Shoot High-Frame-Rate Always and Everywhere

Newer digital cinema cameras allow straightforward high-frame-rate shooting, and there are several benefits to doing this. First, shooting at HFR with a 360-degree shutter will give up to a 1.5 stop increase in dynamic range compared with 24fps, 180-degree shutter. 

Further, the precise data produced with HFR gives the cinematographer total creative control over the look of motion in ways not possible with standard shooting rates. The source footage can be used to create different motion looks, speed ramps, or alternate output frame rates.

Once the action is over, whatever data is in the can is in the can. HFR simply captures more of it.

Motion the Way it Ought to Look

The language hasn't caught up with the imagery very well, but we use words like "judder" and "strobing" and "tearing" to describe the problems with rolling square wave shutters. At Tessive, we call these things "sampling aliasing" and "reconstruction aliasing", but we don't expect anyone else to use those terms! The bottom line is that the output footage can have a wide variety of looks, including looks that incorporate the best of traditional square wave shutters while removing just those elements that are objectionable, yielding a very glossy yet traditional look. Or, a more crisp and present look can be applied, nearly hyper-real.  

This method also can dramatically reduce the tearing effects seen when imaging uncontrolled strobes using a rolling-shutter camera. How? Time Shaper smoothly collects the adjacent frame readouts and stitches them together into the output footage, so the rolling shutter artifacts are dramatically reduced.  

Spectacular Speed Ramps

With film cameras, fluidly changing the rendered speed of action was straightforward; just change the crank rate smoothly. Digital cameras don't allow this kind of speed ramp, and even if they did, exposure would still have to be controlled during the ramp. 

Time Shaper can apply a consistent soft-wave or square-wave shutter to the action during the speed ramp, so the action never looks choppy or juddery as the speed changes. This gives your footage a consistent motion look before, during, and after the ramp. 

Time Shaper computes real speed ramps using all the data contained in the high-frame-rate input. It doesn't throw out frames or lose any of the action, nor does it make up anything. Speed ramps can be created with an arbitrary number of setpoints during the clip, so the ramp can go from over- to under-cranking and back, even several times over the shot.

The controls for defining speed ramps are easy. Just pick the keyframes and set the speeds.

Easily Fits into Current Workflows

Unlike Tessive's Time Filter system, the Time Shaper system is an entirely software approach, so it does not require any additional equipment during the shoot. The current generation of digital cinema cameras are capable of 120 frames per second or higher with a 360° shutter, which is all that is needed for Time Shaper to work its magic.

Time Shaper works with ProRes, H.264, ARRIRAW, and ACES (EXR) footage, and is intended for use prior to any color correction or editing. The raw clips from the camera are converted into desired output frame rate, but remain in their original format with color and metadata untouched.

Learn more about acquiring footage for use in Time Shaper.

A Low-Risk Approach

Since the decisions for the motion look take place in post production, there's no risk of "baking in" a look that is later decided isn't right for the project. Time Shaper can create a traditional square-wave shutter if that's ultimately desired. All downstream editing takes place at the traditional frame rate, so there's no extra production cost. The tool can be used for an entire sequence or just for a single shot.  

There's no light loss through this technique, either. In fact, because a 360° shutter is employed during acquisition (compared with a traditional 180° shutter), and all the frame data is used, there's a net gain of illumination.

Powerful, Scalable GPU Rendering

Time Shaper runs on Mac OS X (10.9 or higher) and is easy to use to process a single clip using a powerful GPU processing system. Time Shaper's rendering system is optimized to use the GPUs and parallel memory pipelines of the latest Mac and Mac Pro systems.

Once you get a setup you like for a project, Time Shaper can export all those setting for batch operation from the terminal to run multiple simultaneous clips.  This ensures the throughput on your project is sufficient.