Really Cheap Targa Motion Blur is a 32-bit Windows utility designed to take a numbered series of input Targa files, average groups of them together, and then output the resulting data as a new image, in order to simulate motion blur.

Really Cheap Targa Motion Blur provides two different blurring algorithms: an even-weighted blur, suitable for animations, and a "temporal bias" version in which the earliest input frames contribute less to the final image than the latest frames; this latter version is designed for still images, in which the fading of the blur helps to indicate direction of motion.

Even-weighted blur

Temporally biased blur

Click on the following images to see unblurred and blurred versions of the same animation (each one is approximately 140 KB, MPEG-1 format). The animation consists of a camera zoom through a cluster of quickly spinning objects (hand phasers from the original Star Trek television series).

Without Motion Blur

With Motion Blur

The Really Cheap Targa Motion Blur utility is currently only available as a Win32 binary. If you want to see it on some other platform, and want to try porting it, please contact me.

• Win32, Self-Installing Executable (295 KB)
• Win32, Zipped (37 KB, but you'll have to set up all directories and shortcuts yourself.)