Goodbye ND filters? Adding 180 degree shutter look in post

[Andrew Reid]

I am experimenting with a few techniques to do this, but looking for suggestions.

In VLC Player if you go into the effects panel where is a motion blur slider, and obviously if you put that on high it looks very over the top.

However I found if I put it on very low, it really does reproduce the motion blur of 180 degree shutter, with footage shot at a fast shutter speed.

The look is very authentic!

However what should be easy in Premiere and Resolve never is. The tutorials I've seen all deal with adding motion blur in the Transform panel to moving layers. Not what we want. There is an echo tool, but that doesn't look any good at all - tons of ghosting and takes ages to render, won't play in real-time.

So the question is - what plugin for Premiere or Resolve does what VLC Player does!?

[heart0less]

Resolve offers something like this. It's quite good, actually.
Did you give it a whirl?

 

[androidlad]

If you wanna do it properly for professional work, there's a dedicated plug-in for adding motion blur called ReelSmart Motion Blur:

https://revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/premiere-pro/

It has a number of parameters for fine tuning and allows you to add precise amount of blur based on captured shutter angle and desired shutter angle.

[gt3rs]

1 hour ago, heart0less said:

Resolve offers something like this. It's quite good, actually.
Did you give it a whirl?

 

Yep we posted in another thread about adding motion back using Resolve..... I did experiment more so it depends a lot on the scene and background as just a tad of blur does not add too many artifacts in case of complex bg like a metallic fence can cause bad artifacts.
My test was a show jumping horse in a parkour the goal is to pull picture at 1/250 or 1/500 and have a usable video. 

So to an untrained eye you can fool them but for real pro work not sure I would use it. But in case where photo has priority I will definitely use it. 

[gt3rs]

This is a frame pulled from the video at 1/200 (for a photo a bit on the limit as you can see on the horse legs that are a bit too blurry), I have the video with added mention blur if I have the time I can pull the frame with the blur to compare.

Forget the horrible location etc. as here most of the things are still closed.

 

Goal is to provide picture like this but also some video snippets for social media etc.. this is a photo that I took at 1/1000.... so probably something 1/400 maybe a good compromise....  

[Emanuel]

I'd rather play with PotPlayer than with VLC... Just sayin' : ) Good tips above : -)

[Video Hummus]

1 hour ago, androidlad said:

If you wanna do it properly for professional work, there's a dedicated plug-in for adding motion blur called ReelSmart Motion Blur:

https://revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/premiere-pro/

It has a number of parameters for fine tuning and allows you to add precise amount of blur based on captured shutter angle and desired shutter angle.

This has been used in professional Hollywood films so it’s probably pretty good.

I’ve seen other people on YouTube talk about it and use it to ditch having to use ND filters. It’s very CPU intensive though with something like 7-10 mins to process 1 minute of video.

[Andrew Reid]

Excellent stuff guys.

I'll give the techniques a go and write a blog about it.

[Geoff CB]

The one in resolve is  close enough that I'm not going to use ND's for shots on my Z6 anymore.

Also for VFX work results are far better when you pull a key off a high shutter speed and then add the motion blur in post. Makes cleaning up hair work far easier.

[kye]

20 minutes ago, Geoff CB said:

The one in resolve is  close enough that I'm not going to use ND's for shots on my Z6 anymore.

Since I found out about the Motion Blur feature in Resolve I think I'll probably ditch NDs as well.  

I had it on my list to do some A/B tests and see how well it worked, so I'm looking forward to seeing what Andrew finds and reading the blog post.

[Video Hummus]

25 minutes ago, Geoff CB said:

The one in resolve is  close enough that I'm not going to use ND's for shots on my Z6 anymore.

 

2 minutes ago, kye said:

Since I found out about the Motion Blur feature in Resolve I think I'll probably ditch NDs as well.

What’s the performance like? I wonder if resolve’s implementation is GPU accelerated?

[Geoff CB]

3 minutes ago, Video Hummus said:

 

What’s the performance like? I wonder if resolve’s implementation is GPU accelerated?

It is GPU accelerated, I get Realtime playback in 4K on my GTX 2080. Just did this quick test to show how effective it is. 

It's not perfect, but it's so close that 99.9% of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Titles go faster than I expected but you get the gist. 
 

 

[Andrew Reid]

Yep. Definitely calms the image and blends away the staccato motion cadence.

Maybe it's worth doing one pass on all clips - converting to ProRes from H.265 in the process too.

[kye]

2 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Yep. Definitely calms the image and blends away the staccato motion cadence.

Maybe it's worth doing one pass on all clips - converting to ProRes from H.265 in the process too.

I'd be interested to see some stress-testing of it, like Lok did on digital rev when he did star-jumps and it really emphasised the effect.  Ultimately it will come down to the motion detection and estimation so it knows what to blur.

In Resolve it would be pretty easy to bake the effect in while converting - just drag all clips to the timeline and then do an export and set it so that all the clips are individually exported.  This workflow would also work if converting from RAW, and would handily be a place to apply LUTs any other things that always get added to your grades.

[colepat]

I am excited to see what you find Andrew. I have always wished there was a good (and fairly quick) way of doing it in either Premiere or FCPX, but the ones I have seen are not great and/or take too long to be worth it when I could just throw an ND on. But it would be great if there was.....

[Deadcode]

ReelSmart Motion Blur can give you nice results, however in complex scenes there are a tons of glitches. 

Make a selfie video and wave to the camera. Or just follow a moving object like a car while turning with the camera.

But if you record in 50p and your timeline is 25p you can get better results.

[tweak]

52 minutes ago, Deadcode said:

ReelSmart Motion Blur can give you nice results, however in complex scenes there are a tons of glitches. 

Make a selfie video and wave to the camera. Or just follow a moving object like a car while turning with the camera.

But if you record in 50p and your timeline is 25p you can get better results.

I'm thinking about using it for 160fps footage where I want slo-mo but also ability to play in real time at 180degree shutter look.

[kye]

8 hours ago, Deadcode said:

But if you record in 50p and your timeline is 25p you can get better results.

 

7 hours ago, tweak said:

I'm thinking about using it for 160fps footage where I want slo-mo but also ability to play in real time at 180degree shutter look.

These would require the blur to essentially simulate a 360 shutter, or in the case of 160fps -> 25fps it would involve simulating a 1152 degree shutter!

I guess there's no reason why you couldn't do that, it would simply blur the motion significantly more than the object moves in each source frame.

Of course, this depends on the order of operations - if the motion blur is applied after the speed change then the input to the effect might only be the frames that survived the speed change, so extra frame rate wouldn't help the accuracy of the effect. 

[tweak]

Surely you would apply after the speed change, doesn't seem logical to do it before.

[kye]

31 minutes ago, tweak said:

Surely you would apply after the speed change, doesn't seem logical to do it before.

I think the point that @Deadcode was making was that the extra frames can help the motion estimation better, which makes sense, although I'm not sure that it would actually work that way in how they would have likely implemented the video processing pipeline.