How to blur frozen aeroplane propellors.

**Imagewerx** · 10-20-2020, 08:20 PM

I know this is happening because of the strobe effect of the camera shutter,so I need to know if there's a realistic looking way to make it look naturally blurred as we see it with the human eye.Taken at 30 fps and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro I have tried radial blur which looks awful and even speeding it up by 1000% and it still shows the propellors frozen.Even if I choose a different shutter speed or frame rate,they vary the speed of the engines so this will always happen regardless.
Is there an editing trick or plug in etc,or would I have to animate it using something like After Effects?

**Grapes** · 10-22-2020, 12:51 PM

You could stack the clip a few times with decreasing opacity and then off-set all the layers by one frame.... may make the human walking in front look a bit weird though as this will create a movement trail for him. Ideally you'd mask him out but yeah I'd try that layering trick first and see if that does anything. May need to play around with the amount of frames to off-set on this one. I normally use it to mimic motion blur. There's a plugin in after-effects if I recall correctly called echo or echospace which does more or less the same I believe.

**Imagewerx** · 10-22-2020, 03:30 PM

Originally Posted by Grapes

You could stack the clip a few times with decreasing opacity and then off-set all the layers by one frame.... may make the human walking in front look a bit weird though as this will create a movement trail for him. Ideally you'd mask him out but yeah I'd try that layering trick first and see if that does anything. May need to play around with the amount of frames to off-set on this one. I normally use it to mimic motion blur. There's a plugin in after-effects if I recall correctly called echo or echospace which does more or less the same I believe.

Thank you for that suggestion.I'll give it a go,the only problem I can see is making it look realistic just after the propellors go from stationary to idling speed in just a few seconds,or any other time they change speed.
The whole engine run (and all similar things) was about twenty minutes long and the safety man was walking about all the time but with enough footage left over to be able to edit out the times he's in front of the props and stiil have a decent length of footage left for the full length video,in this case about five minutes.