trying to build a traditional rostrum camera application with blender

Support Materials and Textures
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I am a bit of a newbie to blender.

I am trying to trying to build a traditional video/film rostrum camera application with blender.

I have set up a camera and can do the necessary animation to make the camera move in and out over an image and render it out to a video file to edit into a video programme. The photo image is lit by a flat area light.

I am having a few problems with the material settings though of the photo.

I have set up a plane and made a material and added a texture where I have imported an image. I have then set up the UV mapping. But this process is quite slow and needs customizing for each picture to be rostrumed

  1. Is there a simple way to import an image as a plane at the aspect of the image that will show up in the view preview.

  2. I can’t seem to find a way to set the shutter on the camera to give a bit of motion blur. Does this need to be done in the compositor?

  3. Is there a way to speed up the render as even on a 6 core Mac pro it takes a couple of seconds to do a render of each frame at HD resolution. I expect my setting are too high or it is doing too many passes? Any suggestions?

  4. What is the OpenGL render engine like compared to the default

thanks

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  1. Is there a simple way to import an image as a plane at the aspect of the image that will show up in the view preview.

File / User Prefernces / Addons / Import-Export, activate the Images as Planes addon
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Add_Mesh/Planes_from_Images

  1. I can’t seem to find a way to set the shutter on the camera to give a bit of motion blur. Does this need to be done in the compositor?

Or in Render settings under ‘Sampled Motion Blur’ but slower than the compositors vector blur.

  1. What is the OpenGL render engine like compared to the default

Press the button and see for yourself

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Area lights can eat render time if they are set for raytracing. If you are looking for your images on planes to be perfectly lit across the surface, use the Shadeless option in the Materials/Shading section instead. No lamps required then and it renders much faster, even at high image resolutions.

Aside from using the Images as Planes add-on, if you need an image to exactly fit a plane, make sure the plane has dimensions that have the same aspect ratio as the image, and use Generated/Flat as the Mapping options. Faster than the UV method.

For perfectly flat-plane rendering, consider also using the Orthographic option for your camera. It’s a little different than using Perspective mode but works very well for rostrum-type animation moves. I’m currently using it to do multiplane background animations made from hand-separated photographic plates, works very well.