After Effects - how to add motion blur?

[Brodie Geers]

I've got a pretty simple animation I'm working on. Right now I have a bunch of .png files I'm comping in After Effects (I also have Premiere if that's better for what I'm doing).

 

All I really want to know is if I can add motion blur at this stage and if so, how? Most of what I'm seeing is about adding motion blur to effects or layers. I've just got one layer so I don't know if this is possible.

 

I've turned on motion blur for the layer but I don't really see anything happening nor do I see any controls that allow me to adjust the affect.

 

Frame Blending seems to be producing the look I'm going for but I'm not sure if that's what I should be using. The tutorials seem to suggest it's for stretching/squeezing your timeline so it sounds like there may be a better, more accurate solution.

 

-Brodie

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I often use frame blending. Set it to a speed of 100, and then enable motion blur. It isn't perfect, but it is an easy way to blend the frames.

 

I have never been able to get frame blend to work in conjunction with other adjustments, so I typical do a color correct and composite pass, write out the frames, and then load them into a new comp, and apply the frame blend pass. There is a probably a cleaner way to do it, but that is what works for me.

 

There are occasions where the frame simply screws up, and this method of tricky won't work. It often happens when you have a foreground object against a medium distance background. The speed at which both objects are moving across the screen can create havoc on the algorithm used for blending.

 

Also, the generation of a time warp to blend frames is quite time consuming. Only do it during business hours if you have a render farm set up to handle AfterEffects. Otherwise let it render overnight. I do up my Shutter Samples from the default, so that may be contributing to the overall length of time.

 

All of that said.... I often render out Vray Motion Blur Vectors, but I have never figured out how to really get these to work via compositing. That would probably produce the best results after actually rendering the blur into the image.

Edited May 4, 2011 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Brodie Geers]

Thanks Travis. I'm afraid I'm really new to AE though. How do you set the speed for frame blending? (edit: nevermind, sorry, just saw your image)

 

Also I'm having a really weird issue with adjustment layers. I'm probably doing something very stupid. I created an adjustment layer over my video, applied an effect (I've tried several but I'm using Exposure in the example below) and nothing happens. In this case, however much I adjust the exposure, it doesn't affect the video. It works fine if I apply it directly to the video's layer but I plan on replacing that layer later so I'd like to avoid that. Can you see what I'm overlooking?

 

Edited May 4, 2011 by brodie_geers

[Brodie Geers]

double post

[Brodie Geers]

sorry, nevermind on the adjustment layer issue as well. I started a new file and did it and it's working fine now. I must have mucked something up before. I hope I don't do it again.

 

-Brodie

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I would apply it to the video layer, and then simply replace the footage via the method shown in the attached image.

 

Alternately, you can also copy and paste effects between layers. So if you wanted to, you could import a new layer, and simply paste the effects on them.

[Tommy L]

Reelsamrt Motion Blur plugin is really good. Two options. One is push button and does slightly more intelligent frame blending than AE. The other is using a Motion Vector pass out of Max. There's no overhead on rendertime, just another render element. That is accurate motion blur and looks as good as it can get.