[Peter Litwinowicz]

Our SmoothKit filter set ( $89.95) has a directional blur filter that will start a pixel and blur going to one side of the pixel instead of both sides. Simply apply the directional blur filter and set the “FIlter Grow” parameter to “One side” (from the default of “Both Sides”).

You can also control the direction at each pixel (instead of a globally applied direction) through the use of an externally supplied image (like a ramp, or the picture itself). Be sure to read the short HTML manual that is installed with the plugins upon installation.

You can try the demo by clicking on the “Downloads” button on our webpage for SmoothKit: https://www.revisionfx.com/smok.htm
The filter set has some other nice filters: a true compound blur that doesn’t give a box-filter approximation like that found in AE. You can blur images without blurring across edges (using our Gaussian Blur filter and setting the max deviation less than 100%. This is how we blurred the face you see on the page for SmoothKit without blurring the hair too much.

Pete Litwinowicz
https://www.revisionfx.com

[Peter Litwinowicz]

[yoyomama] “or real. we used to use twixtor all the time but then furnace came out with the plug for AE. we tested it against twixtor, re-timer, annnd some other one i cant remember. kronos is much faster and gives the best results. only problem is that you have to buy render licenses, so if you are rendering over a network … it could get expensive. “

Have you used Twixtor lately? The new version (4.5) that came out in March is much much better (we completely rewrote the tracker), and our Pro version has many more features to fix the tracking when things “go bad.” ( and yes, things will go bad with ANY retiming software). We believe that Twixtor 4.5 compares favorably against Kronos even without any manual help, but I’ll let you decide for yourself. You try it out you can see for yourself that we pretty darn fast too (as far as this stuff goes).

Why don’t you try our demo version? I believe Kronos has a demo version too. You can compare for yourself.

Pete Litwinowicz
https://www.revisionfx.com

[Peter Litwinowicz]

You can always try the compound blur available in our gaussian filter inside SmoothKit. https://www.revisionfx.com/smok.htm

It’s a true compound gaussian blur and not a box-filter approximate.

However, to use it as a DoF filter you’ll need to get your Z-component into a greyscale image and use that as the per-pixel kernel size “modulator” inside the SmoothKit Gaussian filter. You may also need to play some tricks with the greyscale image (like multiplying it by itself to get a “squared” value at each pixel) so that it performs nicely as a DoF filter. Remember to precomp any operations on the image used as the per-pixel filter kernel scale before using it with our plugin.

Plus you get 5 other very interesting smoothing filters that allow you to blur and preserve various kinds of image properties (like edges).

We have a free demo on the website, in the “Downloads” subsection for SmoothKit.

Cheers,
Pete Litwinowicz
https://www.revisionfx.com