Camera blurring when panning

[Mike Kozuchowski]

Looks the same.

[James Grafsgaard]

Mike – Did you ever solve this problem? I am struggling with it now too.. take a look: https://vimeo.com/497100147 I think I will work with how my camera movements are set up and see if it makes a difference.

[Steve Roberts]

I see the blur in your video, James, when stepping frame-by-frame through the video (pause, then shift+ R/L arrows): yes, some of the frames are blurred. Two causes come to mind:

– the compression for Vimeo might be causing this. The way to tell if it is or not is to render uncompressed, maybe TGA sequence, re-import, and take a look at the frames.

– AE moves layers in subpixels, meaning (in case you didn’t know) that when a layer moves a non-integer number of pixels (e.g. 7 1/2 pixels), AE antialiases the image. In the case of a complex painting, this can make it look blurry. To get around this, try the expression here: https://chrissilich.com/blog/?p=288 Or … if you use the script “iExpressions,” I hear it has a “snap to grid” feature.

I think it’s the second problem. But if you snap to pixels, the motion could look a bit jittery as it jumps from pixel to pixel.

It’s your choice, but you might be running up against an old issue: not all layers look good in all forms of motion.

For example, a straight pan can exhibit something called “judder,” which is a kind of stuttering movement. It is inevitable, unless you hike up the frame rate a lot. Motion blur will not solve judder: you just see juddering blurry frames. It comes from our brains’ getting accustomed to a simple motion, to the point where we are able to perceive the static individual frames of the video.

If you can’t hike the frame rate a lot, you have to take a leaf out of the Visual Cognition (a branch of Psychology) book: distract the eye with a secondary motion. If you are panning across a scene, add a flitting butterfly. That will make the pan look smoother, because our brains will be occupied between the butterfly and the pan.

But in your case, to distract the eye and prevent the brain from seeing the blur or pixel-jumping, you might want to pan past a gallery patron in the foreground during the blurry part of the move, then lose them when the image cleans up, so we can look at the painting unobstructed. Why not?