Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Blur Edges Only

  • Blur Edges Only

    Posted by Mark Curry on November 17, 2008 at 12:22 am

    OK, this should be easy, but I’m stumped. I have a progressive video clip that has jaggy edges. I want to apply a (0.4 pixel) gaussian blur to the edges only. However, I cannot figure out how to isolate and blur the edges of the footage.

    I first tried the Smart Blur filter. It nicely found all these edges (via its radius control set to about 0.7) and made them white and everything else black. I tried using this resulting layer as the control layer for a Compound BLur, but found that the Compound Blur still blurred too much of the area set as black in the control layer. Next, I tried Auto-trace-ing the luminance channel of the black and white layer and copying the resulting masks to the source clip layer. This works though trying to Auto-trace my 11 second clip crashes (unexpectedly quits) or freezes AE (with a not enough memory error) . Thinking there has to be an easier way I played around with Layer Track Mattes, Blending Modes, keying, and levels in an effort to convert the black and white areas of the Smart Blur layer to alpha information. I’m really a noob, so “playing around” is the key phrase here. Help …

    Mark Curry replied 17 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Darby Edelen

    November 17, 2008 at 12:43 am

    You can use the matte you’ve created with Smart Blur as a Luma Track Matte for a blurred copy of your source footage.

    Here’s some information on track mattes:

    https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7cf9a.html

    You may want to blur the matte a bit as well to soften the transition from the original source footage to the blurred source footage. You might also consider trying the Noise & Grain > Median effect with a low radius to smooth the edges some.

    Darby Edelen

  • Mark Curry

    November 17, 2008 at 1:38 am

    Thanks Darby, that’s got it. A simple solution (once you know it).

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy