Motion blurring?

[Mylenium]

How would you add motion blurring to an animation in a mov format? I tried using several versions of AE with sequence of TGA files and it would not render or allow me to do ram previews. After effects does seems to like the MOV files of the animation, but I'm not sure if I can still get the motion blur effect.

Motionblur is based on transform operations, not differences in pixels between frames. If your layers don't move, scale or rotate, there will never be motionblur in AE. You have to use plugins that do per-pixel motion analysis such as Revision FX' Reel Smart Motionblur.

Mylenium

[Laserschwert]

Which version of AfterEffects are you using? The Professional version of AE7 has the "timewarp"-effect, which allows to add motion-blur by per-pixel motion estimation. The quality is far better than RevisionFX' ReelSmart-effects, although depending on the settings you can reach killer render-times.

[Mylenium]

Which version of AfterEffects are you using? The Professional version of AE7 has the "timewarp"-effect, which allows to add motion-blur by per-pixel motion estimation. The quality is far better than RevisionFX' ReelSmart-effects, although depending on the settings you can reach killer render-times.

You must be frakkin' kidding! RSMB by far beats what you can get with the Timewarp effect, which suffers from producing shutter artifacts. And even if it didn't - the render times are prohibitive compared to those you can get with RevisionFX' tools.

Mylenium

[suztv]

Womball - What kind of machine are you using that won't let you preview the TGA file sequence. That seems strange - it could be a hardware problem.

And Mylenium is right - you only get motion blur when an object moves from one point to another. However there are several plug-ins that you can use for per-pixel analysis and if you have AE7 you should have the Cycore Force Motion Blur among your effects to choose from. Echo is another really cool effect - not a blur, more of a motion trail.

Render times and other problems will probably occur if you had problems just viewing TGA files. You might want to upgrade your system or re-config.

[Laserschwert]

You must be frakkin' kidding! RSMB by far beats what you can get with the Timewarp effect, which suffers from producing shutter artifacts. And even if it didn't - the render times are prohibitive compared to those you can get with RevisionFX' tools.

Mylenium

No, I'm not kidding at all. I've gotta admit RSMB and Twixtor render a lot faster and are good enough for most situations. But I've had several cases where RSMB produced tons of artifacts, because the tracking wasn't accurate enough at the highest setting (imagine 5 pixel wide strings moving through frame... impossible for RSMB to catch... it's tearing them apart with artifacts), whereas Timewarp - admittingly WAY slower - tracked these fine features perfectly. The shutter artifacts you're talking about are of course caused by too few samples.

By the way, nice argumentation along the lines of "It's better... and if not, there's something else wrong with it" ;)

[Mylenium]

By the way, nice argumentation along the lines of "It's better... and if not, there's something else wrong with it" ;)

Actually not. I think I know both tools well enough to understand the differences in how they work and why they do what they do. Probably it's just once more a matter of my inability to express myself properly.


But I've had several cases where RSMB produced tons of artifacts, because the tracking wasn't accurate enough at the highest setting (imagine 5 pixel wide strings moving through frame... impossible for RSMB to catch... it's tearing them apart with artifacts), whereas Timewarp - admittingly WAY slower - tracked these fine features perfectly.

It's inherent in the way RSMB works (and probably it's one singular great weakness if you wanna see it that way). It creates an internal matte which in turn can result in jumpiness if indeed pixels are moving out of frame or change directions abruptly - where there was no pixel before, there can be no differential to the next consecutive frame. Timewarp (or other tools from the Kronos product line for that matter) don't make that differentiation and will always analyze the entire buffer including empty areas which are assumed to have some abvstract neutral value, one of the reasons why they are so slow. It can be argued which is better depending on the given situation, but FWIW, you're not out of luck with RSMB, either, as the FG/ BG controls are exactly meant to cater for this. And of course there is plenty of techniques to properly flatten and modify the buffer for improved analysis.


The shutter artifacts you're talking about are of course caused by too few samples.

And that's what's wrong - a algorithm based on motion estimation/ optical flow analysis should not have any problems with that. It should reconstruct intermediate pixels based on the curvature, dilate gaps along the vectors or whatever, even if the results may be even more incorreect in physical and perceptional terms. So from where I sit, Timewarp acts pretty dumb in such matters.

Mylenium

[Laserschwert]

I assume that the motion-estimation grid of RSMB is still too unprecise (even at the highest setting) to catch details properly, that's why the per-pixel approach of Timestretch works better in some cases. Of course, a high number of samples wouldn't be necessary if Timestretch would support vector-blurring, yet I think this limitation comes from the fact that the filter is actually built for - guess what - time-stretches... and for slowmo or speed-ramps there have to be intermediate frames calculated, so the motion-blurring option is just a gimmick using the same approach. But even for time-stretching Timestretch delivers better results than Twixtor does, the latter one being again faster of course since it uses a vector grid instead of per-pixel estimation, which - just as with RSMB (which is of course included in Twixtor) - causes more artifacts.

Anyway, I think this discussion is rather pointless, since as always it's a matter of preference which plugin to use. I tend to use RSMB and Twixtor more often than Timestretch, because most of the time it's more about speed than perfect quality.

After all I've just answered Womball's qusestion about HOW to achieve motion-blurring in AE, and I wasn't going to discuss the pros and cons. ;)

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