I used Adobe Premiere 6 before moving to Studio 12, and the one feature I miss the most is a flexible adjustment of clip speed. I frequently film home improvement projects, sunsets, and other slow moving scenes that are much more enjoyable to watch sped up.

The "Speed" tool in Studio is limited to 5 times normal speed, and I often have to speed up clips dozens or hundreds of times. For example, I may want to reduce an hour long sunset down to a 1 minute time lapse.

There are also many times when I want to adjust the playback speed to match an audio clip. For instance, I may have 40 minute clip of a car driving that I want to speed up to match the length of a 3 minute song.

Also, the "Speed" tool in Studio seems to blur frames together. I'd rather see more of a time lapse approach, for example keep one frame out of "x" frames (selecting or dropping frames as needed to achieve the desired final length of the selected clip).

Thanks,

 Anthony

I takes a couple of steps, but you can accomplish this with Studio. Let's say you have an hour-long video.

1. In the video album, right-click the thumbnail for the 1-hour video and select Subdivide Scenes. Enter 2 seconds for the length of clips.
   
   
2. Drag the newly created scenes to the timeline. This might appear to lock up your computer, but be patient. You might want to drag the scenes to the timeline a few album pages at a time. It's a lot of clips!
   
   
3. Once all the clips are on the timeline, press CTRL+A to select all.
   
   
4. Open the clip editor panel by clicking the camera icon at the upper left corner of the timeline, and set the duration to 1 frame. Again, this might take a while to process.
   

This will result in reducing the 1-hour video to 1 minute. Because of the large number of short clips, it probably won't preview well, if at all. But if you render it to file. I should play fine.

 You can enter a higher or lower number for the length of clips in step 1 to achieve different speeds of time-lapse effect.

Good luck!

B

I think Bob has offered you some good workarounds there, but I do think this is something that Pinnacle could also consider as a Plus effect - Advanced Speed?

I'd like to see a greater range. I'd also like to see the Advanced Speed effect made keyframeable, with acceleration and deceleration rather than a simple change of speed.

My reasoning is that apparently Liquid has an advanced Timewarp filter. It will allow you to choose how frames, or even fields, are blended when adding the effect.

So, with Liquid nearly dead, it's certainly some code that could be added to Studio

I know this thread is old but... when you say to "set the duration to 1 frame" I am in need of help. The clip editor is in seconds and 10th of seconds. Do you just do the math and set the time that way or is there a way to set the clips duration to 1 frame?

 

thanks

mmillerpsyd:

I know this thread is old but... when you say to "set the duration to 1 frame" I am in need of help. The clip editor is in seconds and 10th of seconds. Do you just do the math and set the time that way or is there a way to set the clips duration to 1 frame?

It should be in 30ths of a second (00 -> 29).  North American video runs at 30 frames per second.  The display just looks like thenths or hundretths.

Are you seeing something different?

I think I am but... the duration indicator shows 0:00:02.00. When I play back the clip it is indeed 2 seconds long. See my problem? What do I set the counter at for this effect? When I follow the directions and set the counter for 0:00:00.26 (don't ask) how did I change the clip, in frames per second?

What do I set the counter at for this effect?

0:00:00:01

 The counter is set in hours:minutes:seconds:frames.  

I'm not playing dumb, I am. So the same counter has seconds on it and then fps? so the :00.01 is the only way you can set frames per second. So what if I set the counter at 0:00:02.01? What would that translate as. I am having trouble with one counter keeping count of two different standards of measure. ...I think. Is this an old discussion for you guys?

I am having trouble with one counter keeping count of two different standards of measure

Like Pounds and Ounces? There are 14 16 ounces in a pound. There are 30 (29.97 actually) NTSC frames in a second.

I think you might be trying to use the counter for something else. Wherever in Studio you are setting a frame rate, then you just enter the number of frames. Where you are setting a duration, then you do so in Hours/Minutes/Seconds/Frames.

14 ounces in a pound huh? Are you sure you wanna go with that? A pound is a Unit of Mass as are 16 ounces in a pound. Hours, minutes, and seconds are units of time. Frames are an artificial unit when applied to videotape but even applied to film it is not a unit of time. Rather the frames per second are a function of time. So are many, many things. In fact anything that changes is a function of time.

In other words, I lost you with 14 ounces in a pound.

Well, there are 12 Troy ounces in a Troy pound...

 

I understand why this might be confusing you.  You're brain has been too well trained.  You have to let go of what you know and accept something new.  The duration counter is a MIXED UNITS counter.

Consider a literal piece of film.  I one second, 30 frames have gone through the project.  One-thirtieth of a second is an odd unit.  It doesn't align with tenths, nor with hundredths.

Any time you are talking sub-second amounts of time, we count frames.

The period is not actually a decimal point.  It is just a delimiter between seconds and frames.

 

01:02:03.04    --   One hour... two minutes...  three seconds... and 4 frames

(4 frames is 4/30 of a second...  or 0.13333 seconds, not exactly a round number, which is why we count frames, nice simple integers)

 

 

Bonus points:

Remember that 00-29 is 30 frames.  Just like we have 60 seconds, but your digital clock only displays 59, never 60.  "00" is the first one.

 

There are 14 ounces in a pound

  I once knew a greengrocer who counted like Jeff. 

BTW, in PAL land, there are 14 lbs. in a stone.    I'm not sure what the NTSC equivalent is.

And Dennis, thank you for pointing out that the separator is a period, not a colon.  I've never noticed that before.  Perhaps if I had better eyesight, I would have been confused too.  

Sorry about the typo confusing things even more

BTW, in PAL land, there are 14 lbs. in a stone. 

Yes, that's where my mind was heading....

I still don't see how they are mixed units. If you define your system units as NTSC video time, then there are 29.97 frames in a second. Of course a frame of film can last any duration your wasn't, if you set the frame rate to something non-standard on the telecine/projector or the camera, but that's not how the Pinnacle speed plug-in works. If you have defined your project as NTSC, then playback is fixed to 29.97 frames per second, and the standard Speed effect allows a variation of 10% to 500%. The latter part of this thread describes a workround to lower the 10% to someting much lower, achieving the appearence of a timelapse at a lower percentage.

And all this apparent confusion from a land that defines a date in the form Second most significant digit/ Third most significant/First most significant. What is that all about?

Got it. Thanks

>>And all this apparent confusion from a land that defines a date in the form Second most significant digit/ Third most significant/First most significant. What is that all about?

 We're just a confused bunch of children waiting for maturity...

 

>>The latter part of this thread describes a workround to lower the 10% to someting much lower, achieving the appearence of a timelapse at a lower percentage.

Is latter before or after in PAL land?

 Again I ask, humbly.

>>So what if I set the counter at 0:00:02.01? What would that translate as.

mmillerpsyd:

 Again I ask, humbly.

>>So what if I set the counter at 0:00:02.01? What would that translate as.

 

Two seconds and 1 frame.

Wow! Genius!  Thank you so much! 

I started playing around with this technique and got good results using the suggested 2 second scene length with 1 frame duration. I continued testing to see what speeds I could achieve using this technique. Here's what I found...