better camera blur?

[Ben Insler]

Why not add a gaussian blur as well on the layers you want to be out of focus? This might clean up (or rather enhance) your blur effect.

-Ben

[Jeremy Webb]

i thought about this, but there are a lot of things that are coming in and out of focus and i’m not excited to do all of the keyframing, if i can avoid it.

[Ben Insler]

Yeah, that’s what i figured would be the case. I’ve had trouble with the camera DOF blur too, and the only way I could fix it was with gaussian blur. Fortunately you don’t need too much blur on the images, just enough to cover up the bad areas in the DOF… I’d experiment on a layer to see how much gaussian blur you need and then write an expression relative to the camera for that layer’s gaussian blur so that the blur intensifies (to the maximum necessary) as the layer moves out of the focal plane (in either direction) and is zero when that layer should be in focus. Then copy the gaussian blur with the expression and put it on all the layers, essentially doing exactly what the camera’s DOF is doing but correcting it with the gaussian blur. I guess you could even just do this and turn the camera’s DOF blur off… that might even turn out better.

Best,

Ben

[Joey Korenman]

You could probably just apply Gaussian Blur to all the layers that you’d like to be affected by Depth of Field, and then write an expression for the Blur Amount parameter that would link to the layer’s distance from the camera. Now, it’s pretty easy for me to just throw that out there since I wouldn’t actually know how to write that expression, but this website can probably teach you how.

https://www.jjgifford.com/expressions/geometry/length.html

joey

[Ben Insler]

Yes, but the method is a little more complicated than that… for example if the point of focus is 3 units (or whatever distance is measured in, we’ll call them units) from the camera, we want the gaussian blur on the layer to be 0, not 3, when the layer is 3 units from the camera. I guess we could just use simple addition/subtraction from the distance to achieve this, but I was thinking that a cap on the blur might be nict too, because as distances increase or decrese to the extremes, we would want the gaussian blur to just completely obliterate the layer (unless you were going for a macro lens effect).