CompuServe Messages

>>the only way to come close to this effect would be to use the BLUR IPAS (Or mabye the XAOS one). Well, not the ONLY one, but certainly the easiest. A rack-focus effect using the Blur IPAS (I don't know anything about Xaos's routine) in its simplest form involves rendering the two planes you wish to focus to and from as separate elements, with alpha and using the Split alpha option to keep the alpha separate. You will then have a series of background frames (no alpha needed for that), and a series of foreground frames along with the alpha frames. Now, say you wanted to pull focus from the foreground to the background. Take the background frames and load them in Video Post (A working knowledge of VP is pretty important here), and then use blur to process them, going from blurred at the top of the shot to full focus at the end. then load the foreground and blur it in the opposite direction over the range of the pull, then do the same to the split alpha files for the foreground. Now you will have a new background sequence, over which you will composite the new foreground frames, using the split alpha frames as masks. This will leave you with a final composite that shows a focus pull from the foreground to the background. Thats the simple explanation, and of course there are many variations that can be done. Theoretically you can do the same thing using an image processor like Photoshop to blur the layers, but unless you had LOTS of time to run all the frames thru one at a time, you would need to have a static scene and just composite two stills. There are some programs popping up that will let you process sequences of frames, and these would simplify the process of using an external program to blur the frames. Well, those are the basics. I hope you get the idea. (if not, let me know, and I'll go into more detail)