Hi,
I made a 2D parallax video and after uploading it to you tube I noticed some motion blur. The original version was 24fps so I upped it to 60fps which helped but there’s still some blur. I have motion blur un-ticked in render settings. My friend says it looks smooth on his screen but he has a 120fps monitor and I think most people don’t.
Its more noticeable in fullscreen
What I see is not motion blur but strobing, which motion blur usually smoothes out. A higher frame rate may help in a native playback, but all online video display sites like YouTube and Vimeo do video conversions that probably reduce the benefits of high frame rates. You can confirm this by looking at the video in Pause – the frames show no motion blur at all. Motion blur is actually rendered into the frame image, so in pause it would still be quite visible.
Your friend’s 120fps monitor refreshes so fast that the video blurring is much less noticeable.
Also, did you increase the number of frames rendered @ 60 fps? if not, that would only speed up the action in Blender’s playback, or, if you render direct to video formats, in local playback of the original video. But the site may convert that to 30fps as part of their standard, so you get playback there at “normal” speed.
Hi Chip,
I didn’t mess around with much, just made sure motion blur was unchecked and changed to 60fps in the drop down. I havent actually tried adding motion blur, maybe that’s worth a try. It just seems the look im going for is spoiled because you can’t see the details. The only other thing I can think of is slowing the scrolling animation down a little. The first test was really fast, I would say this is medium.
All this would do is speed up the animation playback, if your machine can actually play it back that fast in Blender. If you render direct to a video format (not a good idea for a number of reasons) it will also have 60fps and play back 2.5x faster than @ 24fps. But many video playback apps don’t handle higher FPS all that well, and conversion is likely to render it useless.
This is true of all types of animation, but at 24-30 fps, you should get a decent amount of detail and relatively smooth animation. Strobing usually shows when the action is fast and there is no motion blur. Motion blur is a consequence of our eyes having no shutter mechanism like a camera – we do not see in frames – and so when it occurs in movies (there are a number of ways it can be introduced and controlled in both film & digital photography) we don’t notice it, our brains allow for it. When it is NOT present the look can be artificial, hence strobing.
I’m not exactly sure why there was so much strobing in YouTube’s conversion, just that the source is not motion blur in Blender.
If you slow the animation it will help with the strobing, as that usually occurs with higher-speed actions and no motion blur. But be sure to slow it by increasing the number of frames rendered, which is the only proper way to extend the time an animated sequence lasts. Plan on 30fps as your standard because sites like YouTube do best with that, although 24fps is of course quite acceptable.
Can you tell me what you mean by increasing the number of frames rendered? I haven’t really deviated from the default render settings much in my blender life
OK, here’s the skinny: At 30 fps second (frames per second) 1 second of animation requires 30 frames rendered. So, if the same action is to now last 2 seconds, it will need 60 frames rendered (60 frames/30fps = 2 seconds animation length). You can do this by scaling all the animation keys along the X-axis (time) in the Dope Sheet or Graph Editor, or by setting the Time Remapping option to 100 Old, 200 New. This last option can be confusing because of the way it changes how the Timeline works, but can also be very accurate and simpler than scaling.
Yes, reducing the fps for playback will slow the animation but also amplify any problems with strobing and stuttering, and is not a good choice for slowing things down.
Just as an example, in film cinematography, 24fps is the standard and cameras take (expose) 24 still frames per second. Most can be “overcranked” up to around 48fps (slowing the action by a factor of 2), but for the real slomo stuff, specialized high-speed cameras are used that can take thousands of frames per second. With these specialized instruments, actions like a bullet bursting a balloon, that happen in less than the blink of an eye, can be filmed so the same action lasts 30 seconds or so. But instead of taking a couple of frames @ 24fps, the high-speed cameras take thousands. By the same token, you need to increase the number of frames rendered for any particular action.
aha i can see the time remapping option. I’ll have a tinker around with that. Thanks for the help!
Just be aware that with Time Remapping, scrubbing and finding particular frames in the Timeline and Editors can be a little confusing.
yeah, it looks funky. luckily there wont be a huge amount of parallax shots so i’m hoping it wont be all that bad.