Understanding Motion Blur and Transition Techniques

Animate transitions by overlaying matching background colors, optionally using motion blur for smoother motion, which displays only during movement and affects preview performance but not final export quality.

Dive into the process of creating seamless scene transitions and enhancing visual quality using motion blur in After Effects. Understand how motion blur settings affect both playback previews and final exports, helping you build more polished animations.

Key Insights

  • Scene transitions in After Effects can be built using simple techniques like opacity fades, layer overlays, or zoom animations—what matters is how the visual continuity is achieved between scenes.
  • Enabling the motion blur switch on a layer also activates the motion blur preview at the composition level, which enhances visual realism during movement but may slow down processing during playback.
  • Noble Desktop’s tutorial highlights that while motion blur increases preview rendering demands, it remains active in final exports regardless of preview settings, ensuring high-quality output.

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So it's kind of old. Now, by the way, the way this animation works is anything that covers the screen to give you the background color is cool. Like that.

I literally just animated a green or the same background color, solid, overlaying everything. And then when the next layer hits, it starts on the same color. Your transition is simply a way of getting from one scene to the other.

So that could be a simple fade out, opacity animation. That could be one of the effects. That could be a layer covering it.

Or as we did in this example, that push in, that zoom in behavior. The program doesn't care. However you choose to build it is up to you.

So like I said, by the way, when you turn on motion blur, which again is that switch right there, the little dot circle, circle, circle switch, you'll only see the motion blur. Notice no blur when something is moving. Without motion blur enabled or technically without the preview enabled, that's the preview by the way, the motion blur right there.

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That's what you would see throughout it. Now keep in mind, it's also happening very fast over 15 frames. If it was a slower animation, you'd have longer to see the motion blur.

Okay. One, it hides the jagged edges and two, it just makes it look a little like a little light motion trail when you do it. But yeah, so you don't see it there.

It's only when it's moving that it pops up. And again, only if the preview is enabled. When you turn on a layer's motion blur switch, it auto-enables the preview for the composition, which is the button on top.

Because you can disable that because it takes more power for the program to build a motion blur preview than not to do that. So you can enable a motion blur and then if you know it's there, you can turn it off so the previews run faster. Okay.

When you export, it's still gonna export motion blur, it's not gonna matter.

Jerron Smith

Jerron has more than 25 years of experience working with graphics and video and expert-level certifications in Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator along with an extensive knowledge of other animation programs like Cinema 4D, Adobe Animate, and 3DS Max. He has authored multiple books and video training series on computer graphics software such as: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash (back when it was a thing). He has taught at the college level for over 20 years at schools such as NYCCT (New York City College of Technology), NYIT (The New York Institute of Technology), and FIT (The Fashion Institute of Technology).

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