Motion Blurring footage

After poking around, it seems smart to ask what the best option is for this. I don't have the Optical Flow tools in 8, and perhaps those may be just what I need. Reading the manual descriptions doesn't really give any comparison of the different methods available.

Would I need to purchase ReelSmart's Motion Blur, or can I do it within Fusion 8? This isn't a 3d scene, so I don't have vector information. Some of the available methods seem to need vector information. I did experiment with Trails, and it helps, but it really doesn't blur the footage of course. Or can it be done with the tools in Fusion 9 if I upgrade, or is ReelSmart's plugin best for the job?

Thanks for your help,
Rick

If you buy the studio version you get the optical flow tools which can generate vectors from the footage and then use them to generate motion blur.

To use the reelsmart motion blur plugin you would also need the studio version

Ahhhh....I was wondering about that possibility on the plugin. Their website says it works with 7 and higher, but I also thought it might require the full version. I am one of "the old guys" who started in the industry decades ago. I don't really see myself completely retiring. And it looks like I have a great chance at doing some large-scale production work again, at which time, I will move to the full version. Right now, I am tinkering and learning.

So, just to be sure I'm fully understanding this, Fusion's Optical Flow tools will automatically generate the vectors from the frames of footage and add the correct motion blur without needing to use the hand-created polygonal mask technique I have seen....correct?

Thanks again for the info and help.

Best,
Rick

the optical flow node will create a vector pass which contains the motion of the pixels in the footage, with this pass you can create motion blur in the vector motion blur node.

the reel smart motionblur does the same thing, creating vectors from the footage and then use them to blur the image.

Thanks, Michael!

Best,
Rick

Some tips if you decide to go the OFlow route:

It takes some time and patience to get good results from optical flow. Sometimes it's useful to adjust the gamma of the image you're generating vectors from to get better accuracy. You can also do some post-processing on the vectors themselves to smooth out artifacts. A localized blur or dilate, or even a gain adjustment, can help to control things. Optical flow isn't as precise as vectors generated from CG, so sometimes you have to take some liberties with the data that you wouldn't otherwise.

Prerender your Optical Flow to float32. It's a time-consuming process, and having an active node in your tree will seriously reduce interactivity.

Objects showing significant parallax may need to be rotoscoped, flowed, and blurred or retimed separately to prevent edge artifacts.

And at the end of the day, I find I usually have to touch up some remaining artifacts by painting.

Thanks, Bryan...

I was hoping not to have to rotoscope, but I guess we'll see. Thanks for the tips. This will be interesting
to see how well the basic function works without a lot of man-hours.

Best,
Rick