Making Sped-Up Footage Look Better in After Effects

Charles Yeager offers a couple of quick tips for getting footage that has been sped-up to look more believable and realistic. There are times when you would want to have some footage play back faster than it was shot, but simple chaining the speed at which the clip plays may give you more pronounced visual distractions that will loose the sale of the shot.

In this Quick Tip, we are going to look at how to make ‘Sped Up Footage’ look more realistic by smoothing out the camera’s movement and adding in more motion blurCharles Yeager – AETuts.com

As an example, Charles uses some footage of a car driving by After Effects, which represents be a typical shot. Speeding up the footage also speeds up the handheld motion, and messes with the motion blur of the scene. Shooting the car driving by at normal speed doesn’t provide the needed motion blur to have the shot look believable sped-up.

The two tips are rather simple really, Charles walks through using Warp Stabilizer VFX in After Effects to steady the shot, and then uses Pixel Motion Blur to generate motion blur from the moving pixels in the shot.

Check out the tutorial for Making sped-up footage look better in After Effects here.