As an already very content user of Video Editor, I'd love to see the possibility of changing framerate. That is, speed up or slow down the video.

Basically I want to be able to select a target speed (like 2x or .5x) and a speed transition duration.

A physical example:
take one continues shot

determine that from point A (4 seconds in) you want the video speed to drop to .5x for an original duration of 5 sec
you add a transition duration of 1 sec to the beginning and 1 sec to the end
an x sec shot with a frame rate of 30fps will then run at that rate from 0 - 3 sec
from 3-4 sec the frame rate will drop from 30fps to 15fps, followed by 10sec of 15fps video,
after which video speeds up again in the space of 1 sec to 30fps.

This is just an example. It's a bit of cross between changing speed and effect introduction, where you can introduce a transfer period (markers).

If more comment or info is required ...

To: michael24


Thank you for the suggestion.

As far as I can see the main idea is that speed should changes gradually during transition time.... Am I right?

By the way, it would be great if you show example video with such effect.

Regards.

To: Vlad
Hi Vlad, that is correct. Change should be gradual as opposed to sudden.

As for an example, I don't think I have one on hand. But the idea I had was a shot of a baseball player taking a swing at a ball. Every thing is normal speed, until he is about to hit the ball. Speed gradually slows down during the swing of the bat, until he is about to hit the ball, when speed has dropped to 0.2. Then just after he has hit the ball, the speed gradually returns to normal.

[URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEW_ULEizb0]This link has a few examples at the start[/URL]. I have to admit that the speed changes in this example look sudden, but that's as close as I can find.

I wouldn't mind that much if the gradual change was impossible. I'd settle for speed change from one instant to the next within a continuous shot. But I'd figure I ought to go for the full monty.

Thanks for any and all efforts

Michael

To: michael24

Michael,

Thanks for the full explanation. I see what you mean. I will forward your suggestion to our developers so that they could consider adding such effect to the next version of the software.

Regards.

I came to this forum specifically to find out if this kind of effect was available because I am desperate to have this feature as well.

I'd also like to have the freeze frame equivalent of this feature, in other words the video plays normally, but at a user specified point instead of just slowing down it stops altogether on a particular frame (for a user specified amount of time) before playing again.

This allows the user to get to clearly see something that may only happen for a very short time in a fast moving video.

To: Quisquose

Freeze Frame option is avaliable in AVS Video Editor. Here you can find the details about it.

It is also possible to change speed of video playvack, but not gradually.

Regards.

As a work around, could you just split the clip up into segments, and individually set the speeds of the segments? Probably need to zoom in a LOT to do this properly, but left click and dragging the timeline scale.

For example, if you have an action that takes 4 seconds, you could spilt the clip into four 1 second clips, and progressively reduce the speed of each, sticking a freeze frame at the end. Fiddly I know, but it would work.

To: Vlad

Thank you for pointing out the Freeze Frame option.

The effect that I wanted to achieve was a slow down to a still frame and then a gradual speed up to normal again. However, seeing as the freeze option already exists, then all I would need is the same feature that Michael is requesting. I'd then create a specifed slow down followed by using the existing Freeze feature. This would give me what I am looking for.

It would be great if this variable speed feature also worked for reverse playback (at user specified acceleration and deceleration rates).

To: LauraEss

Unfortunately that would not work very well. The existing speed options are not fine-grained enough, so you'd get horrible speed jumps bewteen each segment (especially if speeding up, because it goes in large jumps from x1 to x1.25, x1.5 then 1.75 etc.). You cannot get access to the speeds in between these values.

It would be much better if the speed slider control was continuous so that any speed (within the over all upper and lower limits) could be achieved. It would also be helpful to be able to type in a value (accurate to two decimal places) when you know the exact speed that you want (for example, x0.93 or x1.26 etc.)

I am surprised at just how important variable speed has become to me. I have found myself needing this effect so many times over the last few months (for all sorts of different reasons) but unfortunately AVS is still unable to do this.

I was looking at my old video editing software (ULead Media Studio v8) and although that program is way too difficult and complicated to use, it does have a very good variable speed function. You open a clip and then click on the timeline to create speed points. For each point you specify the speed that you want the video to be playing at when it reaches that point. You can enter any value whatsoever between 10% and 1000% (accurate to a single digit) so you are not restricted to large 25% jumps like you are with AVS. The video editor then interpolates between the values entered on the speed points and very smoothly transitions between each speed value.

So, for example, you could add a speed point at the beginning of a clip, one in the middle and one at the end, and if you then assigned values to these speed points of 107, 13 and 286 you would get slightly faster than normal playback to begin with (7% faster than default 100%) and then it would gradually slow down to 13% of default speed and then gradually speed up to 286% (i.e. approaching 3 times normal speed).

I have used Ulead Media Studio for syncing out of time action to a regular beat from a newly added soundtrack (because you can make various adjustments to speed up and slow down as needed to keep things in time with the music). The speed changes were so smooth that you couldn't tell playback speed was altering, it just looked like the action was done in time with the music.

Something like this would be really great for AVS Video editor!

I wondered if there was any news or progress on this feature?

I am so desperate to have variable speed playback in AVS.

If the feature is likely to take more time to develop, could you please in the mean time at least add more control for fixed playback speeds. At the moment there are very large jumps in speed when speeding up (it goes from x1 to x1.25 to 1.5 to 1.75). These jumps are much too large. Can we please have 0.01 increments instead (e.g. x0.98, x0.99, x1.00, x1.01, x1.02, x1.03, x1.04 etc.)

Thanks

To: Quisquose

I will not promise, but, perhaps, the effect will be avaliable in the next version of AVS Video Editor.

Regards.

To: Vlad
Thanks so much Vlad.

I understand that it's difficult to give guarantees when it comes to software development, so I am grateful for your comment to let us know that it might possibly be available in the next version.

Fingers crossed!

Vlad:

As far as I can see the main idea is that speed should changes gradually during transition time.... Am I right? By the way, it would be great if you show example video with such effect.

Hello Vlad.

I know that you made this request quite some time ago, but trying to search for a video with variable speed effect is difficult. It's the kind of thing that you tend to find by accident because there's no real way to search specifically for videos that contain this effect.

However, I found such a clip today and I thought that you might be interested to see it. (See link below)

http://vimeo.com/23046646

Examples are at 1 minute 20 seconds and at 1 minute 33 seconds.

To: Quisquose


Awesome effect! but, I guess this effect need High frame rate video. approx. 50-60 fps.

regards

I have recently used the "time remapping" feature of After Effects - it's made very easy to handle and intuitive.
It would be a really cool if AVS had this!

To: Quisquose

Nice example! Thanks


To: humpataa

Thanks, we will consider making such tool.

Quisquose:

If the [variable speed] feature is likely to take more time to develop, could you please in the mean time at least add more control for fixed playback speeds

Vlad:

I will not promise, but, perhaps, the effect will be avaliable in the next version of AVS Video Editor.

Hi Vlad,

When you made the above comment, were you talking about variable speed playback or finer control of fixed speed playback?

I was hoping that if variable speed playback could not be included in this version that we would at least get some finer control over fixed speed playback instead. Unfortunately we didn't get either.

Re-reading your comment made me realise that you could have been referring either to the new variable speed playback feature or to my request for an interim enhancement of the existing fixed speed playback (to add more speed choices).

To: Quisquose

Hello,

Sorry for the late response.

I was talking about variable speed playback effect. Unfortunately, we didn't include it in new version AVS Video Editor 6.0.

As for more controls for fixed playbak speed, sorry, but we do not agree that there are big jumps in speeds now.

Best regards.

Vlad:

I was talking about variable speed playback effect.

Thanks for clarifying.

Vlad:

As for more controls for fixed playbak speed, sorry, but we do not agree that there are big jumps in speeds now.

That is indeed your prerogative and I do very much appreciate your response, but ask anyone who's had to deal with post production and they would beg to differ. It is impossible to do any kind of serious synchronisation to sound tracks (or any kind of tempo based editing) when you only have 25% speed increments to work with. Those kind of increments are acceptable for preview window playbacks when you just want to quickly review the timeline, but for permanently adjusting the speed of the saved video itself, it needs much smaller increments.

Try it for yourself. Load a scene of someone walking normally, then speed it up by the smallest amount that AVS allows (25%). It goes so fast that the scene and motion looks completely unnatural and is therefore unusable. There's no way to have just slightly faster walking than the original footage. Alternatively, find a scene of someone dancing (for example) and then try to sync the dancing movements to a new soundtrack that has a different tempo. This is a perfectly ordinary and often-performed video editing task (think about how pop music videos are put together so that action in a particular scene happens in time with the beat) but it is impossible to achieve this in AVS because the control over playback speed is not fine enough.

Many other video editing packages can do this as standard, but I would prefer to work in AVS because of its simplicity. By any standard, 25% is a large jump. Just imagine if AVS's volume control increased by 25% per step, or if the brightness control increased in 25% jumps. Users would soon start complaining that the controls are not fine enough.