Camera Lens Blur No After Effects 5.0 Plugin Download
Sibyl Piccuillo
Ran into the same problem. I opened my mac's time machine and went back to when I had the previous version installed. In the AE plugins folder i found the lens blur plugin and copied the file. pasted it into my current plugins folder and reloaded after effects. The effect no longer appears as missing.
lens blur has been removed in CS5.5 Camera Lens Blur effect and camera depth of field properties in After Effects CS5.5 Creative Cloud... it was replaced with Camera Lens blur. find the missing effect and instead apply a Camera lens blur effect with manually dialing the same settings. hopefully the result matches.
interesting. to make sure I opened a 2015.3 version to see maybe it was only moved to the obsolete category. it's not anywhere. in fact I even remember a heated debate here in the forums about the Camera Lens Blur effect not on par with the old one. if you are really curious, you can uninstall AE 14.2 and it will remove the current build too. when you re-install, it will reinstall the very first build (which was buggy) for this release...
I like that I can search in the project area for Missing Effects and it lists each and every time it is used, so I can go through those one by one and correct. Just feel bad for the content providers out there when things go missing without warning.
I'd ask for the content provider's support and even accommodate their content to the software. lens blur is not supposed to be there as of CS5.5, and I can't explain why you seem to had it. just for the test I reinstalled in one of my systems the CC14.2. now it's 14.1
We use this plugin in our entire news package and it was also stripped out of CC17 for us on Mac...
I copied it from an older versions plugin folder into our new plugin folder and it worked fine... no clue why it was removed if it still is functional.
However, as an alternative, I've discovered that Camera Lens Blur operates essentially the same way if you tweak the settings around to sort of match... just remember to 1)repeat pixel edges 2) change placement to stretch to fit
One more thing... The new "Camera Lens Blur" Plugin that replaced "Lens Blur".... I have no clue what it is actually called in the plugins folder because it is NOT in there under the name "Camera Lens Blur" So unless its a hidden file or stashed away in some other random location... I have no clue how it even loads in... but it works... soooooo, thats a plus? haha
I would not expect for effects that have been EOL'ed to be returned. It was listed as Obsolete for 7 years prior to being removed. I'd say that's quite a bit of warning. Jon mentioned above that users of 2017 can copy the AEX from an older version into their plugins directory. That may work but it is not supported.
First, pre-compose your zPass layer, next apply camera lens blur on the zpass layer, don't need to be extreme, around 10-15 pixels is fine. Now go back to the main comp and use THIS as your zpass. The redundant camera lens blur helps it blend better. Again, not a permanent fix, but it somewhat works.
On a Mac Install Adobe After Effects CC 2015. (Please note this can be done by going to the Adobe Creative Cloud app and click on the down arrow next to the after effects app and click on manage and then other versions) . Then go to the Plug-ins folder found in Applications/Adobe After Effects CC 2015/Plug-ins Find the plugin called lens blur copy it to the same location on the Adobe After Effects CC 2018. This is the easiest way.
The Camera Lens Blur effect that came with AE CS 5.5 and CS 6 doesn't look nearly as good as the old Lens Blur effect that came with CS 5; it's pretty much unusable for my purposes. Foreground elements that should be sharp render sharp, but with a blurry halo around them. The old Camera Lens blur does not exhibit this behavior, nor the Frischluft Depth of Field plugin.
The images are composited from 16-bit PNGs rendered out of Cinema 4D. There's a nasty halo visible around the foreground particle in the upper left in the CS6 Camera Lens Blur version. I saved the old Lens Blur effect as a preset out of a CS5 project and am, fortunately, still able to use that approach in CS6 since the "improved" version of the plugin looks pretty crummy (I skipped AE CS5.5). As a test I installed the demo of Frishluft's Lenscare plugins, and after inverting the depth buffer in the plugin I got a good result.
The "new" Camera Lens Blur is acting like the Compound Blur effect. Foreground elements appear sharp but with a blurry halo since the entire "background" is being blurred, creating a blurred ghost of the foreground element. The old Lens Blur effect was very slow, but it did work.
Anyone know how to make this new "improved" Camera Lens Blur look like the other plugins? I've posted a zipped file with the image and depth map in a small AE CS6 project here if anyone here would care to check my settings. Maybe I'm missing somthing.
The After Effects team does consider this to be a bug, and it's on our backlog to fix. It just hasn't risen to the top of the to-do list because we have seen very few bug reports about it, so it seems that not very many people are bothered by it. We tend to work on bugs in priority order based on severity and how many people report that they are affected.
How about this? I see this forum is frequented by Adobe employees. Would Todd or Aldofo care to take two minutes, open the CS 6 AE project I posted, and confirm that the Camera Lens Blur plugin is behaving as designed?
It is behaving as designed. You might try adjusting the Blur Focal Distance (Blur Map) and the Blur Radius for better results. The Camera Lens Blur effect is much more accurate than the original one, though you certainly do need to adjust parameters according to the particular shot.
Did you have an opportunity to check my project file? I can find no combination of settings that duplicates the behavior of the old Lens Blur effect. A Blur Radius of anything but zero creates the blurry halo around my foreground element; the larger the radius, the bigger the halo. And, obviously, there is no DOF effect if the radius is zero.
The old Lens Blur effect did it correctly. The Frishluft DOF plugin does it correctly. Am I going to have to spend $200 on a third-party plugin to retain this functionality going into the future? At what point will the old Lens Blur become incompatible with After Effects?
Your sample isn't really what I'm looking for. I want that big particle in the upper left to be totally sharp, with everything in the distance getting progressively blurrier without any halos around that foreground element. The old Lens Blur had no problem with this. If you look at the Old Lens Blur comp in my project you'll see that you're able to crank the Iris Radius way up, creating a background that's really out-of-focus but without a halo around that foreground particle. The Frishluft DOF plugin produces the look I want, too, and it's much faster than the old, native Lens Blur. That CS5 version is staggeringly slow.
Also, I attempted to duplicate your settings, but my Blur Focal Distance in the Camera Lens Blur only has a range of 0 to 1. I don't know how you were able to plug in 8520. Of course the Blur Focal Distance settings are moot if I'm only allowed a miniscule blur radius to prevent a halo from forming.
It would be swell to have the speed of the new Camera Lens Blur combined with an ability to produce results comparable to the old Lens Blur. At this point this feels like lost functionality, which wouldn't be the first time for me when upgrading After Effects. It would be about the fifth time that tools I used regularly were removed in new versions of After Effects, software I've been using professinally since 1997.
I'm only chiming in to say that I'm having the same exact issue. I wonder if anyone has been able to use the depth map feature without getting a halo? And I honestly can't see this as being a feature of the effect, and not a bug. Oh well.
Issues like this make me wonder whether anyone else is using these features professionally, or whether they just don't have much attention to detail. Does Ash "Amazing Spider-Man" Beck not notice the halo around foreground objects? This "new and improved" Camera Lens Blur has been out for, what, two years now? The old Lens Blur handled depth maps correctly, but it was slow as hell. If Adobe had just made that plugin multiprocessing-aware we'd be golden.
Define "better." If you look at the comparison image I posted at the beginning of this thread I put a render from the old CS5 Lensblur next to the Frishluft Depth of Field Blur, and I don't see any appreciable difference in quality. No halos around the foreground element, nice realistic blur stretching off in the distance. The primary thing that makes the Frishluft solution better is that it's a lot faster than the old native Lens Blur. I think it kind of sucks to have to spend $300 to regain functionality that was native in After Effects.
You can still use the old Lens Blur in CS6 if you still have a copy of CS5 working. Just apply the old Lens Blur to a layer in CS5 and save it as a preset. You can then call up that preset in CS6 and the old Lens Blur effect will appear in the effects palette, even though that actual plugin doesn't live in any of the plugin folders as far as I can see. That legacy support is in there somewhere. It's just too bad it's so very slow and kills multiprocessing.
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