Slow motion is a great effect to use when trying to spice up a scene. It’s ability to slow down the world and bring focus to things that normally would be missed are really powerful. Slow motion is really popular in anything from music videos, to sports.
Premiere Pro has the toolset to aid you in creating slow motion. This is most easily accomplished using high frame-rate footage. However, Premiere also has a feature that will allow you to slow virtually any piece of footage down and make it look pretty good while doing it. In this tutorial, we are going over how to create smooth slow motion in Premiere.
How to Create Smooth Slow Motion in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2017)
- Create a new sequence, and set the sequence fps at the target frames per second. This means set it to what you want to export it in.
- Drag the footage in to the sequence. We want to KEEP existing settings.
Constant Slow Motion
- Right-click on your footage and go to “Speed/Duration”
- Change the speed to a lower number like 50%. This means it will playback at 50% of the speed. Slowing it by half.
- Your slow motion has been created.
Variable Slow Motion
- Increase the size of the video track on the timeline. (You can do this by dragging the top of the track bigger)
- Right click on the footage
- Go down to Show Clip Keyframes->Time Remapping->Speed. Click on this option.
- The footage will now control the speed.
- Go to the point you want to begin slow motion.
- Click the add keyframe button on the left side of the track. It looks like a diamond with two triangles next to it.
- It will add a double sided keyframe to the footage at that point.
- You can then drag the right side of the keyframe to the right to control the duration of the ramp
- Go down to the line and drag it down to slow the footage down. The percentage will pop up to tell you how much you are slowing it down. You can also drag it up to speed it up.
- You can then add a keyframe later on to bring it back up to 100%. This will create a ramp from fast to slow back to fast again.
- You can control the transition speed by grabbing the lines on the square in the center. This will adjust the smoothness of the transition.
“Stretched” Slow Motion
- If your footage is choppy, then there isn’t enough information for that slow motion. So we need to tell Adobe to fix this.
- Right click on your footage and go down to Time Interpolation->Optical Flow. Click on this. It will create new frames based on the math of the missing frames. This effect does have its limits, but can usually work good from ½ to around ¼ speed.
- Click the enter key to prerender your footage so you can view it in the timeline! This process starts to get RAM intensive. Keep that in mind!