[Anne Lawant]

Yeah, I think a re-install may be the best option. In my first post, I posted a video with some time-remapping with Layer Maps. There too there are some hard edges.

Thanks everyone for all the help and thinking with me. I like this community 🙂

[Anne Lawant]

Turning of the colour adjustment does nothing. I’m more and more convinced the problem is something with my system. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what. I don’t understand how a memory issue would forbid layer maps to be used.

[Anne Lawant]

Okay, pre-composing the Solid Layer did help, but now it has the exact same problem as the Shape Layer, namely that it still has the hard edge. Well, luckily mapping layers is nice, but not something I can’t live without.

[Anne Lawant]

Okay, I just tried all that, no luck. The Compound Blur also has the hard edge when I have it point to the shape layer. The solid layer has no effect, wether I point the Compound or the Lens Blur towards it.

[Anne Lawant]

What if you just cut out the all black frames? Or would that make the movement too jittery?

[Anne Lawant]

Why this would the solution if I was working on a deadline and needed something to work, I would prefer the actual Map Layer process to work. Here is what I have now, working with feathered masks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y32H13Iw66E

It might not be that obvious, but there are only three levels of blurriness in the frame. I want more levels, gradually moving into eachother. The way a gradient Map Layer would.

[Anne Lawant]

I am not using OpenGL, but turning the preview to OpenGL made no difference. I am right now using the Lens Blur effect. The way my project is setup is as follows:

The project is 1920×1080.
The first layer is a pre-composed Shape Layer, containing a diagonal gradient black and white shape. This pre-comp has a 5000×5000 resolution, but the problem existed even before I precomposed the layer and it was just 1920×1080 (pre-composing did not work as a fix, but I like the workflow aspect). This layer is turned invisible. Collapsing the Transformation does change the picture, but does not get rid off the sharp edges.
The second layer is an adjustment layer containing some colour correction.
The third layer is an adjustment layer containg the Lens Blur effect. The depth map layer is set to the first layer. The channel is set to luminance. The blur focal distance is set to 0, the iris radius is set to 15. The Repeat Edge Pixels checkbox is checked. The rest of the options are set to standard. Playing with the Iris and Focal Distance values does change the picture (at value 100, for example, another part of the frame becomes unblurred, but there is still a rough edge between what is blurred and what is not).
The fourth layer is my actual footage. Only effect is Time Remapping. I used to have the Lens Blur effect on the actual footage, but I put it on an adjustment layer, hoping that would fix the problem. It didn’t.

So that’s my workflow. My conclusion is that for whatever reason, using Map Layers is buggy. However, I don’t see how this could be something like a driver issue. But then again, I don’t understand why the problem occurs at all. Does anyone have any experience with this problem?

[Anne Lawant]

Heyhey, thanks for your reply, I’ll try to explain better.

The pics I posted are the pics I have, not the ones I want. In the pics there is a clear problem. The edge of the effect is hard, not soft. The reason I want to use a gradient to map it to is because I don’t want that hard edge. Right now I’m rendering out a version where I copied the layer and used a feathered mask to seperate the layers, but this is also not quite the way I want it.

If I use a feathered mask to go from lens-blurred to not lens-blurred, I have two instances of the effect: blurred and not-blurred. 0% and 100%. Now, the feathering does not give me spots where the image is 50% blurred. Merely spots where both the 0% blurred and 100% blurred are visible.

In theory, when using a gradient as a map, black pixels should blur the image 0%, white pixels 100%. But the awesome part is that perfect gray spots are 50% blurred, and other tints of gray should cover the entire range between 0% and 100%. But, as the pictures I posted show, this theory is not working out.

I’d understand if this is still somewhat strange. If so, I’ll try to reformulate tomorrow.

[Anne Lawant]

Here are two other pictures. The first is the gradient I’m using now, the second is the result. Interestingly, using the gradient diagonally results in a strange effect with lines of 90 degrees. Furthermore, changing the resolution changes where the actual edge of the blur effect is.

I’m not that familiar with the inner workings of After Effects. Does anyone now what is going on?

https://img59.imageshack.us/img59/1488/gradientmap.jpg

https://imageshack.us/m/848/3351/mvi00010010111.jpg

[Anne Lawant]

That seems a little silly, not to give the option of having no half-transparant border. I’ll just make a checkerboard in Photoshop. Thanks!