Jitter Associated with Track Camera

[JamisonK]

My goal is to animate the Track Camera to follow a character's walk cycle for 9 seconds, creating the feel that the world is passing by and the character is moving forward. Pretty basic stuff. The Track Camera is animated smoothly/consistently forward on the X axis, and no other element of background is animated in support of this forward movement (e.g., clouds and buildings are static). Unfortunately, all of the people that are not moving with the Track Camera appear blurry/nauseatingly-jittery.


I tried to fix this by being clever with the Track Camera, jumping quickly forward to a group of people, letting them do their animation, and then moving the camera forward again. Unfortunately, the walk-cycle character is then out of sync with the Track Camera, and so he appears blurry/jittery.


Does anyone have a solution for this? The project is raster-based, which I know is probably the primary issue. But this isn't an overwhelming amount of movement, and I'd think the rendering could keep up. The project is set to 24 fps. I also tried extending the timeline so that it was moving at 50% speed and then speeding it up by 200% in the post-production software. So getting Moho to essentially render the images at 48 fps and then resetting them in post-production to 24 fps. This didn't work either, and I'm out of ideas. And (one more video) you can see that 48 fps isn't much better anyway.

[slowtiger]

This is normal behaviour. There's nothing wrong with the first version.

Bigger productions may give the fastest moving plates a motion blur pass. Since those characters don't move you could give the 2 layers some treatment with directional blur.

[JamisonK]

Thanks Slowtiger. It is reassuring to know that this is normal behavior, and I appreciate that all software has it's limitations. I like your idea of hiding some of the jitter with blur, but (as you said) Motion Blur within Moho doesn't have any effect (since it's the camera that is moving). Adding Directional Blur in the post-processing software doesn't seem possible as I can't separate the layers from one other. I guess that I will make my peace with this jittery quality or reimagine how this scene might be devised.

[Panha]

Nothing wrong with the first video. It is how camera moment works. If you want to not have blur background and background people (something that is not moving along with camera), you may need to change the way you move the camera and your characters, such as make it very slow, but I don't think it should be recommended to do so. You can also try to increase the frame rate and see which is better for you, but I don't think it should be recommended either. This is normal behavior in Camera movement, and I think other software that would have the same behavior.

[slowtiger]

I tried to google "shatter" which is the term I learned for the effect of jittery/blinky BG elements in a camera pan, but Google doesn't let me do it anymore - it's only offering "shutter" which is not what I want. Enshittification if internet in full action!

More googling only came up with my own advice from a decade ago: viewtopic.php?t=26948. "Live action motion blur" will turn up some example images.

As for the directional blur: you should do that to the layers in any bitmap program before you export them to Moho. I often export stuff containg lots of elements from Moho, stitch them together in another program, and import as one bigger bitmap.

[NanotechBeasts]

I think the first video looks fine. Only thing that may be a little off is he is turned toward the camera not the street as he is walking. Maybe his attention is being directed at the audience or something off scene. Also I didn't notice this one small thing until like the fifth time I watched it. I believe it is used alot in animation to give the audience a connection to the character.