Motion Blur in animations

Hi,

I’m rendering a short, simple animation: a camera slowly moving over a kitchen benchtop, showing some pieces of food and the cooktop.
The issue is, eventhough the movement of the camera is pretty slow, how to make sure the overall movement in the resulting video will be smooth, and not jerky? In other words how to implement a soft, nice motion blur?

Of course I could enable motion blur in the camera settings, but I don’t want to do that in order to keep rendering times as short as possible.
I guess there must be a way to do that in post-production? I use After Effects.

It’s worth mentioning there’s not any moving objects in my scene, nor moving lights. The only moving thing is the camera.

What’s your usual workflow?

Thanks for your advice.

I think I know what you want…

I do this by converting the animation from 25 (or 30 or whatever fps you have?) to 60 with smoothing in the video edit.

I did a YouTube tutorial about this, but it’s related to DaVinci resolve… so not sure how suitable it is for you.

I wouldn’t be adding motion blur to the camera, either.

My tutorial: https://youtu.be/eeB01TSfks0?si=71nl-y9_teW_-frQ

ReelSmart works good for After Effects

Thanks a lot guys. Looks awesome. I will have a look at these.

I’ve found that even with proper render settings, motion blur can be a bit of a balancing act between quality and render time. For some animation projects I’ve actually rendered cleaner frames and added blur in post where needed. Tools like Blur Part of a Video Online — Faces, Plates, Text | Zimblu can be useful for quick tests before committing to longer re-renders. Not a replacement for good in-camera motion blur, but sometimes it’s a practical workaround.