Motion Blur in Sony Vegas

Adding a sense of speed and realism to graphics that are in motion can make your videos look far more professional than before. The easiest way to go about doing that is to add a motion blur to the objects that are moving quickly. In this tutorial I'm going to explain how to add a motion blur to particular objects in your composition in Sony Vegas 8.0 Pro. This tutorial will allow you to have complete control over the appearance of the blur and the speed in which your object is moving. Let's begin!

To show you how we're going to add speed today, I'm going to use text as our object. You can use any other image or video file as your object as well, however text is the easiest to explain and show. So, I have a simple transparent text that says "http://postprochat.blogspot.com" I have not done anything to it yet, other than edit it from saying "Sample Text" to "http://postprochat.blogspot.com."

Text editor in Sony Vegas Pro. No effects applied yet.

The next step is to have it in motion. I like to pick a destination point first, then make another keyframe of where the object is starting from. Refer to the image below.

Showing the starting point, then the finishing point of the text in the Pan/Crop tool of Sony Vegas. Click on the image to see it better.

After you have a starting point and a finishing point, you can then move points closer or farther apart to each other. If you move them farther apart, the movement will be slower. If you move them closer together, the movement will be faster. Now, so far we've covered the essential steps to make the object move, but we haven't inserted that motion blur to the object yet. To do this, we want to apply the "Gaussian Blur" effect to the text on the track. After doing that, we need to set the Horizontal to 0.000 since the text is only moving vertically. Next, we want to move the Vertical to about 0.016. Look at the image below to see if yours looks like this.

The text with the Gaussian Blur effect added to it. Horizontal set to 0.000 and Vertical set to 0.016.

Next, we need to use our observational skills to see when the text stops moving. Click on the first keyframe in the Gaussian Blur effects panel, and tap your right arrow key until you see the point where your text makes its complete stop. Once you've found that point, turn your Vertical to 0.000 on your new keyframe and you're done!

Tapping the right arrow key until you've found the ending point, then setting the ending Vertical Gaussian Blur keyframe to 0.000.

Once you're done, the final product should look like this. Remember, you can move the Pan/Crop keyframes together to make the movement faster, but make sure you also adjust the Gaussian Blur keyframes as well, or else the blur will be timed incorrectly.

I hope this tutorial helped you creating a more professional looking movement when you have objects in motion in your composition. This will create a sense of realism within your video as well, so feel free to use it whenever you like. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comment section. Have a good one.