Tip: Create Cinematic Motion Blur in After Effects (and in life)

Quick: what’s the difference between shutter speed and frame rate? You might be surprised that there are even a few camera operators don’t even know the answer to that one. Frame rate is the number of frames per second that are shot (or displayed). Shutter speed is the amount of time that the frame is actually exposed to light, and thus, the amount of motion blur contained in that shot.

Tip: Render Faster & Smarter in After Effects with BG Renderer

My only assumption with this tip is that you use Adobe After Effects CS4 (or even CS3) on a multi-processor machine, Mac or Windows. Beyond that:

• maybe you only have one main machine and often face the dilemma of wanting to render while continuing to work
• perhaps you monitor your system’s performance carefully and have noticed that your After Effects renders don’t always peg all of the processors
• possibly you own or have owned a copy or copies of Gridiron Software’s Nucleo Pro and have experienced the joy of background rendering in After Effects already. However you’re not experiencing that joy in CS4, because Gridiron has been too busy with another little project to update it.
• It could even be that you are aware that you can kick off an After Effects render in a shell (Terminal on Mac, DOS on Windows), allowing you to render without the GUI, and thus keep working. If so, if you’re like 99% of visual artists, you’re not that fond of memorizing, typing or optimizing code.

If any or all of these is true, get ready to buy Lloyd Alvarez a beer, because he offers the answer to all of these and more.  Lloyd’s site is home of many useful tools, another of which may appear in this space this month, but as my first true tip of the month I wish to promote his most infinitely valuable script. And I say infinitely valuable because BG Renderer is offered free, a 100% discount off the alternatives.

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