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A Retime Speed curve with two segments: a shorter one that creates fast motion, and a longer segment that creates slow motion
— To expose speed curves for a clip in the Timeline: Right-click a clip in the Timeline, and choose Retime Curve. The Curve Editor is exposed for that clip, and you can edit it as you would any other curve, adding moving, and deleting control points.
— To switch between editing Retime Speed and Retime Frame curves: Use the Curve pop-up at the upper left-hand corner of the Curve Editor to check or uncheck the curves you want to be visible. Clicking on a curve within the editor makes that curve the currently edited one.
— To close a speed curve: Clicking the Curve button at the right-hand side of the clip’s title bar in the Timeline toggles the curve open and closed.
As far as adding, removing, and smoothing control points on speed curves and adjusting curve segments, they work identically to any other curve in the Timeline. For more information, see “Keyframing in the Timeline and Curve Editor” in see Chapter 53, “Keyframing Effects in the Edit Page.”
Speed Effect Processing
Once you’ve retimed a clip, you have the additional ability to change how the retimed clip is processed in order to improve its visual playback quality, especially in the case of clips that are slowed down.
There are two ways you can set this. First, there’s a project-wide setting available in the Master Settings of the Project Settings. Secondly, you can change how clips are retimed via a per-clip setting available in the Inspector.
1 Open the Project Settings and click to open the Master Settings panel.
2 Choose an option from the Frame Interpolation group Retime Process pop-up menu.
— Select a clip, then open the Inspector and choose an option from the Retime Process pop-up in the Retime and Scaling group. If you choose Optical Flow, you can also choose an option from the Motion Estimation pop-up.
Here are the different options you have for processing speed effects:
— Retime Process: Lets you choose a default method of processing clips in mixed frame rate timelines and those with speed effects (fast forward or slow motion) applied to them, on a clip-by- clip basis. The default setting is “Project Settings,” so all speed effected clips are treated the same way. There are three options: Nearest, Frame Blend, and Optical Flow, which are explained in more detail in the Frame Interpolation section of Chapter 4, “System and User Preferences.”
— Nearest: The most processor efficient and least sophisticated method of processing; frames are either dropped for fast motion, or duplicated for slow motion.
— Frame Blend: Also processor efficient, but can produce smoother results; adjacent duplicated frames are dissolved together to smooth out slow or fast motion effects. This option can provide better results when Optical Flow displays unwanted artifacts.
— Optical Flow: The most processor intensive but highest quality method of speed effect processing. Using motion estimation, new frames are generated from the original source frames to create slow or fast motion effects. The result can be exceptionally smooth when motion in a clip is linear. However, two moving elements crossing in different directions or unpredictable camera movement can cause unwanted artifacts.
— Motion estimation mode: When using Optical Flow to process speed change effects or clips with a different frame rate than that of the Timeline, the Motion Estimation pop-up lets you choose
the best-looking rendering option for a particular clip. Each method has different artifacts, and the highest quality option isn’t always the best choice for a particular clip. The default setting is “Project Settings,” so all speed effected clips are treated the same way. There are several options.
— “Standard Faster” and “Standard Better” are the same options that have been available in previous versions of DaVinci Resolve. They’re more processor-efficient and yield good quality that are suitable for most situations.
— “Enhanced Faster” and “Enhanced Better” should yield superior results in nearly every case where the standard options exhibit artifacts, at the expense of being more computationally intensive, and thus slower on most systems.
— “Speed Warp” is available for even higher-quality slow motion effects using the DaVinci Neural Engine. Your results with this setting will vary according to the content of the clip, but in ideal circumstances this will yield higher visual quality with fewer artifacts than even the Enhanced Better setting. This setting is only available on a clip-by-clip basis; it’s not available in the Project Settings.