blur

Blur

Blur is a native desktop application made for easily and efficiently adding motion blur to videos through frame blending, with the ability to utilise frame interpolation and more.

Join the Discord to share your configs, render tests and ask the community for help.

Download

• Windows installer
• macOS installer
• Linux (requires manual installation of dependencies)

Beta releases

I often release beta versions with new functionality before I think they're stable enough for a proper release. To test these releases, visit the Releases tab of the repo. To receive beta update notifications you can enable include beta updates in your blur.cfg found in your config folder. Any feedback or issue reporting on these releases is greatly appreciated :)

macOS notes

After opening on Mac for the first time you'll get a 'Blur is damaged and can't be opened.' error. To fix this, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/blur.app in Terminal to unquarantine it.*

The default interpolation program on macOS is RIFE, unlike Windows and Linux. RIFE is more accurate than SVP, but quite a bit slower. The reason for this difference is because because using SVP for interpolation on macOS requires that SVP Manager be running, or you'll get a red border around videos. (This software is paid, and not affiliated with Blur)

Linux notes

Requires manual installation of dependencies. See here for the list of dependencies.

Features

The amount of motion blur is easily configurable, and there are additional options to enable other features such as interpolating the video's fps. This can be used to generate 'fake' motion blur through frame blending the interpolated footage. This motion blur does not blur non-moving parts of the video, like the HUD in gameplay footage.

The program can also be used in the command line via blur-cli, use -h or --help for more information.

Sample output

600fps footage, blurred with 0.6 blur amount

60fps footage, interpolated to 600fps, blurred with 0.6 blur amount

As visible from these images, the interpolated 60fps footage produces motion blur that is comparable to actual 600fps footage.

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Recommended settings for gameplay footage:

Most of the default settings are what I find work the best, but some settings can depend on your preferences.

Blur amount

For 60fps footage:

intent	amount
Maximum blur/smoothness	>1
Normal blur	1
Medium blur	0.5
Low blur	0.2-0.3

To preserve your old blur amount when changing framerate use the following formula:

[new blur amount] = [old blur amount] × ([new fps] / [old fps])

So normal blur at 30fps becomes 0.5, etc.

Interpolated fps

Results can become worse if this is too high. In general I recommend around 5x the input fps. Also SVP seems to only be able to interpolate up to 10x the input fps, so don't bother trying anything higher than that.

Notes

Limiting smearing

Using blur on 60fps footage results in clean motion blur, but occasionally leaves some smearing artifacts. To remove these artifacts, higher framerate source footage can be used. Recording with software such as OBS at framerates like 120/180fps will result in a greatly reduced amount of artifacting.

Preventing unsmooth output

If your footage contains duplicate frames then occasionally blurred frames will look out of place, making the video seem unsmooth at points. The 'deduplicate' option will automatically fill in duplicated frames with interpolated frames to prevent this from happening.

Frameserver output

Blur supports rendering from frameservers. This means you can avoid having to run blur on your input videos when video editing. When rendering, simply output (make sure your project is high framerate) to the frameserver and then drag the generated AVI into blur. Note that some video editing software might limit the maximum project framerate.

Config settings explained:

blur

• blur - whether or not the output video file will have motion blur
• blur amount - if blur is enabled, this is the amount of motion blur (0 = no blur, 1 = fully blend every frame together, 1+ = more blur/ghosting)
• blur output fps - if blur is enabled, this is the fps the output video will be. can be a framerate (e.g. 600) or a multiplier (e.g. 5x)
• blur weighting - weighting function to use when blending frames. options are listed below. also: view weighting comparison graphs.
  • equal - each frame is blended equally
  • gaussian_sym
  • vegas
  • pyramid
  • gaussian
  • ascending
  • descending
  • gaussian_reverse
  • custom weights - custom comma-separated frame weights, e.g. 5, 3, 3, 2, 1. higher numbers indicate frames being more visible when blending, lower numbers mean they are less so.

interpolation

• interpolate - whether or not the input video file will be interpolated to a higher fps
• interpolated fps - if interpolate is enabled, this is the fps that the input file will be interpolated to (before blurring). can be a set fps number or a multiplier (append x to end e.g. 5x)
• interpolation method - method used for interpolation:
  • Quality: RIFE > svp
  • Speed: svp > RIFE
  • Note: On macOS, SVP requires SVP Manager to be open or a red border will appear. It provides a 30-day trial, but then costs $24.99 for a lifetime license. RIFE can always be used however, but it is slower than SVP.

pre-interpolation

• pre-interpolation - enable pre-interpolation using a more accurate but slower AI model before main interpolation
• pre-interpolated fps - FPS to pre-interpolate input video to (before blurring). can be a set fps number or a multiplier (append x to end e.g. 5x)

rendering

• quality - crf of the output video (may be different if using GPU encoding) - (0 = lossless quality, 51 = really bad)
• deduplicate - removes duplicate frames and generates new interpolated frames to take their place. fixes 'unsmooth' looking output caused by stuttering in recordings
• deduplicate range - amount of frames beyond the current frame to look for unique frames when deduplicating. make it higher if your footage is at a lower FPS than it should be (e.g. choppy 120fps gameplay recorded at 240fps), lower it if your blurred footage starts blurring static elements such as menu screens
• deduplicate threshold - threshold of movement that triggers deduplication. turn on debug in advanced and render a video to embed text showing the movement in each frame
• deduplicate method - method used for deduplication:
  • Quality: RIFE > svp
  • Speed: old > svp > RIFE
• preview - opens a render preview window
• detailed filenames - adds blur settings to generated filenames
• copy dates - copies over the modified date from the input file to the output file

gpu acceleration

• gpu decoding - uses gpu when decoding
• gpu interpolation - uses gpu when interpolating
• gpu encoding - uses gpu when rendering
• gpu type (nvidia/amd/intel) - your gpu type

timescale

• input timescale - timescale of the input video file (will be sped up/slowed down accordingly)
• output timescale - timescale of the output video file
• adjust timescaled audio pitch - will pitch shift audio when sped up/slowed down

filters

• brightness - brightness of the output video
• saturation - saturation of the output video
• contrast - contrast of the output video

advanced rendering

• video container - the output video container format (e.g. mp4, mkv, avi)
• custom ffmpeg filters - custom ffmpeg filters to be used when rendering (replaces gpu & quality options)
• debug - shows debug window, prints commands used by blur

advanced blur

• blur weighting gaussian std dev - standard deviation used in the gaussian weighting
• blur weighting gaussian mean - mean used in the gaussian weighting
• blur weighting gaussian bound - bound used in the gaussian weighting

advanced interpolation

• SVP interpolation preset - preset used for framerate interpolation when using SVP, one of:

  • weak (default) - explained further here
  • film - explained further here
  • smooth - explained further here
  • default (default svp settings)

• SVP interpolation algorithm - algorithm used for framerate interpolation when using SVP, one of:

  • 13 - best overall quality and smoothness (default) - explained further here
  • 23 - sometimes smoother than 13, but can result in smearing - explained further here
  • 1 - explained further here
  • 2 - explained further here
  • 11 - explained further here
  • 21 - explained further here

• interpolation block size - block size used for framerate interpolation. higher block size = less accurate blur, will result in spaces around non-moving objects of the frame, also renders faster. lower block size = more accurate blur, but can result in artifacting, also slower. for higher framerate input videos lower block size can be better. options:

  • 4
  • 8 (default)
  • 16
  • 32

• interpolation mask area - mask amount used when interpolating. higher values can mean static objects are blurred less, but can also result in less smooth output (moving parts of the image can be mistaken for static parts and don't get blurred)

manual svp override

You can customise the SVP interpolation settings even further by manually defining json parameters. see here for explanations on settings

• manual svp: enables manual svp settings, true/false
• super string: json string used as input in SVSuper
• vectors string: json string used as input in SVAnalyse
• smooth string: json string used as input in SVSmoothFps

These options are not visible by default, add them to your config and they will be used.

Linux dependency requirements

General list of things you need

If your distro isn't listed below, here's a list of the things you'll need to install.

• VapourSynth
• FFmpeg
• VapourSynth plugins (install to your system vapoursynth plugin path or [your blur binary directory]/vapoursynth-plugins)
  • SVPflow
  • BestSource (my automated build)
  • MVTools (my automated build)
  • Akarin (or this fork which supports newer LLVM versions) (my automated build)
  • RIFE-ncnn-Vulkan
  • Adjust

Arch required packages

paru -S vapoursynth ffmpeg vapoursynth-plugin-svpflow vapoursynth-plugin-bestsource vapoursynth-plugin-mvtools vapoursynth-plugin-vsakarin-av1an-git vapoursynth-plugin-rife-ncnn-vulkan

And manually install adjust

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*in the future I might buy a dev cert, but $99 a year atm doesn't seem worth it 😅