I shot a scene with my phone at 60fps and I want to do 0.5x slow motion for an edit. When I try it in Premiere, it gets really choppy and pixelated. Is there a technique to keep it smooth without it looking awful?
The thing that really makes a difference is interpolating frames before slowing down rather than after. In Premiere, you can use the "Optical Flow" option in the speed settings - it generates smarter intermediate frames by analyzing the motion between each image, so it's way less stuttery than basic interpolation. It does eat up some processing power and it's not perfect either, but honestly the difference is really noticeable compared to just letting Premiere do its default thing.
It's not really possible to keep quality when slowing down from 60fps to x0.5 without some tricks, because you're creating frames that don't exist - Premiere interpolates but it's never as smooth as actual 120fps. Your best bet is to use an interpolation plugin like Twixtor or enable the "Optical Flow" option if you have After Effects, that gives way smoother results than Premiere's standard interpolation.
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