Film motion without plugin-Rick Gerard please help

[Matt Larson]

Here’s something I just wrote a couple days ago:

Thanks for the advice. Playing around yesterday I was stunned by the results I got from just using After Effects comps (no plug ins). I imported the footage twice, one set to lower field first and one set to upper, drop them both into a 59.94 comp, with upper set to about 50% opacity, dropped that comp into a 24 fps comp and that comp into a 29.97 comp. Added a slight blur and it looks a MILLION times better than CineMotion.

[Brian Mills]

wow…that does look really nice…thanks alot!

[37point5]

Matt,

I’m interested in this process that you’re describing. A few questions:

1. When you say “add a little blur”, are you referring to using AE’s built in Motion Blur, or are you referring to a 3rd party plugin like the one from RevisionFX?

2. Are you using AE’s 3:2 pulldown for any of this? I was always under the assumption that the pulldown is a big part of what gives it the 24P film look that we all recognize.

3. How do the results compare to the 24P look that Cinemotion’s “Film 1” preset produces? I personally think Cinemotion looks great (better than dvfilm maker in my tests), although the render times are bad news. I’m really keen on 24P as opposed to the 30P look, so I’m just wondering how this compares visually to Cinemotion.

Thanks in advance,
Ryan Graham

[Matt Larson]

[Ryan Graham] “1. When you say “add a little blur”, are you referring to using AE’s built in Motion Blur, or are you referring to a 3rd party plugin like the one from RevisionFX?

The answer to this is both, but neither. In the final comp I screen one version of the 24p comp over a duplicate of itself. I drop the top layer’s opacity to about 12-30 and apply Lens Blur from Tindrebox2 (This makes the white in the image glow and soften, which I think of as “The Barbra Walters effect”) then the bottom layer is set to normal, opacity 100% and a gaussian blur of about 0.4 to take off the edge video has.

2. Are you using AE’s 3:2 pulldown for any of this? I was always under the assumption that the pulldown is a big part of what gives it the 24P film look that we all recognize.

The pulldown happens when you go from 24 fps to 29.97. Now that I think about it, I don’t think AE makes any “interframes” or whatever the pulldown 1/2 frames are called. But, looking at a pan across a horizontal line, the stutter looks almost identical to what I got in CineMotion

3. How do the results compare to the 24P look that Cinemotion’s “Film 1” preset produces? I personally think Cinemotion looks great (better than dvfilm maker in my tests), although the render times are bad news. I’m really keen on 24P as opposed to the 30P look, so I’m just wondering how this compares visually to Cinemotion. “

I always used the Shutter Blur option in CineMotion, but I just tried the Film 1 option (using the default setings) and I still think the motion looks much smoother, there isn’t nearly as much interlacing noise (which is the reason I started looking for a new method in the first place) and any diagonal lines and edges are NOTICIBLY cleaner then what I got with CineMotion. Also, I like to be able to have more control over the blur that is applied.

Send me an email to matt@visuality.com and I’ll send you a copy of the project file for you to check out. I’d love to hear some feedback on it.

Matt