Optical Flow in Premiere Pro

Optical Flow in Premiere ProLearn more about Optical Flow and exporting Time Interpolated media.

The Optical Flow feature in Adobe Premiere Pro uses frame analyses and pixel motion estimation to create brand-new video frames, resulting in smoother speed changes, time-remapping, and frame-rate conversion.

You can access Optical Flow in the Time Interpolation menu (Clip > Video Options > Time Interpolation > Optical Flow). It lets you interpolate missing frames for time remapping and produce better-looking and smoother slow motion from conventionally shot footage.

Since the optical flow library cannot sustain real-time playback, as it happens with the existing Frame Blend function, Premiere Pro uses the time-consuming Optical Flow only for Time Remapping for high-quality renders. For low-quality or draft rendering, the faster Frame Sample interpolation is used even while Optical Flow is enabled.

Optical Flow interpolation is ideal for modifying the speed of clips that contain objects with no motion blur, which are moving in front of a mostly static background that highly contrasts with the object in motion.

Exporting Time Interpolated media

The Time Interpolation setting in the Export Settings dialog box (File > Export > Media) lets you change the frame rate of the exported file by using Optical Flow to interpolate the missing frames. For example, if you have 30-fps footage that you want to export at 60 fps without repeating every frame, you can export the media with the Optical Flow option in the Time Interpolation drop-down box.