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[♪ dramatic music ♪] [ADOBE TV Presents Colin Smith in...] [No Stupid Questions] [Robotic voice] No stupid questions. One of my favorite effects when I'm shooting through a real optical lens, like my gorgeous Canon 5D Mark II, is something people call bouquet or coins of light. That's the real optical thing that happens when you get depth of field and you see those beautiful sparkling lights turn into these little sharp little edges. That is just gorgeous. You don't have to know anything about filmmaking to know that it adds an intimacy to a scene and really just helps set things right. Well, one of my new favorite features in After Effects CS5.5 is the new Camera Lens Blur. We've been doing this for a long time in After Effects, but I've been faking it with Gaussian Blur so it just looked all soft. This new effect is unbelievably controllable. It works with a mask so that we can stop that happening from some things. And you can basically take a complete, flat 2-D layer and make it look like it's got an enormous amount of depth. Let's have a look. So this is the footage that's already rendered. And I'm just going to play this here and show you what's happening. This is the original footage with no effect in it. And we've added this visual effect of this globe on here-- this burning little globe in his hand--and it gets to a point near the end where you see the little coins of light start to sparkle. And if I turn on the right effect, there we go. I was playing around with this earlier, and I had it off. There we go. Look at that. So we're going from this footage right here with no effect, to this visual effect and the Camera Lens Blur. If I just isolate that particular layer and have a look at it, you can see what's going on. So inside my effects control, Camera Lens Blur is applied. I'm going to turn that off and show it to you. That's still a cool effect, but if we want to start separating that effect from the actual actor, we turn that on, and we can control how much--the blur radius. So as we turn that up or turn that down, you can see that we're bringing it up or down. This particular demo file also includes a mat in front of his hand, just to help identify different areas. You'll notice that inside the Camera Lens Blur settings, we've got control for shape of the iris. So let me take it back to that point. You can see here it's a typical hexagon, or if I change that to a triangle, you can get these interesting effects. We can also change the aspect ratio so we've got more of an anamorphic flare kind of an effect going on. Let me just undo that. And some other great tools in here-- we can also use a blur map. So one of the other layers down here actually uses a blur map in front of his hand. If I open this up and we play this back, you can see we've got just a simple little painted mask inside there, and that will help us direct that particular effect to a certain area. So like I say, you can start with a very flat-looking file, and through adding Camera Lens Blur on different layers and adding masks, you have this amazing robustness that can really bring a scene to life. Let me just show you a really simple shot. This is just a simple night shot. I'll type in "Camera" and get Camera Lens Blur. Notice that it's 32 bit. And what's important there, if I jump back over to project, hold down the "Alt" key option on Mac and click here twice, when I'm in 32-bit floating and I start to do things like increase the gain and the threshold and start to really introduce some super brights inside here, those are things you can only do with 32-bit floating point lights. So if we start to turn up this blur radius, you can see it. It's definitely going to take a little bit more computing power, but I'm sitting here on my super-fast HP Z800. Look at that, those gorgeous coins of light. Look at that. That is just fantastic. This is something that we've been waiting for forever inside software. Now it's built right into After Effects CS5.5. You simply do a quick green screen pull, light the person correctly, stick them in front of a background like this, and all of a sudden you've got this amazing cinematic quality. I'll go on all night about this. I love this effect. I hope you have fun, too, with the brand new Camera Lens Blur inside After Effects CS5.5. [Presenter/Music, Collin Smith; Executive Producer, Bob Donlon] [Producer, Karl Miller; Director/VFX, Kush Amerasinghe] [Post-Production/DP, Erik Espera][ADOBE TV Productions]
