How can i fix choppy slow-motion footage in a walking clip?

[JerryLC]

I’m trying to get a smooth, slow-motion effect on a clip of someone walking, but no matter what I do, the motion looks choppy and unnatural. I’ve tried interpreting the footage at a lower frame rate in Premiere Pro and using optical flow, but it still doesn’t have that fluid, professional look.

[AaronFG]

I’ve done this with a walking clip from 60fps down to 24. It looked smooth in the timeline, but the export still felt stuttery. I tried re-encoding at a higher bitrate and it helped a little, but not the dreamlike slow motion I wanted.

[Scott51]

Sometimes the culprit is the source. If the shutter was too fast, the motion blur is minimal and slows mean it chews through frames unevenly. I found that adding a touch of blur in the original capture helped the slowed version look a bit more natural.

[Scarlett_R]

I played with frame blending and one pass of optical flow, and the results were either ghosty or just chunky. Neither really nailed it.

[ChloeQG]

Another angle: the walk itself has lots of micro-motions that look normal in real time but explode when interpolation tries to fill frames. I ended up keeping the clip at closer to real speed or using a small speed ramp instead of full slow-mo.

[Gary62]

Do you have a high enough shutter speed to avoid blur when you slow it down that much?

[SavannahD]

I also wondered if the problem is the clip length and editing software rendering, and I brute-forced a couple exports just to compare, but nothing felt right.