Question about Effects and Motion in AMVs

[evelynwang]

Hi everyone,
I’m new to creating AMVs and having some trouble with applying effects and making the motion smooth. I’ve been using After Effects, but when I apply effects like glow or blur, the video often lags or doesn’t turn out as expected.
Could you share your experiences or suggest ways to optimize effects and motion in AMVs? I’d really appreciate any advice from more experienced creators.
Thanks a lot!

[Fumbann]

Does the video lag on its preview or on the final render? (Or just the program itself?)
If your preview lags, try to change the quality of the display and see if that helps. When I'm focusing on the movement I use "half"/"third" and when I'm working on the actual colors/image quality I change it to "complete" to make sure I'm doing the right changes. (Sorry for the image in spanish)


Also make sure you clean your caché memory every once in a while. It gets so many gbs fast if you're FX-heavy.

For blur I mostly only use either gaussian blur or the camera-lens one. Gaussian only lags when you go three digits (and by that point it's kind of overkill), Camera-lens if you're not careful and have a potato computer it'll struggle a lot. The differences in iris properties are barely even noticeable if it's not a still image, I'd recommend you stay away from anything above hexagons! it murders my humble potato at least.
For glow I don't really know since I use MBL plugin overall, if you use glow as a filter I'd advise you put it on a adjustable layer (this layer type is invisible and will add any effect put into it towards all the other layers below) and turn it on/off to help optimization.

If it's laggy on the final render, first of all check the amount of frames on every composition you have on the project, maybe along the way one of them got lowered without you noticing. The other thing that comes to mind is maybe the file is too large and your video player is struggling to play it properly? different video encoders help with that

For smooth motions, I'd say use the layer option for motion blur when you do notable changes in scale/position/rotation of a clip, and for those keyframes use the graph editor. There's lots of youtube tutorials for those if you don't know much about it

Spoiler :

That's all I can think of now. I hope any of this helps