After Effects Time Lapse Motion Blur

[strausd]

Hi, I have a 10 minute shot of a highway at night that I want to speed up and give motion blur to the cars moving. If you look at this video, specifically 21 seconds in, you can see that the cars all have motion blur on them. This is the effect I am wanting to get.

I have tried it using twixtor, but the only way I get anything close is by bumping up the motion blur compensation. But if I bump it up to only .36, it looks awful. Does anyone know how I can get this effect?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Have you tried this?
Car Light trails In After Effects Tutorials

 

[strausd]

That tutorial looks to be on the extreme side of what I am going for, I want to still be able to see cars, and not just their lights, more like in the video I posted. And I would like to use the footage I already have, not use a still and animate on top of it.

Also, at 44 seconds in, there is a big crowd of people and they all have motion blur when they move, so does the water fountain in the clip right after it.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You could combine the method I linked to with your approach.
Maybe you could take a look at any of the other tutorials for light trails, or you could ask at CreativeCow (a forum dedicated to DCC) how to achieve this.

 

[strausd]

Ive looked through creative cow and they only talk about using stills with long shutter speeds and have nothing to do with actual video footage. As for other tutorials of light trails, I have not found any.

The only information I have found that somewhat pertains to the effect I am going for is using a plug-in called reelsmart motion blur, the downside is its cost and I don't have money to spend on that at the moment. I was wondering if anyone on here knew how to achieve the same effect, or close to, without using that plug-in.

 

[wonderspark]

If you look closely, you can see how the effect was achieved. These were sets of stills shot whereby the shutter is open for, say, three seconds. Then the downtime between the shots is as short as possible, to get a continuous capture of the time. You can see this in the headlights of the cars; they are streaks with small gaps between them, which is when the car was moving between exposures. It's tricky, and I'm still working on my skills in this area.

I'd have to experiment a bit myself to achieve this myself using straight video footage. Did you enable Motion Blur on the track, and try using the directional blur effect? Perhaps create a mask of the roadway only, and try layering the same clip twice... one with straight sped up video and the other with the blur effect masked only over the roadway.

 

[strausd]

If you look closely, you can see how the effect was achieved. These were sets of stills shot whereby the shutter is open for, say, three seconds. Then the downtime between the shots is as short as possible, to get a continuous capture of the time. You can see this in the headlights of the cars; they are streaks with small gaps between them, which is when the car was moving between exposures. It's tricky, and I'm still working on my skills in this area.

I'd have to experiment a bit myself to achieve this myself using straight video footage. Did you enable Motion Blur on the track, and try using the directional blur effect? Perhaps create a mask of the roadway only, and try layering the same clip twice... one with straight sped up video and the other with the blur effect masked only over the roadway.

Ya, I know how to do it with stills, thats simple. But my goal is to use the footage I have now. I was wondering if there was any software that could look and see what pixels are changing and which ones are staying still in order to create motion blur. Yes, I have motion blur enabled on the layers and the comp, so that is not the issue.

I got trial version of reelsmart motion blur, but after a certain point it looks just as bad as motion blur compensation with twixtor.

If he did it with stills, chances are he had an external controller to take evenly spaced shots and to do them right after another, not hard at all considering the controller does it all for you.

 

[imagestreamTAB]

Final Cut and Motion have a motion blur setting that is not like the motion blur in AE. They will generate blur on objects that are moving in the frame. This works on any footage. So, let's say you have a static camera shot of cars driving down the road. The cars will blur but the road and other non-moving objects will remain unblurred. If a car stops in the frame, the blur reduces to nothing as it slows and stops. This setting is accessed in the Motion settings of a clip in FCP. In Motion, there's a filter under the Time category, called Trails. I'm not sure how it will work with your time lapse footage, but it might be worth a look.

 

[handsome pete]

If he did it with stills, chances are he had an external controller to take evenly spaced shots and to do them right after another, not hard at all considering the controller does it all for you.

It's not quite that simple. There's still a lot of adjustment and work regarding shutter speed, aperture, etc. I suppose you could also leave it on auto, but it does take some work to get a quality timelapse.

Regardless, the link you posted was all done in camera. You can try to fake it in post with some of the mentioned suggestions, but you're probably never going to get it to look as good as if it was done practically.

 

[strausd]

Thanks for the replies. I will try to FCP route tomorrow. Lately I have been having some serious problems with FCP. It would constantly crash for some reason. I had about an hours worth of footage I was editing that was taken on my 60D. I didn't use any of the log and transfer options, instead I just took the video files from the card, copied to HD, and moved them into the project from drag and drop. I am fairly new to FCP so I'm not sure if that was the right way to do it.

I will try the FCP route for motion blur and post back on here how well, if at all, it worked.

 

[handsome pete]

Thanks for the replies. I will try to FCP route tomorrow. Lately I have been having some serious problems with FCP. It would constantly crash for some reason. I had about an hours worth of footage I was editing that was taken on my 60D. I didn't use any of the log and transfer options, instead I just took the video files from the card, copied to HD, and moved them into the project from drag and drop. I am fairly new to FCP so I'm not sure if that was the right way to do it.

I will try the FCP route for motion blur and post back on here how well, if at all, it worked.

For 60d footage you need to transcode through log and transfer, compressor, or 3rd party software like mpeg streamclip. You cannot edit those files natively.

 

[way2smurfy]

Hmm

using that tutorial as a jumping off point why don't you animate the start and end values of the 3d stroke to match the movement of the cars. Video copilot has some tutorials that simulate the light trail effect reminiscent of the old Ipod commercials. Using FCp won't really get you anywhere sorry to say. Slowing down the footage will only go so far. You are going to have to build the effect in AE or similar program.