Smoothing/Interpolating Frames In Source Footage

Report · Apr 19, 2021

I have some footage I'm cleaning up for a wedding, and I'm trying to make the low-quality footage look a little nicer. I have a screen recording of a Zoom stream (sigh), so while my local video is perfectly smooth, it's a perfect recording of a choppy video.

Is there a way to have Premiere try to interpolate some frames in the source footage? Mostly, when it drops to 10-15fps, I'm willing to bet that "guessing" frames between would be better than the chop.

This has been a little difficult to search for, because any searches for stutter or chop seem to be from their computers being unable to process their video fast enough, which is not a problem here. Is there a tool I can throw at this source video and see if it improves?

Report · Apr 19, 2021

Here's a hack: Put the clip on its own sequence, Then change its speed to 50% (or maybe 25% if you need lots of smoothing). Choose "Optical Flow" for interpolation in the Change speed dialog. Then export that sequence to Prores. Then import the (slowed) Prores clip back in...drag it to the main timeline, and speed it back up (200% if it was slowed to 50%, or 400% if it was slowed to 25%). This would make it play back at the original speed, but PP created extra frames with Optical Flow, so now it will play with double FPS (or quadruple).

No way to know if this will look good or not with that clip. Also, worth a try but choose "Frame Blending" instead of Optical Flow. Who knows?

Report · Apr 19, 2021

Ooh, that's an interesting idea! I'll have to poke at that a bit later!

ProRes...that's a warning note that should be in the warp stabilizer tool: "This effect uses the source file and not the proxy, so re-encode that h264 file to ProRes or ProRes HQ unless you have time to make a new pot of coffee every time you move the seek head." Until someone casually mentioned that as an aside, I'd never really been able to use it successfully, now it's really slick.