My advice to all who timewarp: If your speed isn’t divisible by 100, you will have problems.
I’m fielding a few timewarp questions at work, so I’m making a post. Not about the present issue, but let me tell you a story from last year:
I was working on a big fancy commercial and there was one shot in the edit with a massive slow-down. LIke 25% speed. It was shot at 24fps. The offline motion estimation was a mess (never a good sign, since usually editors say, “well it looked good on Avid, maybe Flame’s algorithm isn’t as good.”) So I talked the clients out of it. Told them to cut a different shot in.
I explained that this shot would take a week to rebuild and it would probably look pretty lousy even then. They listened and were going to use a different shot. The supe walks in, says “Oh no, we can do it!” and they hand the shot to a good Nuke artist.
The shot took a week, the poor artist re-animating the whole thing by hand, and it looks horrible. It’s got way too much motion blur and no detail.
I bring this up, not just because timewarps are the pits, but because so often we end up eating the cost of this work out of a fear of forcing the client to compromise.
Film production is making compromises. We get work because someone can’t afford to fly to Spain for their commercial. We get work because someone can’t afford to build a functioning robot. We get work because someone can’t get the shot without a boom mic in it. All day long our clients compromise, but when it gets to VFX I see a fear of asking those same clients to compromise at all.
And I’m happy to report, that most of the time, if you are involved at a useful point (this may be the ONLY upside to never locking edits), you can talk clients out of making extra work for you.
