Almost every online edit and action sports movie is going to include some slow motion. Geoff Rowley’s skate part in Flip’s Sorry famously didn’t use any (watch it here. If you ever thought you’d had a bad slam, then quit your whining), that’s how prolific the effect is. Most editing programs won’t have a specific ‘slo mo’ button but instead call it something like ‘time stretching’ or ‘remapping.’

Unless you’re going for a specific effect and have the high frame rate equipment to back it up, like some of my good friends/associated morons in this Cavern Cup entry by Will Nangle (above), it’s probably best used sparingly. A particularly effective use is to only slow mo on a segment of a clip, like the tweak on a grab or a particularly hard slam, anything that slow motion can emphasise. Simply cut a clip at the start and end of where you want it in your timeline then apply the effect there. Simple. Now you look as pro as the next guy!

Now, this is where all that talk of frame rates in earlier articles comes in. The human eye can’t distinguish individual frames more than roughly 25 times per second, hence 25fps being the standard frame rate for PAL systems. This is all fine and good, but when you start slowing down footage shot at 25fps you’ll notice it goes all juddery, the more so the slower you go. This looks cheap, which is why you should’ve filmed it at 50fps, just like we told you… Also best to avoid slow motion on less than perfect shots, nothing makes a zeached slide more wack than giving everyone time to look at it and people can get bored by too much 50/50ing.