Motion Blur

Adding motion blur to your video footage can help make the movement in that footage seem more natural. While VEGAS Pro has a Motion Blur envelope on the video bus track, the Motion Blur OFX plug-in gives you more control and enables you to target specific areas of your footage that you want to blur.

The plug-in works best when you apply it at the timeline clip event level.

  1. Click the Video FX tab to open that window and select Motion Blur from the list of plug-ins.

  2. Drag the Default thumbnail onto the event that you want to blur.

Quality

Choose the setting you want from the Quality drop-down list.

Keep in mind that the better the quality, the more processing the tool requires, so you might start with the default setting of Medium and see if the results are adequate.

Blur Mode

Choose the option from the Blur Mode drop-down that gives you the best results:

  • Fixed:

    Blurs all motion pixels with the same amount, determined by the Blur Amount setting

  • Adaptive:

    Blurs each motion pixels according to a multiplier applied to each pixel so that potentially different amounts of blur are applied depending upon the amount of motion for each pixel

Motion Threshold

The Motion Threshold settings enable you to specify a range within which to apply blur:

  • Motion Threshold (min):

    Specifies the amount of movement (expressed as a percentage) below which no blur will be applied

  • Motion Threshold (max):

    Specifies the amount of movement (expressed as a percentage) above which no blur will be applied

Blur Amount slider

Adjust the Blur Amount slider to add blur to the pixels that fall within the range you specified with the Motion Threshold settings. In real application, you’ll often use fairly subtle motion blur amounts, but for the sake of discussion, raise this setting to the maximum value of 20.0 so you can easily see the blur effect.

Visualization | Show Visualization

You can use the Visualization tools to help you determine exactly how you want to set your Motion Threshold settings.

Click the Visualization drop-down arrow. Then click the Show Visualization drop-down arrow to reveal three options in addition to the default option of Off:

  • Threshold Optical Flow Field:

    Colors represent the amount of motion that occurs on the various areas of the video:

    • Color intensity represents the motion magnitude:

      • Black: no motion or the motion falls outside the range you specify with the Motion Threshold parameters
      • Medium brightness: moderate motion areas
      • Bright: areas with highest motion activity

    • The color represents the motion direction:

      • Red: 0° (vertical motion upwards)
      • Greenish Yellow: 90° (horizontal motion left to right)
      • Cyan: 180° (vertical motion downwards),
      • Violet: 270° (horizontal motion right to left)

  • Blur Mask:

    • Black: no motion blur

    • White: at least some level of motion blur

  • Highlight Motion Blur Area:

    A dark shading indicates areas that are not blurred

TIP To make the most of these visualizations, use them as reference as you adjust the Motion Threshold settings. This enables you to include or exclude certain areas of your video in the motion blur operation. For example, in the figure above you can see that with the Highlight Motion Blur Area option selected I can use the Motion Threshold (min)control to exclude the walking woman from the motion blur and apply blur only to the train.

NOTE Make sure to set the Show Visualization setting back to Off before you render your project.