How do I get smooth slow-motion when converting 120fps footage to 24fps?

[GregoryT]

I’ve been trying to get a clean, slow-motion shot of water droplets colliding for a project, but my footage keeps looking choppy and unnatural when I interpret it at 24fps. I shot it at 120fps, but the playback in my editor just doesn’t have that smooth, dreamy quality I was aiming for. I’m wondering if my sequence settings are wrong or if I need to use optical flow for this specific kind of fluid motion.

[Nora_T]

I did this once with water droplets. I shot at 120fps and tried to play it back at 24fps, but I kept getting either a jumpy feel or a too clean look depending on how the clip was interpreted. The fix that helped me was making sure the clip was read as 120fps in the project before slowing, then keeping the shutter around 1/240 so you preserve a touch of blur. It still wasn’t perfect, but the motion felt closer to what I hoped.

[Riley70]

Optical flow can help fill the frames when you slow down, but with droplets it often creates weird warps or halos. I experimented with frame blending and with manual retiming and compared, and the artifacts were obvious in the splash moments.

[AvaZT]

I kept thinking the problem was the sequence, but in one project the problem only showed up in the rough preview. Rendering proxies to check helped; the final render looked smoother, so I started doubting whether the issue was playback, proxies, or project settings rather than the physics of the droplets.

[Anthony.C]

One other thought that kept nagging me is maybe you want more air between frames, not less. I tried tweaking shutter and lighting and the look changed a lot once I stopped chasing a perfectly clean interpolation, but I never felt sure if I had hit the right balance.