Much better motion blur using Final Cut Pro

Thanks for the feedback on the last blog post.

I agree, it looked way too ghosty, and I have finally worked out why.

If you want to do this, you need to be a bit careful with the settings, and also a bit careful with believing what people say on the various Final Cut tutorial videos.

You use Motion to create a Final Cut Title.

You then do a few simple steps:-

• Remove the text element - we are just showing the "background"
• In "Render", click "Motion Blur"
• In "Projects", "Inspector", "Properties", set motion blur samples and shutter angle.
• Save it with a suitable name for Final Cut to see it as a title effect

Some experimentation confirms what I understood. I am applying this to a sped up video. In my case 60x normal speed. So I set 60 samples and 360° shutter. What this does is for each frame of output it merges all 60 frames of original creating a smooth motion blur effect in that one frame the same as if this was actually a 60/25 (2.4s) second exposure for that one frame. This is the effect I actually wanted.

So what did I do wrong?

Firstly the various tutorial videos say the duration of the title effect does not matter, so I made a 10 second (the default) duration effect. I placed it over my (sped up) video, and stretched to fit (in this case, 3 minutes).

What I did not realise is that stretching the effect meant that it stretched the sampling. Each output frame was indeed merged from 60 input frames, but the sampling time period had been stretched 18 times, meaning that it spread over not 2.4 seconds of original (which makes one 1/25th second output frame) but over 43 seconds of original, moving 2.4 seconds forward each frame. Hence the rather odd ghosting effect.

The solution was to make an effect that was 3 minutes long and not to stretch it!

Is there another way?

One of the tutorial videos said to set the effect to loop one frame before its end. Presumably to make a 10 second effect, that when stretched, did not stretch the sampling.

It worked for the 1st 10 seconds, but unfortunately this simply meant the video looped every 10 seconds.

Maybe there is some other setting to define the way the title effect works when stretched, I may have a play.

How did it look?

Here are the three videos again.

Time lapse and motion blur (Final Cut)

I have a slight dilemma with my new camera. It can record for about two hours because (a) the 256G card I have records about that and (b) the battery lasts about that long.

So, if I want a time lapse I have to change battery every 2 hours or so anyway, so may as well change memory card. Hence not a lot of point in recording in "time lapse" in the first place unless I can connect some mains power to the camera. There may be cases where that is sensible and the time lapse feature in the camera makes sense.

However, for now, I figured I may as well record in real time, and then make a time lapse in Final Cut Pro. It is very simple to tell it to speed up a clip.

There is a down side, the time it takes to transfer and process 256GB of data at a time, and so on. However, I think Final Cut Pro could do a better job than the simple time lapse.

The first thing that occurred to me is that the time lapse would be good if it did a proper "motion blur" on the images. So if I am doing 60x time lapse, process 60 frames to make a motion blur for each frame.

It turns out that whilst this is not a native feature of Final Cut Pro, it is a feature of the titling functions. So by buying the "Motion" system, and creating a text title with no text in it and set to do motion blur as a feature, I can overlay that on the sped up video. Yes, it is complicate to make it (and you can google for videos of how to do it), but it works.

Down side it that it takes a while, well, especially if you do 60 samples at 60x speed like I am. It takes a very long time! I need a faster machine (roll on December, Apple).

But the result is impressive.

So first the non motion blur video - which is as you might expect - still very good :-



And now the motion blur version :-



As you can see, quite a difference. It makes for a very different time lapse, and looks ghosty - see next post for the fix!

So, when the do eventually start building the actual climbing frame, etc, I should be able to make a nice time lapse.

Feiyu MG V2 3 axis gimbal

I have concluded that video cameras are a problem - you either need a tripod, and then you need a fluid head to get anything reasonable, or you need a trolly or a something, and for hand held you absolutely need a 3 axis gimbal. On their own a video camera will always look rather amateur.

So, having got a video camera I looked at reviews and prices and decided to get the Feiyu MG V2 3 axis gimbal from Wex Photographic.

The instructions were clear, and balancing the camera was also very easy, surprisingly so.

It comes with a hard case for transport.

It can be assembled for one handed use...

Or, for two handed...

In fact it can be used in a variety of ways.

(Thanks to Lewis, age 4, for taking those pictures for me)

I am amazed at the difference it makes, and here we come to something that really needs a video, so here it is. The first part is with the gimbal, and the second is all hand held. Lewis has a go at both, but unfortunately his arms are a bit short to stop the gimbal hitting his chest and so he is a bit jerky. Even so, compare to Lewis hand held with no gimbal at the end. Sick bags available in the foyer.

P.S. the hand-held was using the image stabiliser that is built in to the camera even...

Time-lapse

The Canon XC15 video camera has a time-lapse feature, so I gave it a try. This was around 2 hours worth of 3D printing...



The first issue was that the battery ran out just at the end, thankfully right at the end, so nothing lost, but this raises some questions. The card can take just under 2 hours of 4k video (256G), and the camera battery can last just under 2 hours (around 110 minutes). Unless using external power, the longest I can record for is the card or battery, and they are pretty much the same. So I could have just recorded, and then sped up later, deciding on what level of speed increase I want, making slowed for anything interesting that happens, etc. Much more flexible. So basically, the time-lapse feature really only makes any sense if I have power attached.

The other issue is that when it shut down for lack of power, it was not clean. It left the file broken. The only clever bit is that it knew this when I put in a new battery, and has a "data recovery" option if you try to play the video on the camera. That fixed it, but a tad messy.

24k Gold Foil Playing Cards - with Certificate

I did this as a video first (here) and decided to make a blog separately. I am still not sure which medium is best, and I suspect it is worth trying to do things both ways as some people prefer one and some people prefer another. This is not a bad example to try as it is a totally trivial subject matter.

It all started when I saw some click bait on Facebook selling "24k Gold Foil Playing Cards - with Certificate", and they looked like fun. The web site was typical, constantly an offer which was just about to expire, only a few cards left, reduced price from £77.10 to only £19.46, but now!

Obviously this is a transparent and annoying ploy, and also, if you read more, it is a US site selling in $ and shipping in 2 to 4 weeks (if you are lucky).

So I googled, and amazon sell the same cards, and several similar ones for much less. Indeed, one identical pack for £1.81!

Now, I was under no illusion what I was buying. I spent a couple more pounds for a pack in a presentation box even.

I was not disappointed - what I received was utter tatt!

Start with the box, with the label (actually some sort of sticky backed foil) stuck on at an angle - a sure sign of a quality product.

Then, opening the box, we have some glue along the bottom, messy.

Then comes the box, which was not stuck together as the double sided tape had come undone. Even when stuck down it is tacky. There is a certificate, claiming 99.9% pure 24K gold foil. I expect that could be true but a few atoms thick :-)

The box is made of the same plastic as the cards, and that made it hard to actually open. I had to prize it open with my pen knife.

The cards themselves, in this case, have a rather distorted image of a £50 note. The one in that advert was a 100 dollar bill, and probably looks as bad to an American.

The cards themselves look quite nice.

The cards clearly have the embossing/foil printed per card, as you can see in the background for the picture cards. The printing is, however, a tad misaligned, with the digits looking like they have a bit of a shadow.

Overall, tacky as expected, but quite fun, and for under £2 you cannot really argue. Not sure I would ever give as a gift, but we'll try playing with them. There is a danger the gold will scratch and leave distinctive wear marks on the backs, which may be a bit of a flaw, but I don't know yet.

A lesson in not following click-bait :-)

As for whether this should be a blog post or a video - you decide. The blog post has ended up as a narrative with a series of pictures, but you can read at your own pace.

The internet of video

Call me old if you will, but I remember a time when the Internet did not even exist - when I was making protocols for file transfer over 300bps modems (for my B.Sc.) at around the same time as IP packets were being dreamt up. I had used computers for many years by them.

I have seen it change over time, and change in many ways.

At the start it was a bit like ham radio - sending packets to each other was what we did - using protocols like TCP on top of that, and I was lucky enough to find Demon for my first home Internet connection with a fixed IP and no filtering. I commend Demon as pioneers of their day.

Times have changed, and the invention of the world wide web, and http, was a major thing. I remember actually going on a course for UI design that mentioned hyperlinking, and a course on web page design (all manually created HTML).

The usage of the Internet really has come a long way and we are now in the video phase of that usage. At each stage the Internet has had its high users. It was text initially, and then images, audio files, and now video.

One of the things I have always said is that there probably are some limits on what consumer Internet will need to provide, and those limits stem from the bandwidth of the person - of the human being. How much data can we, as a person, absorb?

Obviously there are always exceptions, cases where data is transferred for processing by computer systems and not a person, but by far the highest usage of the Internet as a consumer service right now is the video streaming, and that is there to ultimately be fed to the eyes and ears of one or more people.

We have many senses, and even then we have to consider the "resolution" of those senses. The fact we have 4k video now, even at levels perhaps beyond the resolution of our eyes (because we can move our eyes around the screen) is quite amazing. We may go to higher resolutions even, and more 3D and so on. Vision is perhaps the highest bandwidth sense we have, with sound, and smell and touch all taking a back seat.

With consumer Internet connections starting to approach the level where each person in a household is able to receive the video streaming, and the content, at least as much as they as a person can absorb in real time for 24 hours a day - we may start to finally reach limits of consumer Internet connectivity.

Of course there is the uplink side, and that has yet to fully catch up. Internet has been asymmetrical for some time, but even now FTTC offers 20Mb/s uplink if you can get it. We have to consider people creating content, and that content being video. Ratios of content production to content consumption will always be skewed to the consumption so maybe what we have makes sense now.

Personally I am thinking I need to move more to video content - my blog moving to a vlog (or whatever it is called). I have a youtube channel (do subscribe). I will try to learn more about video and multiple cameras, and sound, and so on, and maybe get good at it...

Maybe that will be the new me - the video content generator?

It reminds me a lot of this comic (see image on the right). Well worth reading.