Lens Blur

[paul_round]

Does anyone knoww of an animatable lens blur plugin?
Whilst the Tinder one is good, when it comes to doing an animated lens blur, with a depth of field matte, you can only set a near focus and distant focus, I would like to pull focus, as per a real camera.

Paul

[tscholton]

Have you looked at Sapphire 4 ZDefocus (which I think is an option in ZBlur)?

Jeff

[pixelmonk]

Not yet, but I shall.

Paul

[bnw]

Does animating the near and far focus points together not effectively give you a focus pull? Or are they not animateable…

You could do an animated CC on the depth matte… just lifting it up and down should move the point of focus?

[pixelmonk]

The Sapphire one does the trick, unfortunately we don’t have them.

[claudio antonelli]

Granted it’s half a year later and hopefully you’ve solved the problem in some way (haha) but what I always end up doing, either with the Tinder or Sapphire lens blur is create a stack of them with the output of the first going into the second and so on, then hand animating the focus on each one.

Not ideal, nor scientific, but I’ve always been happy with the results.

[Sajad Amini]

Either use Tinder, the Sapphire Z-Blur or RackDefocus. Be awawre of that both of the filters try to approach a lense-like blur but none of them really gets to it. Z-Blur does another job than rackdefocus. I once tried the lenseblur from speedsix – that one gives great results but I personally think the speedsx is more useful whe it comes to fictional images. – Soo many knobs and wheels to make fun on!
If you need a good alternative, try ´lenscare´. A Plugin for AfterEffects.

A general probem on every of these filters is that you cannot ´design´ the blooming effect and you cannot simulate the variing luminance level of a camera lense. None of them lets you raise contrast or lower the blacklevel and re-match the final result to the original levels of the footage clip.

if it comes to flint/flame I built a setup with a bunch of expressions and nodes that uses color correctors, box blurs and luma/chroma clamps to simulate this. It´s huge and not really handy but does a great job. It would be great to see an improved sapphire spark that gives a better chance to design any kind of camera defocus.

[Author]

Posts