Have you tried the Motion Blur envelope in Vegas? (it's on the video bus track).

Motion Blur is part of the Motion Effects package from NewBlue.
It's $140 though so definitely check out musicvid's suggestion.

Mike

Motion blur Envelope applies blur based on trackmotion and pan/crop motion, not pixel movement inside of the video.

As far as the Motion Blur toolsets in NewBlue, that doesn't do much different than the linear blur in Vegas in terms of the way it is applied (It also doesn't access the pixel movement inside the video file).

So neither of those would apply the blur to the car and not the rest of the footage. You could always go through and Roto the car out and separately apply slight blur, and then that would *sort of work*, but you'd have a TON of work to do. and it wouldn't do as well as the plug-in in AE.

You could send me the clips and I'd do the work for you for a very fair price, if you haven't got AE.


Dave

Dave,

I hate to disagree, but I just double checked by applying it to a clip and rendering it out. The Motion Blur envelope on the video master buss does apply pixel based blur. Items in the frame that move are blurred and static items remain clear. The wording in the help file was an example of use not a limitation.

Vic, a motion blur envelope may do what you want. You also may want to look at adding super sampling (another envelope on the master video buss) and see what that does first. When speeding things up or down, or animating them, super sampling tries to create the intermediate frames rather than repeating them. I find it very helpful in slow motion. I am not sure how much it will help when speeding things up.

BTW, super sampling and motion blur can REALLY SLOW down your render.

In this scenario Supersampling does nothing, it only works on animations created in Vegas. It creates tween frames to give smoother motion blur. If Vegas had motion tracking it could be quite useful. As it stands with Vegas all SS is doing is using up a lot of your CPU.

I suspect in Victor's case with the truck filling a large part of the frame and the fast shutter speed all Vegas's MB is going to do is create quite visible ghost frames that'll look pretty wierd and nothing like real MB. You can try to fix that by using directional Gaussain Blur but that will blur everything.
You can get around this by first isolating the moving objects with a mask(s) onto their own tracks, then work on them. Probably not too much work.

at the end of the day a job much better tried in AE, it's pixel by pixel tracking and time remapping is very good although it's possible to break it. I've had good success getting 4x speedup with the right footage of pouring liquids.

Bob.

Hi,

This is very interesting discussion and worth of continue. I would like to know finally how VIDEO BUS envelopes work. I'm quite sure they CAN affect on pixel level but algoritm of creating motion blur or especially extra frames in not very well described in Vegas help.

Issue is important in both cases : slow motion and fast motion. For me slomo is more difficult to achieve (my camera can only shot in 50p mode) and I'm looking good mechanism to extrapolate frames when velocity is very slow. I have red descriptions of soft like Motion Perfect but did not test it. Is it comparable with Vegas supersampling ?

And general questions : is it possible to achieve good looking slomo in Vegas ?

Best regards,

"I would like to know finally how VIDEO BUS envelopes work"

The MB envelope works by compositing frames before and/or after the current one with the current one. How it is done is determined by the project wide setting in the project settings. For example any "symmetric" options will use frame before and after current. This is a useful but not optically correct value, a camera doesn't see into the future :). The aysmmetric gaussian seems to the most optically correct. None of these are really anything like the real deal as happens in a camera.

Superampling works with Vegas animations. Say you rotate an object 180deg between two frames. If you set the SS envelope to 4 then Vegas will create tween frames at 45deg rotations of the object. This will give you quite reasonable MB although in such an extreme example I'd wind the SS envlope as high as it can go.

In theory nothing can do perfect slomo in post, the data was not recorded by the camera, it is that simple. If you want perfect slomo use a high speed camera. You can get quite good results using pixel by pixel motion tracking...or not. It depends on the problem of oclusion to some extent and the ability of the software to separate the various objects and their motion.
One important tip. If you know you're going to do slomo in post then use a faster shutter speed. For example is you were shooting 25fps your normal shutter speed would be 1/50. If you planned to slow that down 4x then use a shutter speed of 1/200 or 1/250.

Here is an example of mine showing how pixel by pixel motion tracking can get fooled:



Here's an example of SuperSampling used in Vegas:



Here's an example of motion blur done using Vegas at the end of the clip:



Here's an example of doing slomo using After Effects, shot at 60fps and slowed to simulate 240fps on Vimeo.

Bob.

Excellent explanations Bob and great samples.

Hi Bob,

Thank you for answer. I'm trying to find solution for slomo in Vegas. I will use 50p camera with faster shutter speed. In Vegas I will mix my movie with CGI (mostly from Bluff Titler : this content is rendered with alpha usually as 200p to achieve slow and extremely smooth logo elements). Up to this moment everthing is clear for me. But next steps are :

1) change project setting to 200p or even higher
2) change clip properties setting to min value (0.25)
3) use velocity curve in order to achieve extra slomo, almost freeze picture.

As you have said : there is no picture registered in file (camera did not catch reality with such big frame rate) and all my attempts are artificial (especially motion blur can't be symmetric to render reality). My target is just to decrease stuttering and improve smooth. I need some extra frames. If I wiil use low supersampling, then Vegas will just copy frames to match from 50p to 200p.

But what's going on with max supersampling ? Are extra frames especially calculated with "pixel to pixel motion tracking" ? Is somewhere algoritm description or comparision to other products (AE or MotionPerfect or AVIsynth) ?

I'm still not quite sure that supersampling is only effective with Vegas animations (pan/crop or track motion of bold elements is really heavy task and I can see that supersampling can improve effect). But question is : can it make effect on movie ?

Best regards,

"But what's going on with max supersampling ? Are extra frames especially calculated with "pixel to pixel motion tracking" ? Is somewhere algoritm description or comparision to other products (AE or MotionPerfect or AVIsynth) ?

The extra frames are not calculated using any form of motion tracking, Vegas does not have that capability.
What happens is this.
Vegas knows how far you've moved something because Vegas is doing the animation. In my example video I'm using track motion to rotate something. Based on the value is the SS envelope (say 4) Vegas simply divides all the values to calculate where the object would be at say 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 of the time between frames.

After Effects does have the capability to do motion tracking, even pixel by pixel and the render times for HD are considerable. Plugins that work in AVISynth can also do the same. Image stabilisation software using the same concept.

If you don't want to spend the money on AE then AVISynth is what I'd start learning. Our resident guru on AVISynth was John Meyer but he no longer posts here.
Here's an example he did some time ago comparing slomo in Vegas with MVTools:



If you want to persue MVTools it is free.

Bob.

MVtools can help a lot if used the right way.

Following John's advice I used it with some success. It will never compare with overcranking but one can get acceptable results if the footage allows a good computation of new frames.

For RRA: here are two tests I did some time ago. First one was made with deliberately excessive values. Second one used more conservative MVtools arguments to convert from 25fps to 50fps slowmo with velocity enveloppes applied to slow down even more.

http://www.vimeo.com/11142688

http://www.vimeo.com/11170101

Never been so happy to be wrong Keith!

I'm never sorry to be shown I'm mistaken when I gain a new tool in the process :D

Dave

I think the clue to using these tools is to shoot to make it easier for them to work their magic.
Reduced noise, camera movement and a subject that can be easily separated from the background would help a lot along with a fast shutter speed to minimise motion blur.

Bob.