From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 03 Advanced Animation

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Adjusting motion blur

Adjusting motion blur

You have control over how many intermediate frames After Effects creates for each frame of your animation, basically how smooth your blur is. To get access to that, you need to open Composition > Composition Settings, then go underneath the Advanced tab. That's where the Motion Blur settings reside. There are two sets of parameters: number of samples and shutter angle and phase. Motion Blur is not defined by the shutter speed in After Effects. Instead it is defined by the Shutter Angle. This is borrowed from film-camera terminology. One entire film frame is considered to be 360 degrees. The rotating film shutter in a mechanical film camera typically exposes that film for only half the duration of a frame or 180 degrees of the 360 degree rotation that the film shutter goes through. That's why After Effects uses degrees to define how long the shutter is open for each frame and therefore how long the blur trail is going to be. 180 as I mentioned is a default for filmic look. You can see…

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