SOLVED: How to get Motion Blur (for animated objects) in Final Cut Pro without a plugin in 2025 - Tutorial
Hello Final Cut Pro users! I previously showed you how to achieve smooth keyframes in Final Cut Pro without a plugin: SOLVED: How to achieve Smooth Keyframes (… - Apple Community Today I want to offer a solution to another common complaint about Final Cut Pro: the lack of motion blur. A common solution is to use the Directional Blur and painstakingly animate the direction and amount parameters by hand, but this is an extremely time consuming and frustrating process. I'm posting this here for reference for anyone looking for a better, automated, free solution to this problem in the future.
::: Tutorial - How to get Motion Blur (for animated objects) in Final Cut Pro :::
In this example, I want to add motion blur to the picture bouncing across the screen, animated with keyframes.
1 - Right-click on the animated (keyframed) object in the timeline and make it a Compound Clip.
2 - Add the "Trails" effect to the newly created Compound Clip.
3 - Set the "Duration" to 0,01 (to simulate something similar to a 180 degree motion blur, recommended) or to 0,02 (to simulate something similar to a 360 degree motion blur, not recommended).
4 - Change the "Echoes" to 30 (this is essentially the amount of motion blur samples, so the higher the value the better the motion blur will look at the cost of increased rendering time).
5 - Maintain "Trail On" as "Light".
6 - Click on "Modify" and "Render All" and wait a few minutes to let it render the result since the effect is kind of heavy and hard to playback in real time without rendering.
Now you have something that somewhat simulates motion blur, without having to manually animate it.
I know this isn't a perfect solution and it's technically not real motion blur since it works by smearing out the light parts in the direction of motion, but look at this as a temporary workaround for adding motion blur until Apple properly implement motion blur into Final Cut Pro! Hopefully it helps someone!
Without motion blur, fast moving keyframed objects looks really stuttery in a 24 FPS or 25 FPS timeline during playback.
With motion blur, fast moving keyframed objects looks really smooth and natural in a 24 FPS or 25 FPS timeline during playback.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.4
