motion blur: cc force vs. re vision fx

[Kevin Camp]

reelsmart motion blur is designed to work with footage (or already rendered animations), and works quite well at adding motion blur to footage with pans/tilts or where an object moves across/up/down the frame. it doesn’t work as well for quick zooms/trucks or where the an object flies towards/away from the camera or scales up/down. i’ve used reelsmart motion blur a lot with 3d renders from cinema 4d, it’s faster and softer than c4d motion blur.

cc force motion blur actually renders with sub-frame sampling, much like ae’s native motion blur or how a 3d app like cinema 4d would do motion blur. if you have it set to 8 samples, then it renders each frame 8 times to create the composite ‘blurred’ frame. this makes it quite accurate regardless of the movement, but takes a long time (about 8x longer–for what ever reason, ae’s motion blur is much faster than that).

so to use reelsmart motion blur, you’d want to render your comp first, then add rsmb to the render. with cc force motion blur, you would add it to the comp prior to render.

to improve the performance of cc force motion blur, you’d like to add it only to the elements that need it. in the case of the shatter-text, i think you need to pre-comp it and add force motion blur as an adjustment layer over the top. if you’re camera is moving in the main comp, then the camera will need to be in the pre-comp too.

you can also keyframe the force motion blur amount, so you can have higher values when you need more samples and lower values when you don’t need it…. you can actually use expressions to link the amount to speed or velocity of the layer or the camera so it ramps up when needed.

also, depending on the movement of the shatter-text you might even be able to keyframe directional blur, or fast zoom blur on the layer.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Bret Williams]

Great info. An Yes, I was applying the RE Vision blur to the final quicktime in FCP.

Actually, the moves are probably pretty complex for re vision. But they look great. Possibly because the moves are so fast. I could probably have just keyframed directional blur.

Imagine a camera in the middle of a store aisle. Text is zomming toward and away. So you have that z moton blur. RE seemed to do great on that. Then the camera spins 180 and you see the same sort of thing looking down the other end of the aisle. So now you have a more x diretion blur, but it needs to curve because the boxes in the aisle come pretty close. It seemed to do fine, but this is a true whip pan, so it’s hard to tell.

I like the idea of adding CC JUST to the 3 or 4 shatter texts. But alas I think they aren’t precomped. And precomping them was wreaking havoc in the layout due to the hacked nature of how I got it all to work. But I might give it another go. That’s why I was adding CC force motion blur to the entire comp and turning off AE’s motion blur. But it was about 20x the render time.

I just watched the new tutorial (sticky post above) on shatter text and it gave me a few ideas as well.

[Kevin Camp]

it’s very possible that a newer version of rsmb does a better job of interpolating a zoom-type blur… my version is a little old… and even then, i’ve often found it to be acceptable.

it does sound that in your case, rsmb would be a good way to go. i think you’ll be able to use it in plenty of other situations… though i don’t think i’d throw out ae’s native motion blur (personally).

another cheap way to go is to try timewarp with speed set to 100 and motion blur enabled. it will approximate the same effect, though not as nicely as rsmb… but you might look at that too. and, like rsmb, it will work better applied post render.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Bret Williams]

Well precomping the shatter text SEEMED to work. Until I rendered. Everytime I apply cc force motion blur to a precomed, extruded shatter text, utilizing the comp camea, it blinks on and off in the render. It flickers on and off. Only after rendered. Never if you frame by frame through the timeline. 1080i or 720p, doesn’t matter. So now I have this perfect comp, and it won’t render right.

However, the shatter text in the comp that doesn’t use the comp camera is fine. Some of the text I had to use the shatter fx camera so that the text could animate in, separate of what the comp camera was doing. Yes, I had to match the camera moves in perspective by hand. But the trick there was to also have a text layer that wasn’t extruded that existed in 3D, so I had something to match up to. Looked great. Out of 4 text elements 1 remains linked to the comp camera and it flickers. Looks like I’ve got to match it too.

Anyone ever seen the flickering with shatter extrusion on text utilizing the comp camera?

[Bret Williams]

Well, I got the rvmb plug and added it to the latest version of the anim. This time 720p instead of 1080i. The default settings are pretty bad. Odd because the 1080i version was nearly flawless. Twice as much motion data I guess. I’ll try tweaking the default settings. Perhaps in the past you had progressive footage as well.