Blur Your Motion, Smartly
Hello, everyone!
Consider this article a personal gift from me to you. In this article I will be giving you both the gift of time and money. And for those of you who are already privy to this little bit of informational goodness I’m about to share, than feel free to help me welcome those who didn’t into our delightful little club.
I was speaking with a good friend and fellow motionographer the other day about a piece I had recently finished. He had told me how great the motion blur came out on the piece and that he assumed it was a bear to render and guessed it was a 6 hour render. With that assumption he was also assuming I was rendering the 3D footage with motion blur. Which I did not! For those of us who deal with 3D we all know that we can render out footage with motion blur built into the project, but this is a process that will consist of multiple passes and calculations resulting in crazy out of hand render times (at least in my experiences).
So, here is where I share a bit of information that I thought was common knowledge, but apparently is not. And again, this is something that will save you tons of time and money if you haven’t been using it.
Side note; I feel like I should be wearing a goofy mask and prancing around on stage with a propsicle (real term for an attractive female magician’s assistant.) for this reveal. I guess Fuel Your Motionography will just have to do. But I digress.
An After Effects plug-in that was brought to my attention a while ago is called “ReelSmart Motion Blur” by RE: Vision Effects. This is a truly invaluable plug-in that I believe everyone who does any type of 3D motion work should purchase! The best part about it is that it is so simple to use, and it hardly adds any render time to your AE render.
Here is how it works. Simply bring your plain footage into After Effect and add the footage to a comp. Select the layer, and add RSMB to it. The end! In the Effects Control pane there are a few things you can tweak and adjust, but honestly, simply putting the plug-in on the footage will give you a near perfect result just about every time. When I think about how much time I spent watching the same frame render 15 times over to calculate motion blur out of C4D I could cry. This is the best solution to that problem that I’ve found anywhere. So, for a meager $89.95 you could be saving yourself hours of render time, and thus putting some extra cash into your pocket.
I hope that was helpful, and please feel free to ask any questions you’ve got about the plug-in. I swear by this little piece of heaven and will sing its praises for all time.
Be good.
Timmy.
Hello. My name is Timmy Allen. I’m a motion designer based in South Florida. Not much bio to give at this point, but I look forward to hanging out and talking with each and every one of you then maybe someday I’ll have something impressive to say about the time I’ve spent on this planet. But so far, I started a show called “Keyframe” and I’m a part of Triune Films‘ internet show “Film Riot“. I am blessed to say that I get to do what I love every single day for a living. I love and talking to cool people. With all that, to be continued….
Just one quick addition. For those that are weary of purchasing the plugin (though you shouldn’t be!), you can use the built in Time Warp effect to achieve a similar result. It will not be the caliber of the aforementioned plugin, but a good thing to get your feet wet with.
a plugin that saves render time instead of increasing it! interesting! thanks for the tip!
The only issue with RSMB is that sometimes it doesn’t work well – it totally depends on the renders, though. For renders when it can tell where an object was the frame before and will be the frame after, it’s great. For something like turbulent water, or stuff with somewhat random texturing, it can get confused and either give you weird swirly bits or on and off blurring.
That being said, it’s a great plug-in – just don’t expect it to work every time for every scenario…