Sometimes, you may find yourself looking at an awkward cut between two scenes. There isn’t enough going on in the two shots to explain why we are going from one to the next, yet the progression is necessary for building the story.

For example, we are cutting between a car traveling

Car Scene

and the beach destination.

Beach Scene

What we need is something that can pull energy out of the first scene and use it to dive into the second. But, it can’t call attention to itself or it will distract from the story rather than support it.

The Smear transition from NewBlue Sampler Pack provides an excellent solution by using a motion blur to blend between the two shots. Let’s discover how:

Place Smear over the transition between the two shots.

Smear Transition

A great way to get going is to test some of the presets. Depending on your NLE, click on the “p” or “presets” button to view the set of presets that ship with Smear.

Preset Selection

Since the car is moving to the right, we start by choosing “Shift Right” and it immediately gives us some half decent results.

Shift Right Preset

Now, we just need to fine tune to get this working exactly the way we want. Let’s start with the Angle. This sets the direction of the motion blur. Currently, it’s heading straight to the right and it would work better tilting a little down to the right, so we set the Angle to 10 degrees.

Angle Adjusted

Now, let’s play with the Blur control. This sets the length of the blur. If we turn it up, the longer blur implies a faster moving car, which actually would be perfect for a hyperspace hot rod, but not so appropriate here. Instead, we turn it down a notch to 15 so we see more of the car.

Blur Adjusted

It’s subtle, but when we play it back, it works better.

Finally, we look at the Direction control. Direction set the direction of the blur around the image it is blurring. Right now, it is set all the way to -100. When we move it to 0, the car seems to be expanding in the blur and going in both directions. When we move it to 100, the car now moves in the other direction. Unfortunately, that is backwards and it’s not what we want. So we return Direction to -100 and we’re done.

Smear is not only a great tool for injecting motion into transitions. It’s also a great buy! It’s part of the Sampler Pack collection which includes 10 great effects and transitions, all for only $49.95. To learn more about Smear and Sampler Pack, please visit http://www.newbluefx.com/sampler-pack.html .

You can also find a more full featured Smear in the Motion Blends collection, http://www.newbluefx.com/motion-blends.html .