This week we're going to start taking a gander at RE:Vision Effects' suite of video and effects plugins by doing two, two, two reviews in one. Why double up? Well, According to RE:Vision Effects' own literature, "ReelSmart FieldsKit is a great companion to other ReelSmart modules such as Twixtor and Motion Blur," so we're going to see how that claim measures up by using the After Effects versions of FieldsKit and Motion Blur in tandem.

I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first that these products would, or even could, work as advertised. After all, getting clean, progressive-scan plates from video source and adding motion blur to a comp as needed were two of my personal holy grails. As these are two of the main selling points of FieldsKit and Motion Blur, respectively, I wondered if they could really do the job. I don't want to spoil the ending, but after only a couple of weeks FieldsKit and Motion Blur have already changed the way I approach compositing tasks, and I can think of at least a dozen projects I've done in the last year that would have benefited tremendously from these tools.

ReelSmart FieldsKit: What it does
Let's face it: there are times when the Interpret Footage command in After Effects leaves you with some pretty skunky clips, rife with motion artifacts and bad field blending. This is especially annoying if you're trying to get a clean moving background plate for use in a composited or visual effects shot. That's where FieldsKit picks up the slack. FieldsKit comprises three separate plugins: Deinterlacer, Reinterlacer and Pulldown. Actually putting these plugins into service requires a different method of thinking than After Effects users might be accustomed to, as you must make sure that your clips are clear of field and pulldown options in the Interpret Footage panel in favor of the advanced options the FieldsKit plugins offer. As a result, it is relatively easy to get confused, since you could conceivably apply field blending from two different locations. However, the upshot is that since the FieldsKit modules are actual plugins, you can animate the advanced options as you would any other conventional plugin, meaning that it's possible to tweak and vary the settings for more complex clips over time to achieve very clean results.

The star of the bunch is the Deinterlacer plugin. Deinterlacing is a tricky process because what you're really asking the software to do is throw away half of the frame and re-create what was thrown away through interpolation or doubling of the remaining field. And at first glance, it appears that FieldsKit's Deinterlacer doesn't do any better job of handling interlaced footage than After Effects; however, it begins to set itself apart once you blow by the default settings and dive into the other options. According to RE:Vision Effects, the Deinterlacer "uses adaptive motion techniques and clever models for deinterlacing." In plain English, it goes way beyond simple upper frame and lower frame field order to allow the user to control every aspect of the deinterlacing process. This control is accomplished by breaking the process down into four main functions: field order, timing mode, fill method and motion masking.

The ReelSmart Fields Kit Plug-in Options.

Field order is the standard selector that most of you are probably familiar with, letting you select upper or lower as the dominant field. The timing mode options allow you to choose whether one or both fields in a frame are interpolated, which in turn affects the duration of the clip. The fill method provides a choice of several interpolation options, such as duplicate, blend and nearest neighbor. Perhaps the coolest feature, motion masking, actually analyzes the motion of the clip and only selects the areas of the image that are in motion for interpolation while leaving the static areas of the image intact. This function is especially handy for locked-down shots where objects are in motion against a non-moving background.

With motion masking turned on, you can see what parts
of the image the Deinterlacer will interpolate.

The other two FieldsKit plugins, Pulldown and Reinterlacer, are nice inclusions as well. The Pulldown plugin provides some advanced settings for turning 24 fps film clips into 30 fps NTSC standard clips (or vice versa). The formula for pulldown basically turns four frames into five, so the ReelSmart Pulldown plugin lets you choose between numerous settings for determining which of the four frames in a five-frame sequence remain whole and which get split. The Reinterlacer plugin adds several output types to the normal upper field/lower field dominance options.

ReelSmart FieldsKit: Limitations
While FieldsKit is a great product, I have a couple of beefs. I would stress that while the FieldsKit plugins are incredibly advanced, they're not magic, nor are they really automated. Just applying any of the plugins with the default setting won't yield any better results than After Effects' native interlacing options. Getting extremely clean results can often require a lot of meticulous tweaking to achieve a noticeable effect and take a lot of getting used to in order to get the look you want.

Also, I didn't find that the Reinterlacer plugin gave me a better final product than the normal field rendering options in After Effects, though admittedly I am looking at them with more of a compositor's eye. I suspect that editors would find the Reinterlacer to be a very able companion to the Deinterlacer, as the timing options in each work in tandem to minimize field rendering quality issues when re-outputting edit-only footage from NLE software.

ReelSmart Motion Blur: What it does
All I can say is, "Wow!" As anyone who has tried to marry CGI and live footage knows, adding motion blur is an absolute necessity to the realism of the scene, but it is among the biggest pains in the rump as well. As someone who is subjected to all kinds of last-minute changes to composites, I've become a big believer in multipass rendering, so I'm not kidding when I say that ReelSmart Motion Blur changes my entire workflow. In a nutshell, as the name suggests, Motion Blur adds motion blur where none exists. Let me say that again, because it's REAL important: Motion Blur adds motion blur where none exists.

And it does it very well. The plugin's power lies in its ability to compare frames of a sequence and determine what has changed over time, and then applies a very convincing blur to the image. So what does this mean in reality? I can now render out objects in 3D once against a neutral background with no motion blur, composite the rendered layers against a background and add motion blur as the last step. This frees up every layer in the composite to be changed as often as you like with no re-rendering of any source images. Here's an example.

This is a comparison between a frame from the original comp (top), the same frame from the new comp without the Motion Blur plugin (middle) and the same frame from the new comp once Motion Blur was activated (bottom).

But there are a few bonus uses as well. In addition to adding motion blur, it can also remove motion blur. The effects are subtle, but it can compensate for footage that has a little too much blur on moving objects. Another feature is that you can use the motion from one layer to blur another layer, resulting in some cool transitions and effects. The last bonus is that you can use Motion Blur in place of After Effects' Frame Blending option to interpolate frames of a time stretched clip, often with superior results. There are some great video examples of these other features at http://www.revisionfx.com; I recommend checking them out.

ReelSmart Motion Blur: Limitations
While this plugin is as close to a magic bullet as I've seen, there are some quirks that need to be worked around and planned for in your composites. For one, Motion Blur can have some trouble with motion that extends outside of the frame (see below). This effect is not as noticeable at full speed but is a definite limitation. Also, if your sequence contains only a few frames or extremely rapid motion, the effects of Motion Blur can be erratic, even downright freaky. You may want to account for motion blur in some other fashion if your footage falls into either of those categories.

Motion Blur sometimes
has trouble with motion
that goes outside of the frame.

How ReelSmart FieldsKit and Motion Blur work together
Quite well, actually. To test them as a team, I recreated a shot I made for a commercial about a year ago. In the shot, the background plate is a clip of live action peanuts falling from the sky to make a large pile of peanuts, while a single CGI peanut falls in front of the pile, gets up, then hops out of the frame. Previously, I had to create a clean plate of the live action peanuts, export out a Targa sequence to use as a background in LightWave, render the peanut animation and shadow with alpha channels as separate sequences against the plate with motion blur (so when they were composited the blur would be convincing against the plate instead of a messy black smudge), import the rendered CGI sequences into After Effects, then composite the shot. The problem was when there was a change to be made to the timing of the plate, I had to re-render the CGI sequences to accommodate the changes. Plus, rendering with motion blur out of LightWave added a lot of time. What a pain!

So I tried the compositing the shot again, this time using the FieldsKit and MotionBlur plugins. I brought in the live action peanut shot and interpreted it using FieldsKit's motion masking options, fiddling with the interpolation settings until I had a cleaner plate than before. So far, so good. Then I rendered the CGI peanut and shadow separately without motion blur turned on, which saved quite a bit of rendering time. Getting better. Next, I time compressed the live footage to be one second shorter than the original source, but instead of using After Effects' frame blending, I opted for the Motion Blur plugin to smooth the frames. The results were subtle, but slightly better than frame blending. I then composited the CGI peanut and shadow over the live footage, then nested that comp in another comp, at which point I added the Motion Blur plugin to the entire comp. The result: the finished clip looked almost identical to the original, with the background being a lot cleaner and a with a little smoother motion. The main difference is that I could change any of the elements without having to re-render the CGI peanut elements. Once I crunched a few numbers, I found that I could have saved between 8 and 10 hours putting this particular comp together had I used the ReelSmart plugins originally. Nothing to sneeze at!

The bottom line
ReelSmart FieldsKit and Motion Blur work tremendously well either on their own or as a team. They both live up to and surpass expectations, so we're giving each a Strong Buy recommendation.