I’m wondering if someone can help me. I’m in need of a Media Player or Video Editor which will allow me to do 2 things:
Perform a VERY high speed playback of a 53 minute clip (atleast 32x or more)
Let me record the above
The video clip I want to speed up is of a Zaluzianskya flower opening with the onset of evening, and will be used for research purposes. I’ve tried several MP’s already, namely SMPlayer, ZoomPlayer and PotPlayer but none of them do a playback with the speed or stability I need, nor do they facilitate both playback speed control AND recording (I have to have both)
Any suggestions or help from the fine people on this forum would be greatly appreciated!
I don’t know anything about specific video editors, but it doesn’t really sound like you want to record the high speed playback necessarily - a screen won’t be able to show the frames as fast as that (32x would be >900 fps).
You want to drop a certain number of frames and then save that result. For 32x, you would drop 31 of every 32 and keep one and this would lead to the effect that you want (I think).
i think any basic video editing program will allow you to do this. even the very basic Video Editor program included with Windows 11 allows you to easily increase the speed of a video up to 64x and then export that as a new video file. i think the iMovie app included on Macs and iPhones will allow you to increase speed up to at least 20x (and probably more as a custom input). whatever you use, if if doesn’t allow you to get to 32x in one pass, you can just do multiple passes. for example, if you do 8x and then 8x again, that would get you 64x.
I’m really not a pc boffin and have no idea where to begin with what you’ve laid out, could you perhaps point me to a tutorial or walkthrough on how to do this? I noticed with SMPlayer that I could speed up the playback to anywhere between 16x and 20x without too much jitter but sadly this MP doesn’t offer recording
If all the frames are being kept each time you increase the speed you can wind up running into memory buffering issues and the video player can freeze or get really jerky during playback.
you wouldn’t keep all the frames. when you export video, you’ll choose a frame rate for the resulting video, and the new video will have that many frames per second, effectively dropping frames.
It sounds like you want to turn a video into a time lapse.
Is the original video showing an event taking place at normal speed?
If so, then look at timelapse video editing software (see links below).
Are you on PC or Mac? What was it originally filmed with (eg. a phone, a DSLR, a mirrorless, a webcam, etc)? These are things than can be important when picking the right software and approach.
There are a bunch of different ways you can turn a video into a timelapse. If the camera was fixed on a tripod the whole time that makes things a bit easier as you don’t have to stabilize the video after converting it into a timelapse.
It depends on the software you use, that’s why I included the “if”.
If you’re just speeding up the video (changing the frame rate but making no other changes) then all the frames should be kept. If you’re making a timelapse to speed up the video then you’re discarding unnecessary frames.
Speeding up a video and making a timelapse can give similar looking results, but are two different things, and work somewhat differently.
hmmm… even if you could do it, i’ve never heard of someone taking, say, a 30fps video and speeding it up by turning it into, say, a 900fps video. that seems masochistic to me.
That’s done with slow motion footage all the time. When you see one of those videos where it’s normal speed, then goes to slow motion, the back to slow motion that’s what’s been done.
The whole video is in slow motion, but the frame rate for playback is adjusted. At the “normal speed” portions it’s running at a high frame rate (120 fps or more), and in the slow motion portions the frame rate is locally changed (down to 30 fps), resulting the the slow motion.
If you take a slow motion video on an iPhone, for example, when you’re reviewing the video you have a slider control to adjust what portion you want in slow motion, but the entire video is still recorded and saved with all of the frames in it. It doesn’t resample and cut out frames when you tell it to play some portions at “normal” speed and others in slow motion.
You can also find your video in the path where you saved it.
If everything looks okay, you can delete the video project in Video Editor if you have no more need for it. (This does not delete the original source video.) In the top-left of the Video Editor screen where you see the breadcrumbs for Video Editor > [Your Video Project], click on “Video Editor” to go back to the main Video Editor page. Then right click on your project and select Delete.
Thank you Pisum for this detailed explanation, I will give it a shot :)
@earthknight I will give your suggested softwares a try too, I have a new and fairly beefy laptop so hopefully I should come right with a timelapse if those programs are well optimized
Here is the end product: Intricate opening of a night-flowering species of Zaluzianskya in Mooi River, South Africa. This may even be used to distinguish this specimen on a subspecies basis
Much appreciated
EDIT: I see I can’t add videos here, I will post a link to the upload a little later
