OCTOBER 18, 2001
RE:Vision ReelSmart Motion Blur and FieldsKit
Interlacing and motion blur plugins for editing and compositing systems
by Kevin Schmitt
Page 2 of 4

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 [an error occurred while processing this directive]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).



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