Motion Blur on text or motion graphics in Premiere Pro with the Transform Effect

 I have to admit I didn’t know about this until fairly recently. I have always been disturbed by the lack of Motion Blur in Premiere Pro, when it was in Final Cut Pro 7 and so easy to turn on (though the render time was brutal). And likely that is why I missed it here, because I always just used the standard Transform effects within every object.

And the standard Transform effect does not have a motion blur, to get a motion blur on text or a shape in Premiere you need to use the Transform Effect in Video Effects, Distort Category.

The Transform effects add these controls.

If you use the Transform effect to move objects you can turn off Use Compositions’s Shutter Angle and change the Shutter Angle to get a motion blur.

0 is no motion blur and 360 is max motion blur, but 180 is normal motion blur (a 180 degree shutter on a film camera).

I am in a 23.976 sequence and created a simple Essential Graphics text object.

I created as simple animation with it coming from the top and moving to this position over 12 frames within the Transform Effect.

This is half way through the move with 180 degree shutter.

This is with 360 as the shutter angle.

And this is with a 90 degree shutter:

So it is very easy to have motion blur on a moving object in Premiere Pro using the Transform Effect.

Now if this effect is in here, I don’t see why Adobe can’t just add the same controls into the normal move controls, so you can get motion blur without using this effect, and make it as easy as it was in Final Cut Pro 7, you just switched it on in the timeline window.

I am assuming they would have to rewrite all the normal transform controls, but hell it would be worthwhile, as it should just function like this.

Still at least Motion blur is here and is able to be used within Premiere without having to go to After Effects.

Adobe Announced Creative Cloud pro with unlimited access to Adobe Stock

 

Adobe has announced Adobe Creative Cloud Pro Edition at it’s Adobe Blog. This is just like the normal version of Creative Cloud but the with the addition of unlimited access to over 200 million assets from Adobe Stock.

The price is the same as Creative Cloud for teams at $79.99 a month for a year and $89.99 a month after that.

For individual users this only makes sense if you use a lot of stock and templates, but for businesses this could end up being a huge money saver, and well worth it.

The Hidden cost of Apple changing it’s hardware architecture for editors and motion graphics artist is plug-ins

 

So of course Apple is moving to the M1 processor for all of it’s computers, moving away from intel. This is the 3rd hardware switch Apple has made, from it’s initial motorola processors, to power pc, to the ARM based M1 processors. And while the current M1 is very fast, but not a pro processor, especially with shared graphics and normal ram and a limit of 16 GB of total RAM. 

For everyone sticking with Apple this will eventually mean new hardware to move to M1 from Intel, though for a few years at least Apple will continue to support Intel hardware.

The hidden cost though, that is something different, and for a professional editor or motion graphics artist the hidden cost is plugs-ins.

Plug-ins can be an expensive investment, but can really help your workflow and speed things up and let you do things that couldn’t do without them. And the move to M1 will certainly be a paid upgrade, even for those still on Intel hardware. And those plugs in upgrades can cost hundreds, and over the upcoming period there are going to be a lot of upgrades to M1.

And while DaVinci and Final Cut Pro X already run on M1’s and the Premiere Pro Beta runs on M1, to get your old plug-ins to run you have to run them via Rosetta 2, which means running the Intel based versions of the host software to get the plug-ins working. And that is going to mean running the software slower through emulation, and could cause many issues and add more stability issues.

Now of course subscription based plug-ins will have the price included in the subscription, but the lack of more money for the upgrade might mean a lot longer before they upgrade to M1, even if it should mean they should upgrade sooner since you are already paying monthly or yearly for the software.

And yes the fact that our Intel Hardware will last a few more years with upgrades means that the upgrades will happen over a few years, so we can pay it, but for me it is a lot of plug-in upgrades, that will be followed by an expensive hardware upgrade to whatever form Pro M1 Macs take.

And of course their will be the exceptions, companies that treat their customers correctly and will upgrade to the new architecture without charging anything. One such company is RE:Vision Effects, which I got an e-mail from and they are developing M1 versions of the current versions of all their plugs ins. And have already released OpenFx and Twixtor M1 betas for FXPlug versions and RSMB for FXPlug is next.

The Adobe Support community is an important tool for finding answers to your questions and issues

 

The Adobe Support Community is a huge resource for those who are having issues with their Adobe software. While Adobe isn’t on the forums that often (they are sometimes), other users are very helpful and will do what they can to help you.

And the Premiere Pro and After Effects forums are very useful.

Separately from the forums you should also know about the Feature Request / Bug Report form which is where you should post specific requests or reproducible bugs to Adobe.

You can also try Adobe’s Help page, though I find you get more results from the community.

ProVideoCoalition article on Understand Premiere Pro’s Color Management is a must read

 Oliver Peters at ProVideoCoalition has posted a great article on Understand Premiere Pro’s Color Management and it is a must read for all video editors editing with Premiere Pro on a Mac.

I had neglected to mention the Display Color Management (requires GPU Acceleration) setting in my previous article on the Gamma shift of Macs, so wanted to post this so people can see why this setting is important.

The article is a companion article to another recent article of his on Trusting Apple Displays. And is another must read.

Creative Cloud only supports the most recent and previous versions, what if you need an earlier version?

 

Since Adobe Creative Cloud only supports the latest 2 versions of your apps, if you need an earlier version what do you do? Well the first thing you can do as an active creative cloud subscriber is contact support and ask for an earlier version.

The other thing you can do is go to ProDesignTools and check and see if he has the direct download links for the version you need. He has the links from 2019 to 2021, so you can still get 2019 if you need them (and if you are using them for a job, maybe it is a good idea to download their direct installers just in case as they are no longer available from the Creative Cloud app).

The Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner tool the last step for fixing problems

 So I was seeing some posts on various Premiere forums on Facebook about having a version of Premiere not work at all, not launching or not installing and I want to post about a possible solution and one that has worked for me in the past. Now this is a last resort, after you have removed your plug ins and reset your preferences and cache files, and if stuff still ins’t working.

The absolute last resort tool to try is the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner tool. This will wipe out everything Adobe on your system, and you can completely re-install form scratch. It will sometimes solve problems that a standard uninstall won’t touch.

Now if you are using older versions of your programs, you might want to check in the Creative Cloud app to see if the version you are running can still be re-installed, as it seems that Adobe has killed most earlier versions at this point and currently only supports Premiere Pro 15.0 and 14.9, with version 13.1.5 (2019) unable to be re-installed, so take caution before doing an uninstall at this point!

So the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner tool will literally scrub your system of all things Adobe, and this blank slate could help solve some serious issues, so it is something you should know in case of major issues.

BeatEdit V2 for Premiere Pro is a very useful plug in for editing to the beat

For the editors who aren’t musicians or just want a quick speed up to their editing workflow, BeatEdit V2 is a Premiere Pro script from mamoworld tools available at AEScripts (which I will talk about in the future).

BeatEdit detects the beats in your music and generates markers for them in your Premiere Pro timeline. Create automatic edits in sync with the music, or let BeatEdit assist your manual editing process.

This is an awesome and quick to use tool. Great for creating an edit of photos or just to give you edit points on the beat.
Any time you are editing to the beat this will speed up your workflow, and the $99 will be worth it in a few jobs.
BeatEdit is in the Window Menu Extensions

This is the window. You select a music clip in your timeline and hit load music.

This will load the track and after a few seconds.

The drop down at the top lets you chose sequence or clip markers.

And here you select how many beats get markers, I chose every 4, but should have done more.
You then hit the create makers button.

And you get this result.

There is much more it can do and this video will explain the rest.

I have run into a problem with the script though having to do with the new world scripting engine of Premiere Pro, so to use it you need to switch to the old scripting engine (which will stop the text entry script Excalibur from working) and unfortunately it doesn’t have a way to quickly turn new world on and off.

So you will have to activate the old scripting engine and restart to get it to work, and to get any extensions working that use the new New World Scripting Engine. 

First hit command -F12 to call up the Premiere Pro console.
Then from the dropdown menu at the top select Debug Database view.

Now type in “newworld” and it will show the following 2 commands, AME.ScriptLayer.EnableNewWorld and CriptLayerPPro.EnableNewWorld and make use to set them both to true. A quick restart later and you will have re-activated the New World Scripting Engine.

Adding motion blur to slow motion shots in Premiere Pro with ReelSmart Motion blur from RE:Vision Effects

 

ReelSmart Motion Blur

So another plug-in that you don’t need until you do, and when you do it is great to know it is there.

Now the main use for this plug-in is for work with 3D imagery. If instead of rendering Motion blur in a 3D image, you have the 3D artist render you a motion vectors pass, then with this plug-in you can add motion blur after the fact and have full control over it, which is a huge thing, and absolutely necessary, but that is only scratching the surface of what this can do.

This plug in can automatically track every pixel in an image and add realistic motion blur, and you can control the amount. Blur can also be removed. This doesn’t sound like much but it really is. Especially if you are given say footage that is high speed which then has very little motion blur, and you are running at normal speed. The footage just won’t look right because of the lack of motion blur, and adding in motion blur can make the footage look normal and correct.

Now once again there are 2 versions, the normal for $109.95 and the pro for $269.95, the pro lets you do object separation using matts, track points, alphas and simple splines and the aforementioned 3D motion Vector Input.

Once installed it shows up in your Re:Vision Plug-ins folder
If you have a good GPU turn on GPU to speed things up and you can control the amount of blur by using the blur amount control. This Goes up to 10, or can down to -2 to remove motion blur.

I have made a quick little video using the same footage of my Shar Pei Boba Fetch as the last video on Re:Vision Effects Twixtor. This time I show the 59.94 footage playing at normal speed in a 23.976 timeline and then adding in more motion blur, we have it at the default .50 at 1.0 and at 2.0.

Once again not the ideal footage or a demo, but some of my own footage, so I can use it, and you can certainly see the effects.

The best way to slow down your video, Twixtor from Re:Vision Effects

 

Twixtor

While Premiere has the ability to slow down your footage, and it has a newer higher quality version called Optical Flow (called Pixel Motion in After Effects). It is certainly better than plain frame blending, but it is not the highest quality slow motion you can get. For the highest quality post slow motion the answer has always been the expensive but worth it TWIXTOR from Re:Vision Effects.

Clip speed in Premiere Pro is in the Clip Menu.

This brings up the Speed Panel, and for best results select Optical Flow from the drop down menu.

Twixtor comes in 2 versions, Standard and Pro and is available for a variety of platforms. The version I use is the After Effects/Premiere Pro version. The standard version is $329.95 and the Pro version is $595.00, both fairly expensive, but as I have said quite worth it.

The Pro version gives you the ability to really tweak what the auto track does, lets you use matte’s and alphas to enhance your tracks, as well as splines, and the ability to work with motion vectors from a 3D system. If you have a really important shot to slow down the Pro version is certainly worth the extra money, though you may get away with the normal version. And they have video based tutorials for their effects on their sites, and they are really worth going into to learn the ins and outs.

Twixtor shows up in your Video Effects RE:Vision Plugs-Ins (RSMB is ReelSmart Motion Blur which I plan on talking about in a later post).

The first thing to realize when working with twixtor is it works based on the whole clip as it can see it, so to specify the in points you need to Nest (in Premiere or Pre-Compose in After Effects) and in the sequence the sequence needs to be longer to work on the extent of the clip, so you might want to double or triple your clip in that nest/pre-comp.

This is the clip in the sequence with playhead parked on first frame

First frame of clip I want to slow.
Twixtor Effect Added

Speed Changed to 20%

First frame becomes first frame of clip.

So nest your clip in timeline

If you want clip longer as slow, you need to lengthen it, so double clip next to open. Since I want 20% speed, I duplicate clip 5 times.

Put twixtor on Nest in original sequence.

Here are the settings I am using. I always use GPU as I have a decent one and that speeds things up, but it is much slower within Premiere than within After Effects. Different settings will give you different results, so play around for sure. I ususally got for Motion Weighted and Smart Blend, and add a little Motion blur Compensation though it really slows things down. I have also set my Image Prep to Delinearize.
I did a video to demonstrate, it is UHD and shot 59.94 but is in a 23.976 Sequence, I have shown the footage as if 23.967, then slowed down, then slowed down to 20% using Premiere Pro’s time interpolation with Frame Sampling then Frame Blending, then optical flow and with Twixtor. This isn’t ideal footage, but Twixtor still looks the best. Of course this is recompressed by YouTube, but you should get the idea.