Add motion blur to a video for smooth motion trails

Overview

Motion blur softens movement across frames so that moving things leave trails and fast action looks fluid rather than staccato. Choose a video and one of three strengths. Light adds a hint of blur that takes the edge off jittery footage; Medium gives a clear cinematic smear on anything that moves; Strong turns motion into streaks for a dreamlike, music-video look. The effect follows motion, so a static background stays largely as it was.

The clip is decoded, blurred and re-encoded with the phone's hardware encoder in H.264 or HEVC at the original resolution. Location, device and date metadata are carried over, and HDR footage is saved as SDR. Like every video tool in iEdit the job shows its progress and can be cancelled, keeps running in the background and sends a notification when the file is ready. The original is not modified; the blurred version is saved to My files.

Use it to give phone footage a filmic feel, to make time-lapse and hyperlapse clips flow instead of flicker, or to turn a crowd or passing traffic into soft streaks behind a steadier subject. If you want the whole frame softened rather than just the motion, Gaussian blur is the sibling tool. Nothing is uploaded, so it works offline wherever you happen to be.