FX Request: Pixel tracked motion blur

[Wolf In A Bowl]

This is a request for a motion blur effect that operates by tracking pixels instead of using the motion of a column, pegbar, table, or camera.

An example of such an effect implemented in other software would be Revision FX's ReelSmart Motion Blur, or similarly, Adobe After Effects' Pixel Motion Blur.

Why:

I think such an effect would be greatly beneficial as OT cannot currently blur a series of frames based on pixel differences - it can only apply blur to movement created by animating the position, scale, or rotation of a column, pegbar, table, or camera.

If one were to want to blur the arm of a character using the current effects, one may have to make use of directional, spin, and radial blurs and animate their properties, in combination with masking, to get the desired result.

Whereas the use of pixel tracked motion blur would immediately blur only the parts of the character detected to be in motion.

Frame by frame animated FX, such as a sparkler, magical burst, smoke, or flying debris, are difficult to blur as they are comprised of elements moving in various directions at various speeds and as such, no existing blur effect can produce accurate results without lots of manual work.

In addition, blurring particle effects, e.g. rain, snow, sparks, smoke, leaves, petals, etc; is not possible to achieve accurately i.e. based on the motion of each individual particle as each particle would need to be blurred with individual intensity and direction. Directional blurs are fine if all particles are travelling in a similar direction, e.g. rain, but no solution exists for accurately blurring a particle based on its rotation speed or actual movement.

ReelSmart Motion Blur:

https://vimeo.com/130816568

https://revisionfx.com/faq/motion_vector/

After Effects:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/how-to/aftereffects-pixel-motion-blur-cc.html

[Rodney]

Have you investigated the Motion Blur Ino FX?

I was under the impression that FX took into account pixels.

[Wolf In A Bowl]

MotionBlur, MotionBlurIno, and MotionBlurIwa operate based on motion created by animating position, scale, and rotation and not based on pixels, this is analagous to After Effects' per-layer motion blur wherein only changes to a layer's postion, scale, and rotation have any effect.

This is different from pixel tracking solutions like the aforementioned ReelSmart Motion Blur which are able to apply blur within prerendered footage based on detected motion i.e. camera or subject motion.

From MotionBlurIwa's help page:

'If "Own Motion" is specified, tracks the movement of the column of the input image.'

A quick way to test this is to use vector tweening to animate a movement rather than using keyframes to animate position; as the movement is on a frame-by-frame basis, no MotionBlur FX produce any blurring.

Edit:

From the docs, on the MotionBlur effect:

'The movement has to be defined by an animated column, pegbar or table: the higher the speed, the more visible the effect.'