99 fps, still?

[scott8933]

General question to Adobe's AE developers - will the 99fps limitation ever be increased?

High framerate footage isn't so exotic any more.

[Mike_Abbott]

Where do you need 100fps+ playback?

[scott8933]

I have footage that needs to be interpreted at 120fps.

[Mike_Abbott · Accepted solution]

I'm genuinely curious - what's the application?

I'm 100% certain you won't get an official answer here - your best bet is to fill in the form and state your case...

http://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

[scott8933]

Ah, I didn't realize there was an official way to request stuff - makes sense I guess. Thank you.

Re. the usage - my specific case is messy and convoluted, basically amounts to some 60fps footage that needed to be timewarped to 120 and used that way.

It just seems a little non-pro that the official unofficial policy is still "bring it in at a two digit FPS, then manipulate it via timestretch to get it back to the FPS it really is."

I understand that a two digit fps is probably deeply baked into the application, otherwise we probably would have seen it fixed years ago. But these days I can get 120 or 240fps footage out of anything from an Alexa to my smartphone - its a little nuts to have to do crazy workarounds for that.

[Mike_Abbott]

scott8933  wrote

I understand that a two digit fps is probably deeply baked into the application, otherwise we probably would have seen it fixed years ago. But these days I can get 120 or 240fps footage out of anything from an Alexa to my smartphone...

I think you pretty much nailed it ; )

[Rick Gerard]

I think that there is a little lack of understanding going on here, and nobody is looking at CC 2017

Check the composition settings in the project panel:

Check the interpretation Interpretation of this MP4 file:

New frame rate limit and max comp frame rate is 999 fps. Even the default frame rates go up to 120fps.

The only reason I can think of for having to interpret footage shot with a high speed camera at its original frame rate is so you can drop it in a composition with any frame rate and have the footage play back in real time. Shoot at 900 fps and interpret at 900 fps and drop the footage in a 24 fps comp and one second of in the comp is one second in real time.

This statement confuses me:

Re. the usage - my specific case is messy and convoluted, basically amounts to some 60fps footage that needed to be timewarped to 120 and used that way.

60 fps footage plays back one second of real time in one second if played back at 60 fps or dropped in a 24 fps comp, rendered and played back at 24 fps. 60 fps footage in a 10fps comp or a 999fps comp still plays back in real time. It is only when you change the interpretation of the footage or time stretch or time remap that playback is not real time.

What does 60 fps footage time warped to 120 fps mean? Do you want one second of real time to play back in 1/2 second. If that is what you want then change the interpretation to 120 fps and drop it in a comp of any frame rate. If you want one second of real time to take 2 seconds to play back and give you some slow motion then interpret the footage as 30 fps and drop it in any comp of any frame rate or use time stretch or time remapping to change the speed.

Just for fun I'll review a project I did a long time ago for Boeing. We destroyed an aircraft part and filmed the event at 20,000 fps. The original project was done entirely on film. The goal was to give us a close look at how the part fails. The engineers wanted to stretch 1 second of real time into about 20 seconds. The projector they were using had the ability to playback at any frame rate but the standard was 24 fps. It was called an Analysis Projector and was typically used by football coaches to review game footage. (Yes, I am an antique)

The project was real easy. at 20,000 fps one second was 20,000 frames so if we played back every frame at 24 fps one second of real time would take about 14 minutes to playback. 20,000/24/60

For 1 second of real time we needed 480 frames so you just divide 20,000 by 480 and we told the lab to step print every 41st frame.

You can do the same thing in AE using frame rate interpretation. You just do the math. I could have done the project in AE even with the 99 fps frame limit. Interpret the footage at any frame, say 29.97 fps. Now create a new comp from that footage that is also 29.97 fps and at least 20,000 frames long by making sure that the timeline is set to frames. Slide the footage around so you can pick your in and out points for slow motion footage. Pre-compose the footage so Time Remapping will give you a zero for the first frame and 20,000 for the last.

Now enable time remapping, change the comp back to time, move the CTI to 20 seconds, change the comp back to frames and create a new keyframe with a value of 20,000 or just drag the last time remapping keyframe to the CTI. You have now taken 20,000 fps footage and slowed it down so that one second in real time takes exactly 20 seconds to playback. The frame rate of the comp makes no difference. If you used 10fps or 100, the result would be the same. The only difference would be the frame blending you got while AE was trying to interpolate the frames that don't precisely line up with the frame rate. 

The only time that Comp frame rates make a difference is when you want to change the motion artifacts between frames. There are very few devices that will actually playback 60fps footage and almost no-one broadcasts HFR video all the time. Video is not gaming and HFR just isn't working like most folks think it is.

I hope this helps somebody. I have found in my 40+ years of shooting and teaching film and video that most folks do not really understand frame rates,  how frame rates relate to time, interlacing and the relationship between frame rates and the perception of motion.

[scott8933]

Interesting - my CC17 won't let me put in anything higher than 99 in New Comp, and no presets go higher than 60fps. This is version 14.1.0.57.

Is there a preference I need to set?

Re. usage of 120 in a 60 comp - I really don't want to have to sit down with a calculator more than i need to - yes I know its all easily figured out, but this particular comp is a little hairy with some nested timewarps. Its a hackey fix, but would be the quickest from point A to point B in this case. I mean, its 2017 and these apps are -really- mature at this point. I feel like "calculate frame rates on your own" is something we left behind many years ago.

Apparently its been addressed though, possibly something is wrong with my installation.

[Jose Panadero]

You need CC2017 version 14.2 (the June 2017 update) for access to more than 99fps in your composition. It is one of the new features in this version.

[Rick Gerard]

You are behind - Check Creative Cloud

At least 4 versions of CC 2017.

Latest build is

I still don't know if you are trying to speed up real time or slow it down.

If the footage was originally 60 and you want to interpret at 120 then you have slowed down the speed by 50%. You'll get precisely 2 frames for 1 playing back in a 60 fps comp. If you don't turn on frame blending you'll get every other frame. If you do turn on frame blending you will get one of two interpretation methods that blends the two frames into one creating an entirely new image.

You'll get the same thing using time remapping or just speed controls by setting the value to 200%. No need to re interpret at all. If you are time warping things all over the place then it still doesn't matter at all what the interpretation is unless you are concerned with accurately changing the time - this shot is playing at exactly 50%. For most projects it is usually better to interpret footage at the frame rate it was actually shot at so you have some reference to real time. This is critical if there is audio in the video.

If you are increasing or decreasing speed at different rates and at different times then worrying about intra frame interpretation is pretty much a matter of checking a couple of frames at full screen and full resolution to see how the motion looks, then playing with the frame blending modes or 3rd party apps like Twixtor. All the interpreting footage and calculations are not necessary.

Changing interpretation does not chance the number of frames, it only changes the time it takes to playback the clip. Matching frame rate to the comp frame rate is only important if you want to avoid any interpolated frames. The only way to maintain audio sync is to make sure the footage is interpreted at the frame rate used to shoot the original footage.

[scott8933]

Nice, glad to know its been fixed with a newer version.

Thanks!

[A.I.1]

There are very few devices that will actually playback 60fps footage and almost no-one broadcasts HFR video all the time

Can't all PCs play it back? And modern TVs? I assume all US set top boxes can play it back (if only in 720p). I assume the US sports channels that output in 720p will normally show the whole games at 60 fps. Blu-ray players can play back 60 fps (720p). UHD Blu-ray players can all play back 60 fps UHD 2160p (eg. the Billy Lynn Halftime Walk film). But 60 fps will be outdated when ATSC3 and the new DVB broadcasting standards allow 120 and 100 fps broadcasts.

[scott8933]

A.I.1  wrote

There are very few devices that will actually playback 60fps footage and almost no-one broadcasts HFR video all the time

Can't all PCs play it back? And modern TVs? I assume all US set top boxes can play it back (if only in 720p). I assume the US sports channels that output in 720p will normally show the whole games at 60 fps. Blu-ray players can play back 60 fps (720p). UHD Blu-ray players can all play back 60 fps UHD 2160p (eg. the Billy Lynn Halftime Walk film). But 60 fps will be outdated when ATSC3 and the new DVB broadcasting standards allow 120 and 100 fps broadcasts.

I would add to that, not everyone using AE is working in broadcast.

[A.I.1]

Why does the newest AE limit compositions and "interpret footage" to 999 fps?

Shouldn't AE set the limit of both of those as high as any camera is capable of? Some cameras shoot higher than 999 fps (eg. Sony RX10 M2 can shoot 1000 fps).

Also, in "interpret footage" shouldn't it also let you tell it what shutter it was shot with (unless this can get captured somehow) and also let you output with a particular simulated shutter (like capturing at 120 fps open shutter (1/120th) and outputting with a simulated shutter eg. with the output at 24 fps by frame blending (where you choose the simulated shutter - ie. the shutter setting in the composition isn't used for that)?

[scott8933]

Agreed - seems odd to limit a setting arbitrarily.

[Mylenium]

Why does the newest AE limit compositions and "interpret footage" to 999 fps?

It's still math, you know, in strict programmer's terms. Things have to start somewhere and temporal sampling calculations are generally complicated.

Shouldn't AE set the limit of both of those as high as any camera is capable of?

Not really. What would you do with 25000 FPS footage or something like that on a 60 Hz screen? All of these things only bear limited relevance for a million practical reasons. Beyond a certain framerate it's simply impossible to actually see each frame and there is no requirement to have such stuff play at native framerates. I totally get that 120 FPS footage is becoming more common, but beyond that I don't think anyone will go out of their way to take framerates even higher, safe for specific slo-mo tasks. It simply becomes impractical. Cameras have to be even faster, you need tons of storage, graphics cards have to be beefier to even guarantee displaying all frames and so on. It's an arms race that nobody can win and it only wastes resources without yielding any advantages as far as the visual experience for the consumer is concerned. I think it's safe to say that as far as the last point is concerned we have reached a ceiling where we all can be happy to not suffer from flickery footage and shutter artifacts even in VR, but beyond that there would be no further gains.

Also, in "interpret footage" shouldn't it also let you tell it what shutter it was shot with (unless this can get captured somehow) and also let you output with a particular simulated shutter (like capturing at 120 fps open shutter (1/120th) and outputting with a simulated shutter eg. with the output at 24 fps by frame blending (where you choose the simulated shutter - ie. the shutter setting in the composition isn't used for that)?

How would that make any sense? As you already wrote yourself, frame blending is a processing operation and that's what you do in the comp itself using time-stretch or timewarp effects. There literally would be no benefit at all to introduce this as a pre-processing option in some settings dialog. it only would make things more confusing and convoluted with extra settings panels and redundant options. Even in a HFR workflow you would still render out intermediates and be done with it.

Mylenium

[A.I.1]

How would that make any sense? As you already wrote yourself, frame blending is a processing operation and that's what you do in the comp itself using time-stretch or timewarp effects. There literally would be no benefit at all to introduce this as a pre-processing option in some settings dialog.

It would make things simpler if you wanted the output to simulate a particular shutter. eg. frame blending is an all or nothing option - do you want to blend frames or not - it doesn't let you specify how many frames from the source you want to blend for each output frame.  eg. if you shot 120 fps (with "open shutter" ie. 1/120th shutter) and wanted an output of 24 fps with a simulated 144 degree shutter (in film terms) it could be done with blending 2 frames from the source together, or for more motion blur you could blend 3 frames from the source together. eg. the post production on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk could enter what virtual shutter they wanted (I believe).

[A.I.1]

Why does the newest AE limit compositions and "interpret footage" to 999 fps?

It's still math, you know, in strict programmer's terms. Things have to start somewhere and temporal sampling calculations are generally complicated.

I didn't say the final output video that would be shown to the viewer would be higher than 999 fps. But that both the compositions and the "interpret footage" could allow it more than that, so that cameras that should higher could be accommodated more easily.

But it's not really much more complicated for the programmers. If the code already supports up to 999.0 fps, I don't see why any programming calculations would be made any/much more difficult. A) The 999.0 isn't a special number (like in binary) in computing. Any calculations might only involve adding an additional zero to some figure or something. Perhaps a constant/constants in the program could be changed (too?).

Basically allowing the above (including for "interpret footage" to be set to the value of the actual camera shot frame rate) should let the user have the ability to use, more easily and with greater accuracy those frame rates in their projects, even though the final output when shown to a viewer is no more than 120 fps or so.

[A.I.1]

frame blending is a processing operation and that's what you do in the comp itself using time-stretch or timewarp effects

Thanks. I actually didn't see the new settings in Timewarp etc. It may be that will do most of what I was thinking regarding the frame blending thing.

[scott8933]

A few points to make regarding this, then-

The final stop for a comp will be a screen, but along the way there might be several intermediate comps doing all kinds of strange things. Maybe one of them needs to be at 2500 fps for some reason. I don't get why a limit would be 99 or 999, that doesn't make any sense, I'd think it would actually be slightly more code to limit that field to those weird numbers instead of a 32-bit float number.

Case in point, the title shot for Limitless used a camera with a zoom value that ended up with some exponentially high number. Why would anyone need insanely high numbers for something? Obvoiusly strange cases come up and sometimes strange solutions are the only way to get a shot done.

Last point - interpreting footage at a framerate it's not, this is unacceptable practice that now has to break because of a workaround. If I see a project with incorrect interpretation my immediate assumption is that the artist is either sloppy or incompetent and everything will now need to be double checked. 

But at least this has been fixed now, sort of, which is pretty good news.