Slow Motion Calculator

Slow motion works by recording more frames than you'll play back per second, then playing all of them back at the normal rate, which stretches the action out in time. If you capture at 96 fps but play back at 24 fps, each real-time second of footage now takes four seconds to play through, because the camera captured four times as many frames as playback consumes per second -- that's exactly the 4x slow-motion factor.

No -- Capture FPS Needed depends only on your Playback Frame Rate and Slow-Motion Factor, not on how long the action you're filming lasts. Clip duration matters for a different reason: it determines Output Duration (how long the slowed footage runs in your final edit) and Total Frames (how many frames your camera actually has to capture and your card has to store).

Yes -- Capture FPS Needed is simply the two multiplied together, so bumping either one up by some percentage moves the required frame rate by roughly that same percentage. Doubling your slow-motion factor from 2x to 4x has the same proportional effect on capture fps as doubling your playback rate from 24 to 48 fps.

A higher slow-motion factor requires a higher capture frame rate, and this calculator's storage estimate scales directly with capture fps -- more frames recorded per second of real time means more data written per second, regardless of how long the final slowed clip plays back. Shooting extreme slow motion (like 10x or higher) at high resolution can consume card space very quickly even for a short real-time clip.

Not precisely -- it's a rough approximation based on typical compressed 1080p video data rates, scaled linearly with capture frame rate. Actual file sizes depend heavily on your camera's codec, resolution, bit depth, and compression setting, so a RAW or ProRes workflow at the same frame rate could produce a file many times larger than this estimate suggests. Use it for rough card-capacity planning, then check your camera's actual published data rates for a shoot where storage is tight.