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[ADOBE® TV] [tv.adobe.com] [No Stupid Questions] Creating realistic animations is fun. Especially when you add motion blur. Motion blur is the stuff we take for granted when we're watching movies-- and you're watching stuff that was shot with a camera-- and optically what happens is if something is moving so fast that it occupies more than one frame, then you get blur. That motion blur is used all the time-- we see it in music videos, sports videos, it creates a dramatic effect. If you have a shutter speed fast enough-- let's say there's a diving competition and you see the guy spinning around and they stop him just before he hits the water, there's no motion blur. So if you have a fast enough shutter you'll capture that. You'll also run into times when you're creating an animation in something like After Effects, and stuff is moving around, and it doesn't have a motion blur. Even though you've turned motion blur on! This happens with videos. Well, I've got lots of ways to fix those, including how to add it with animations, how to add it with our presets, and how to add it with any video that's got something moving inside it. Let's have a look. I'm just going to grab a simple shape up here, and draw a shape--just a rectangle. Go down into my settings here, and just hit the R key for rotations, set a key frame at the beginning, go to the end, and let's make this go around 20 times. There we go. So it's spinning fast as the dickens-- no motion blur at all-- because motion blur is turned off by default. So it's just not on. Where's motion blur? It's down here for each layer, so I'll click it on here, and it's over here, this is the switch that turns it on for the full composition. So now, even though we've stopped moving, we can see what the motion blur looks like in that frame. I'm going to hit my 0 key and preview this to RAM-- holy smokes--look at that--let's turn that down a little bit. Instead of 20 revolutions, let's try 10. Now we can see--we still get motion blur, just less of it because it's moving slower. Sometimes when you're working with animations and After Effects you have to pre-compose something, which means you have to put a layer into another composition and nest that layer. So I'll do that with this one right here, I'll just move this over, duplicate it, put it in another comp, and there it is, and you'll notice that both of them have motion blur set on them right now, and if I turn off this button here-- that's our switch for motion blur-- it turns off the motion blur for both: the comp and the nested comp. Inside your presets, which is in the after effects menu on the Mac, or the edit menu on Windows, general, this setting here--switches effect nested comps-- if that's turned off, and you turn this switch off, it won't affect. So, very simple: the switch is turning everything off by default. But, if you want to keep the motion blur from the other one on, then you simply make that change-- I'm going to go back and change it. Then I want that--switches effect nested comps. So now, everything is either blurred, or not blurred when I turn that on. See? There we go. Okay. Also notice that when you have animations that are created from our presets-- so I'm just going to grab some type here-- and I'll type the word motion, and let's just grab one of our motion presets, so--over in our presets, if I browse the presets, it launches bridge-- and we've got our text presets, animate in, we've got lots of different ways to animate in, we've got some that shuffle in-- oh, there we go--that's a good one. Random shuffle in. I'll double click on that and apply it, hit my 0 key, there's our motion, let's add some motion blur to that, so I'll turn motion blur on that, and now let's move it back, look at that-- each one of those characters blurring in very nicely. Just love that effect. It just adds that final little sense of realism on something moving, it just feels right, you don't have to know anything about animation, motion graphics, it's just-- when you do that, it just feels right. Okay. So then we grab a video, and we start to edit that. This was shot with the Panasonic HPX500, and there's our video--we've got lots of motion in here. I can see tons of motion--oh-- let's add some motion blur. So, just like before, I turn on motion blur, and then I turn it on here-- how come I don't have any motion? Because nothing's moving. Nothing's moving as far as After Effects is concerned, because remember--this is a two-dimensional window of this video. And what is it doing? Is it moving? No. It's sitting there in one place. The pixels are moving, but the asset is not moving. So--how do we get around it? Well, there's three different ways to work on this. One is called CC Force Motion Blur, and when I turn this on, you'll see some motion blur. Let me twirl this down and show you some of the effects: we can change the shutter angle-- so you can see that's adding some motion blur to this-- replay that--you can see now all of their movements have that motion blur on it. It's okay. To me, it's just not as real. It's a little bit thin is the way I would describe it. Well, we have another effect inside After Effects called Time Warp, and I've done another demonstration on how you use this for retiming video. But, if we use Time Warp at 100% speed-- so I'm not changing the speed-- I'm just using this to enable motion blur. Because, you see, down here I can enable motion blur and I've decided to not use automatic, I used the manual setting, and I'm changing this to 200. And--what you will find is that this does take a little bit of time to calculate inside After Effect. Now we're starting to get some motion blur. Look at that. I'll turn that off, and turn that on. And you can see how it's focusing in those areas, so let me just do a RAM preview on some of these frames. Time Warp is really really sophisticated. It interpolates or adds all this extra information, it's vector-based, it's incredible, but it does take time. I'm sitting here on a MacBook Pro, so it's not really the most robust system to show this on, but you get the idea. Now we're going to start to get motion-- watch when his arm comes forward-- we should--there we go. We start to get more of that motion blur happening in there. Especially right there--look at that. More motion blur, just like that. Boy he gets close, I hope he doesn't hit him. Alright. But you want to know the Cadillac of all motion blur tools is ReVision ReelSmart motion blur. Let's have a look at that. I'll turn off Time Warp and turn on ReVision ReelSmart motion blur. Look at that--wow--beautiful! Beautiful big fluid motion blur, and if I twirled this down, and you can look at these settings, we've got a blur amount, and we have a sensitivity. So, as I turn the sensitivity down, I can turn it off. As I make the video more sensitive, so it's looking at more of the pixels, then you'll see more motion blur. Also notice, if I move to an area when his hand is moving forward and I'll really start to turn up the blur amount. Where is the blur occurring? That's what is important is that you see all this blur occurring. So let me just go back and reset this to its default setting, turn up the motion--well, look at that! What is the thing that's moving the most? His arm moving back gets more of the weight of the blur, making it much more realistic. So--as I said--you can use CC Force motion blur inside After Effects, or our own Time Warp effect, they do an okay job--I mean, Time Warp does a better job-- but if you want some really realistic effects, and even some special effects, if you can push it a little bit too far and get some really crazy effects, then ReVision ReelSmart motion blur. So that's the idea of working in After Effects with motion blur-- controlling it, adding it to animation, presets, and any video that you bring in. [ADOBE® TV] [tv.adobe.com]
