Greetings / motion blur in orbiter videos.

[darrenc]

Hello, everyone!

I've been mucking around with Orbiter for some time (I frequently dream of Ravenstars), and decided to join this forum to share with you a cool trick for getting motion-blur in Orbiter videos.

The method I have used here is to create your films at a fixed time step of 0.01 seconds at 0.1x time acceleration. This gives you 1000fps (although it takes a minute to create each second of video!). The more frames you generate for each second, the smoother your blur will be.

By then averaging the frames out to obtain the desired frame rate, you get some cool motion blur which makes the videos seem much more real (to me, anyway).

Here is a short clip of STS-101 made using this technique.

Simple, but effective. Enjoy!

 

[Lucy]

It's a nice motion blur. Seems like the video skips every so often though; could be my browser and flash plugin, though. Not sure.

Edit: Oh, yeah. Welcome to OF, by the way.

 

[darrenc]

It's a nice motion blur. Seems like the video skips every so often though; could be my browser and flash plugin, though. Not sure.

Edit: Oh, yeah. Welcome to OF, by the way.

Thanks, Xyon.

The video does stutter a little bit at times, mainly because I was using Fraps to do the capture. Ideally, using a fixed time-step, you want to capture at Orbiters frame rate, not the rate Fraps wants to.

I might have to delve into the SDK and see if I can whip up an capturing plugin. There already is one on orbithanger, but it only saves in BMP format, and at 1000fps, that's a lot of space.

Thanks for the welcome!

 

[n72.75]

Looks cool but seems computationally expensive.

to the forum.

 

[Lucy]

Well, good to know it's not my eyes / flash plugin, at least. And yeah, the bitmap video plugin takes up a hell of a lot of space in the intermediate stages.

I seem to remember the last time I tried to use Fraps to record Orbiter it did take up a lot of space, though; about five minutes of mucking about in LEO recorded to ~1.5GB .avi file, IIRC. Must've been my quality settings or something.

 

[the.punk]

Hey. This looks nice.

to the forum.

 

[Dambuster]

Very nice video, and welcome to the forums!

How did you get the flyby views from a stationary point?

 

[Tex]

Hi there, welcome to Orbiter-Forum!

You have indeed found a creative way to mimic a motion blur especially for those without an editing program which has the capability of adding motion blur. Using Sony Vegas however is probably the easiest way to add realistic motion blurs IMO. I applaud your effort though, very unique! :thumbup:

How did you get the flyby views from a stationary point?

Ctrl+F1 opens the camera box.

Press the Ground button, then press Current and you will fix the camera in it's current position. Move your mouse forward, back, left, and right to move the camera position and use the mouse wheel to adjust the camera altitude.

 

[Saturn V]

Tex is right. Vegas is the way to go with video for so many reasons, not the least of which is motion blur.

For what it's worth, I export my playbacks to a studio grade VHS, import the resulting video back into the PC via PinnacleStudio directly to MPEG-3 format (saves having to convert it during the rendering process), and do my editing with Vegas.

Actually much less complicated than it sounds, and nowhere near the resource hog that Fraps and AVI files are.

 

[darrenc]

Very nice video, and welcome to the forums!

How did you get the flyby views from a stationary point?

The method Tex supplied is one way. There is also the excellent "flyby camera" addon at orbithanger.

For the shuttle flybys I played the recorded scenario until I got the shuttle where I wanted it to be when it reaches the camera. I then used the scenario editor to get the coordinates (I used the rotating equatorial coordinates) and then re-ran the scenario, setting the camera up at those coordinates, plus a fudge factor so the camera didn't penetrate the shuttle.

Thanks, Tex and Saturn V, for the heads up about Vegas. The one concern I have about "after-the-fact" motion blur is that it is trying to reconstruct the missing information (the blur) by extrapolating between frames. It seems to me that wouldn't be as accurate. I might download the trial version and do a comparison - it might be worth the trade-off considering how much time it takes to do it using my current method.

EDIT:

By the way, Tex. Are you the TexFilms Tex? If so, I love your Apollo 11 Re-mastered video. Well done!

 

[Tex]

EDIT:

By the way, Tex. Are you the TexFilms Tex? If so, I love your Apollo 11 Re-mastered video. Well done!

That's me, cheers!

I used Fraps to record the footage for it and Vegas Pro to edit.