• Location: Summerside, PEI, Canada
  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Topic: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

Motion blur... Even when your animation is good enough, it can be jarringly absent.

I know a couple people have used motion blurring software here, I know I've used a bit (but it sucked).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I've found ReelSmart MotionBlur, which I'm pushing the demo of over 30 seconds of Clash of the Titans footage as I'm writing this. (I figured why not apply it to the best?)

Any suggestions? Keep in mind that frame-averaging and interpolation is actually grabbing three frames and overlaying them all with lowered opacity onto the middle one (giving the footage more of an outlined look than anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yEX0ac-Nas

There's a sample, way over-blurred... but if he hadn't used so many jarring motions it would have looked pretty decent, yeah? I know some people are purists and all, so I'm sorry if this offends!

I'll update this thread with the video of Clash of the Titans if it ends up looking any good mini/smile

Ladon's Website

  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

It looks so much better with blur than without (in this video at least). I'll have to see check ReelSmart out.

NXTManiac

https://i.imgur.com/IRCtQGu.jpg
  • Joined: December 26, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

Minimation has experimented with motion blur effects to good results, I think, though I believe I asked him about it at some point and he said he did it using a manual, frame-by-frame editing process.  I've considered trying something similar myself for especially fast movements like in fight scenes, but I hadn't encountered any plugins like ReelSmart before.

http://i.imgur.com/wcmcdmf.png

Sméagol's Website

  • Location: Summerside, PEI, Canada
  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

You can hack the ReelSmart demo plugin if you are using After Effects fairly easily, to avoid the X. It increases the render time by about 3 seconds a frame, but its not too much trouble...

Spoiler (click to read)

Insert your footage into a composition that is roughly 9x the resolution of your frame. Push it all the way to the right and center it. Create a new composition that is exactly the same size as your footage, and insert the first composition into this one. Apply the plugin, and adjust the size of the first composition to keep the lines of the X from coming inside your frame.

It'll take a little longer, because it tries to blur the extra black as well, but its worth it... However, if you're serious about using it once you've tried it out, its not that expensive mini/smile

Frame by frame blurring is scary! I'm just hoping for some subtle blurring when I shoot twos at 24fps... Something to make good animation look a little lifelike? I'm trying to aim for uncanny valley, oddly enough.

Ladon's Website

  • MOL
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Location: Canada
  • Joined: December 26, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

As much as Frame by Frame blurring may look hard, it's not that hard. If you want a good motion blur, than, Frame by Frame is your best bet, in my opinion.

I found a way for free to do something very similar to ReelSmart, in After Effects.
What you do is duplicate the layer. Than, after doing that, animate a directional blur to match the amount/direction of the blur. Than, just mask where you'd like it to be, and feather it. Adjust opacity appropriately, and you've got yourself a motion blur.

As hard as it may seem (Frame by Frame), I tried it, and, for 5 seconds, it took me about 10 minutes. Bad if you're doing it for the whole film, and the film is long, but, I mean, I think it's better than spending $100 on ReelSmart.

I hope you consider doing it this way. Its not as bad as it may seem.

Persist.
  • Location: Australia
  • Joined: December 31, 2009

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

The bionicles came to life mini/eek *cue twilight zone music*

http://i337.photobucket.com/albums/n380/Macdeham/quote1-1.png
YouTube - Steam

Ark11's Website

  • Location: Summerside, PEI, Canada
  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

Haha, I didn't want to overdo the effect when I applied it to Clash of the Titans, so I undershot instead. Oops... I'll bump it up a bit when I get home from work and give it another shot. I'm doing a 30 second bit of the Medusa scene, to see if she looks like an actor with snakes on her head when I blur it a bit.

Just thinking... If I overdo the blur enough, it might make animation look a little like a painting? Could be cool?

Ladon's Website

  • Location: Summerside, PEI, Canada
  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6lQ5GG6bnI

My test didn't work really well (I had to scrap the ram from my laptop, so it took far too long to tweak with settings) but this is a clip from Gwangi (some of Harryhausen's finest) demonstrating the before and after. Once again, they applied far too much blur, but the overall effect looks more realistic (movement-wise) than CGI... At least to me it does mini/smile

Ladon's Website

  • MOL
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Location: Canada
  • Joined: December 26, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

Looked a bit like puppets to me....

Persist.
  • Joined: December 27, 2008

Re: Motion Blur? Not A Debate :)

Those look amazing, the blur really creates a cool stylized feel.

I've done some experimenting with go-motion myself (I believe go-motion is the term for when you just move the objects while you shoot, creating a blur). The disadvatage of doing it this way is that you have less control of the object's position while you shoot, and the animation can look jumpy. I tried an alternative method in my Dane Cook film, namely, manually using a motion blur in Photoshop and then applying a slight Gaussian blur to even out the rough edges. However, this was for short sequences of animation, nothing like the dinosaur battle clips, so I could see where doing it manually could be a problem. Hope this helps?

Last edited by Blue Ghost (January 28, 2010 (10:54am))

https://i.imgur.com/x8mil9Z.png