙁 filmed with canon 550D, i still can’t get it to work 🙁 the reverse don’t wooork 🙁 omg
Follow the steps in the article. It is a great work around. Otherwise, take a look at Adobe’s Premiere Elements 9 as an inexpensive alternative.
Thank you for this work-around. I’m joining this discussion a little late but came across this thread during a Google search for the speed effect clip error in Pinnacle 15. After spending three weeks corresponding with Avid’s technical support and being passed up to the next tier level trying to come up with a solution, the answer (according to Avid) was that my onboard video does not have 2GB of dedicated memory. ‘Thank you for contacting Avid….case closed’. I’m still not entirely convinced that the video RAM is the root of the problem. I think the hardware explantion is an easy way to close open help tickets.
Overall I’m very pleased with the Pinnacle 15 features and ease of use. I’ve tested this work-around on my 60fps videos and it works well.
It would have been nice for them to fix the bug with the new release. Oh well, glad this still works.