What is "frame blending" really?

I can't figure out what "frame blending" is supposed to be. The fact that it's a *checkbox* makes it even stranger. It's either on or off. How does this differ from "motion blur" (is it just a synonym?) and why is it not an effect you put in the timeline but a boolean on/off option when exporting?
I did read the pop-up summary when hovering the option. It does explain it somewhat, but doesn't really answer my questions.

silly people with a silly request.
Heh, heh. I was one of them. (We're talking back in 2007.) I didn't like the default (particularly for what I was doing at the time), and I think it was not possible under some conditions to avoid it.
Example: some slow-mo benefits from interpolated frames and a bit of blur. But when you are looking to get crisp looks in between, you don't want frame blending. And for some animation subjects (think import from After Effects) it was a problem. Sorry; don't remember now why it was not as simple as turning it off. Like lots of things now, I'd like a toggle to control the default (on or off).

Similar Messages

Slow-mo frame blending question

I've made a movie consisting entirely of slowed-down clips (all 40% or 50% speed), and I'm trying to decide whether to leave the "frame blending" option checked. At first I unchecked it because in some clips with a lot of fast movement, it creates a weird blurry ghost-ish effect that I really don't like; I'd much rather have it look a bit choppy, in fact that kind of works with the movie.
The problem is when I burn a DVD and try to play it on a TV screen, there's a flickering strobe-like effect, especially on those clips with fast movement. I'm wondering if applying a flicker filter or something like that would solve the problem, or is frame blending really going to be necessary for it to play properly on a TV?
Thanks!
Claire

Better off frame blending with slomoed material.

Frame blending makes rendered version really jerky? Why?

I have been experimenting with different rendering options and with frame blending on, it comes out really jerky. It seems to just ruin any project. Why on earth would anyone want to use it?
Motion blur makes it look much better and smoother but takes hours to render. I thought frame blending was supposed to be a quicker option but still smoothed things out a bit rather than simply make it worse.
Maybe there is something else that needs to be done before it looks good? Any clues anyone?

No, not on a clip. This project only has stills in it.
I mean one of the check items in render menu. It just makes the rendered output look terrible. What is it there for? When does it do something useful?

Adobe Media Encoder 4.2 update forces Frame Blend

I didn't really want to repost, but I felt the title and info in my previous post were innacurate (http://forums.adobe.com/message/2576915#2576915)
In my previous post, I thought Premiere was to blame, but after a few reinstallations, I've found that the update to AME 4.2 causes the problem.
I've found that Adobe Media Encoder 4.2 forces Frame Blend, even if it has been disabled on each clip of the timeline, when the frame rate of your sequence settings differ from the frame rate of the target format.
Example: Exporting from 24fps Desktop -> MPEG2-DVD (23.976fps)
Adobe Media Encoder 4.1 does not have this behavior. I've reverted to 4.1 for the time being.
If anyone has a workaround for this, or any other info on this problem, please share.

I am having a similar problem. Is it just me or is it Adobe? I have had so many problems with Adobe Premiere CS4. It may have also been exacerbated by the fact the I updated to 4.2.1 (mostly in part to determine if another issue was resolved with this update).
I have some editing background in the Windows Movie Maker and iMovie world, and was excited to use Adobe Premiere, but I have had nothing but problems.
Everything that I am trying to do, looks really washed out, and renders the video useless.
I am trying to do what you just described, with speeding up and slowing video to match the computer actions with the person's voice. I am capturing video using CamStudio and Helix YV12 CODEC, and tried to use HuffyUV lossless compression: using DV-NTSC as the standard format.
Then I go to compose my video, and output the video, but the video is crap. It sounds like the Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder are having major problems.
I tried rendering it to Uncompressed Microsoft AVI with UYVY @ 100% quality, and tried to compare it with Windows Media at the highest quality, and it is frustrating. When I hear that Frame Blend is being applied, it seems to look worse.
I am running:
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU 2.33 GHz (which is kind of slow)
8 GB RAM, 2 SATA 1 TB Drives WD Caviar Green (a little substandard)
Windows XP 64-bit
Let me know there is another process that I am missing. I don't really want to give up on Adobe Premiere, but from a end-user standpoint, I will have to revert back to using WMM due to time constraints. I want to take full advantage of all of the editing and effects capabilities of Premiere, but can't because I can't even produce a decent export to be used by any other program (and given that every conversion will in some way affect the quality of the output, I want to reduce any intermediate steps).
Arrggh!!!

Frame blending not blending propperly

Problem is this:
A clip is slowed to 20% with frame blending enabled. However, when it's played back, it looks jerky, as though there were a problem with the frame rate.
The clip is MPEG4, 30fps. The sequence is also set at 30fps.
This is what it looks like:
http://www.wpsc.co.uk/teleport/slowmoproblem.mp4
Any help would be awesome!
Thanks!
Ben

I've actually been having this exact same problem for about a half year now (ever since Apple released a past update to Final Cut Pro and frame blending started behaving weird after that.) The bummer part is that all the NEW videos I've made after the update, using frame blending, work great and blend beautifully. But all the videos that I started working on before the update stutter miserably.
The biggest problem is that I have one project in particular (a 6 minute music video) that literally took me about a month to make and it's FULL of slow-mo shots with frame blending and it would have taken me FOREVER to re-capture the footage and start a new project with the updated FCP architecture.
I feel like there has to be a really simple solution, like a field is off or the FPS is off or some little thing that got messed up in the update that I just need to switch back but I haven't the foggiest what it is and I haven't been able to track down any good info on google about this yet.
My "solution" for now (if you want to call it that) is to just take Frame Blending off of all 135 slo-mo shots (which makes it look WAY less smooth, but it's better than constant stuttering). I never posted anything about this in the past because I was always expecting apple to finally release a fix but nothing has ever come out.
Any ideas would be welcome.

Frame Blending is Causing Stuttering

I've actually been having this problem for about a half year now (ever since Apple released a past update to Final Cut Pro) and frame blending started behaving weird after that. The bummer part is that all the NEW videos I've made after the update, using frame blending, work great and blend beautifully. But all the videos that I started working on before the update stutter miserably.
The biggest problem is that I have one project in particular (a 6 minute music video) that literally took me about a month to make and it's FULL of slow-mo shots with frame blending and it would have taken me FOREVER to re-capture the footage and start a new project with the updated FCP architecture.
I feel like there has to be a really simple solution, like a field is off or the FPS is off or some little thing that got messed up in the update that I just need to switch back but I haven't the foggiest what it is and I haven't been able to track down any good info on google about this yet.
My "solution" for now (if you want to call it that) is to just take Frame Blending off of all 135 slo-mo shots (which makes it look WAY less smooth, but it's better than constant stuttering). I never posted anything about this in the past because I was always expecting apple to finally release a fix but nothing has ever come out.
As a side note, the stuttering only happens once you render the effect. It looks wonderful in the preview. But in order to export it in any way shape or form (whether to Motion or as a video file), FCP needs to render it - at which point it goes wacky.
Does anyone know any things I could try? Like maybe a way to adjust the source file that all the clips are cut from? (all the clips come from one big DV file)
Any ideas would be welcome.

Okay so here's what happened. First I tried the de-interlacing filter... but no luck. So then I tried the Field Shift Filter in the Video Filters menu, in both +1 and -1 modes... but no luck. Then I thought I'd try re-ripping the .dv file from the clients original DVD (the only reason I never did this in the past is because it originally worked when I made the video. It was only after an apple update that I remembered it no longer working correctly.)
Not really thinking it would make a difference, but following your advice none the less, I recaptured the video and... it WORKED! 6 months it's been doing this, and to think all I had to do was re-capture. One weird thing it's doing now though is the upper letterbox border is "fluttering" at around 30 times a second. My guess is that the letterbox is slightly higher on one field then the other, but that I can just fix with a little minor cropping of the top line of pixils. At least the slow-mo's are nice and smooth again.
That Hobbes face is very fitting... as I feel like that's the face he'd be giving me right now.
Thanks for giving me all the great ideas Patrick, YOU ROCK!

Is it possible to partially export a video using frame blending?

For example, I have a video intro that, after being uploaded and processed on YouTube, looks very choppy. However, if I export it using frame blending, it looks perfectly fine. The down side is that the rest of the video looks somewhat more blurry, as frame blending tends to do. I like how fluid the intro is when frame blended, but I perfer the rest of the video when it's just exported normally. I found an option called frame blend under the clip's video options, making me think that I could fix my problem, but it didn't seem like it did anything at all when I exported it. Is what I'm trying to achieve actually possible, or will I just have to deal with it, one way or the other?

1. I export in H.264 with the preset HDTV 720p 29.97 fps High Quality. I would use the YouTube preset, but it compresses the audio to a point where it sounds terrible. I'm sure there's a way to fix this, but I don't know enough about it to do so myself.
2. My sequence also runs at 29.97 fps.
3. The intro consists of several game capture clips all .avi at what I think is 29 fps. Many of the clips are sped up to at least 200%.

FCP turns off when I turn off frame blending

Hi, I really hope that someone can help with this. I'm running FCP 5.1, 8 GB, 2.66 Ghz. Just starting yesterday, everytime I keyframe a move in the motion tab, as I click to turn off frame blending, FCP quits. No "app unexpectedly quit" warning or anything. Just shuts down. It's pretty annoying when you're on a deadline.
Anybody have any ideas? Please feel free to step up to the plate. Thanks!
mac pro G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8) Big Huevos

Did you do any software updates recently? You should always clone your startup drive when you have a stable OS/Application combo. This way you can restore your system to it's previous state quickly.
Have you repaired permissions?

My SD video keeps jumping between the upper and lower frames. So the video starts frame blending and blurring in and out.

My SD video keeps jumping between the upper and lower frames. So the video starts frame blending and blurring in and out. The sequence settings are set to
Editing Mode: DV NTSC 29.97 frames/second.
Pixel Aspect Ration: D1/DV NTSC (0.9091)
Fileds: Lower Field First
Display Format: 30fps Non-Drop-Frame Timecode
720 x480

What is the source of your video, and exactly what is inside your video?
Report back with the codec details of your file, use the programs below... A screen shot works well to SHOW people what you are doing
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/592070?tstart=30 for screen shot instructions
Free programs to get file information for PC/Mac http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download

Frame blend unaffective?

Hi all,
Here again, once again stumped with Premiere's unwillingness to work properly/consistently and unable to find any other forum threads about my problem.
What's going on is that the clip option "Frame Blend" is not seeming to have any effect on my render in CS4. In fact, when I take on and off, the state of the render remains the same. In other words, if I've rendered and it's green, I turn off frame blend, and it stays green. Turn back on, and it stays green. It's pretty obvious it's just broken-disconnected from affecting my clips, as it renders like a charm, quickly, and in the amount of same time whether or not Frame Blend is checked or not--and the playback of the render is clearly frame to frame. For example, if I slow it down to like 10% it's, step.... step... step... or about 3 frames a second.
The project is SD, the footage is HDV captured in Ppro as mpeg, it's on a OS X 10.5.6 .
Here's the kicker, the same project copy/paste from CS3 works just fine. No changes what so ever and my render time shoots up (as expected) and it actually renders the Frame Blend, producing smoothe video.
I would just export the whole thing out of CS3, but CS3 particularly likes to crash randomly through the export (I've tried a variety of output formats and the standard copy/paste into a new project, timeline, etc). Which is the reason I decided to take it to CS4 to begin with.
I'm going to try the last update for CS4 which apparently has to do with AVC-Intra.. but in the meantime I'd appreciate some help and advice.
Thanks!
- wb

I'm fully up to date, that was the first thing I tried to no avail. I was surprised that updating didn't fix it, I was expecting it to.
SFL, I had searched the forums and came up with nothing, hence my post beginning with 'unable to find any other forum threads about my problem'.
I'll mention again that a) the clips that aren't working have time remapping applied or constant time speed changes. For example, one clip variables from anywhere from 10% to a 80% or so speed change, and many of the clips have been stretched with the stretch rate tool to fit gaps. I wouldn't be able to tell if frame blending was working or not if the speed wasn't changed and still at 100%.
And b) frame blending is working fine in CS3. More details on this are above in my earlier posts, but basically the exact same sequence works in CS3 but doesn't work in CS4. So the circumstances haven't changed between it working and not working.
My vote is some sort of translation bug when updating a CS3 project to CS4. It also messed up a variety of other things (mentioned above) that made me decide to just go back to CS3 for the project and deal with the random export crashing.
Typical week using Adobe products powerful and sloppy. Thanks for the responses all,
- wb

Frame Blending always on when exporting to MPEG2 with Premiere 4.2.1

Hi,
Can anyone confirm that when exporting to MPEG-2 DVD that Frame Blending seems to always be present even if you disable it on the timeline with Premiere 4.2.1. I know that sometime before the 4.2.1 update that this was not the case.
The problem is not present when exporting to other formats, like H.264.
Note: I am going from a 24fps Desktop timeline -> MPEG2
Can someone confirm this, please?

Colin: So was this introduced before 4.2.1? I'd like to know which version to revert to to avoid this problem.
I'm not actually goign from 24fps to 29.97fps, but from 24fps to 23.976. I've tried a range of settings/frame rates, but with mpeg2 specifically, I have forced frame blending.
From what I understand, my settings should not introduce frame blending.
Here are my sequence settings:
Desktop
24fps
1280 x 720
Square Pixel
No fields (progressive scan)
Outputting to:
Mpeg2-dvd
23.976
Widescreen
No fields (progressive scan)
Interpolation does not necessarily involve frame blending...It should simply duplicate frames....

Frame Blending Not Respecting "Anchor" Frames

I have a QT movie. It is 24 fps. If I drop it into a 48 fps comp and step thru one frame at a time each frame repeats twice.. makes sense (A-A-B-B-C-C). But if I turn on Frame Blending (both Modes) not only does the repeated frame get re-created (A-AB-B-BC-C-CD) from interpolation but the KEY frames get altered too ... what's going on? Why is that? Shouldn't the Key frames - the 'real' frames be unchangeable anchors? 48 is twice 24 so those shouldn't be getting blended at all in the first place.
I've tried Time Remapping instead of a higher frame rate comp and also the Time Stretch flyout to 200% - each gives me the same results.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
Marc

Honestly, that doesn't jibe with me. Even if it looks 'backwards' ... take the B for instance in my example ... the previous frame generated would just get it's info from A making AB before B. But I digress - it is what it is but I SWEAR I've generated 60i fields from 30P without altering the Key frames in the past.
But something you said started me thinking. Twixtor. I don't have a few hundred bucks for Twixtor so that was out. But when I picked up Mark Christiansen's book he mentions in his discussion about frame blending that while After Effects doesn't come with Twixtor it DOES come Timewarp from RE:Vision so I looked into that...
and it worked.
There's a teeny tiny button called, "Build From One Image" that keeps the Key frames whole and makes AB frames in between as I would expect. (See! I'm not the only one who thinks it should work like this. .. ... they made it a FEATURE!)
So I got what I was looking for with Timewarp.
Thanks to Mylenium for the Twixtor hint and Mark for his great reference book.
Marc

Frame Blending

I have two questions. First, I am about to export a film with some slow motion in it. Will it be detrimental if I frame blend the entire film upon export or should I go ahead. If not, I could export the slow motion parts with frame blending and put them back in. Just wondering what's best.
The other question relates more to pixel blending. We have used the de-noiser very heavily on some shots causing a blurry static flutter in them. I was hoping frame blending might help that, but it appears to me it doesn't apply to anything but time adjustment. Any ideas on how to alleviate that flutter?

which de-noiser effect are you using? if its causing a side effect, then it would be better to use another de-noiser, rather than try to fix a problem it creates.
premiere has no real slow motion effect. it will either duplicate frames or frame blend. neither are good options for todays fast refresh rate monitors. if you still want to use frame blend, you can select the slow-mo clips in the timeline and right click to turn on frame blend just for those. if you have access to after effects you can try the one in there, or look at third party plugins like twixtor. if you shot high fps like 60, you can then slow mo that footage and premiere will have frames to work with, and wont need frame blend.

Frame blending help

hi,
could someone explain to me what 'frame blending' actually does when slowing a clip down?
which is smoothest with with or without?
thanks in advance

could someone explain to me what 'frame blending' actually does when slowing a >clip down?
If you want a clip to play for 4 seconds that is only 2 seconds long, you will need extra frames, duplication adds the new ones.
Frame blending does more than a straight duplication, it uses the before and after frames to create intermediate frames and will give a smoother look, but sometimes a little unatural in appearance.
Try turning it off if you don't like the look.
Al

Frame blending on clips @ 100%

I used to rely on frame blending to provide smooth video, and I can't release any more videos as my customers do complain when it isn't smooth.
Frame blending in CS4 is only applied to clips that have their speed reduced (or change?) from what I can gather.
Is there any way to force frame blending on?
All my footage is recorded at 120-240fps, but the native footage is slightly jumpy which is very noticeable. Frame blending helps eliminate it.

Doing that wrecked sync with the audio. AND if I resize it, the clip shrinks proportionally each time till it crashes, so it seems buggy!
I did however find a crude solution that makes video smoother at the same time.
My clips are at 120-240~fps, I re-encoded them at 30fps using all the frames of course, the result is the same clip but a lot longer and at 30fps. I simply slowed them down (about 800%) till it plays normally. The result is Adobe uses frame blending, and the frame rate seems a whole lot smoother.
It's easy in Adobe just use the frame stretch tool and drag it to match up with the audio since, the amount of frames is never exactly 240 (usually 231, 238 etc).

What is "frame blending" really?

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