Motion estimated morphing time-remapping on stills

Lester Banks posted a cool technique from "The Great Zimm" on Vimeo. Untested here, it uses Pixel Motion on a short still sequence in After Effects, which yields some easy motion-estimated morphing time-remapping that was pretty smooth in the later examples that had very little motion. If things don't work the way you want, you may find more control using the Timewarp filter (Chris Meyer says you can check out additional details on this filter in The Foundry's Kronos documentation).

This recalls a recent method shown by Eran Stern that created a video with extreme slow motion using just a few still frames with Twixtor; see Extreme slow motion using still frames in AE. [update: Later in RE:Flex Still-to-Still Morphs in AE, Lori Freitag covers the basics of morphing between still images within After Effects using the RE:Flex Morph plug-in.]

pixel motion tutorial after effects from The Great Zimm on Vimeo.

Update: This technique might also be applied to smooth over jump cuts.

As noted in Morph to smooth a jump cut, Wes Plate uses RE:Flex (Motion Morph) to do this. Seamless smoothing over jump cuts can be quite complicated and may require animating and tracking masks of facial features (eyes as they blink, mouth, dimples, brow wrinkles, nostrils) as well as hair & clothing for the better part of a second on each side of an edit to guide the morph. There's actually a transition for this in Avid, Illusion FX> Fluid Morph, can work in some cases.

Update Oct 18, 2010: see More slow motion from pictures using Pixel Motion.