After Effects Weekly

- [Instructor] In the recent versions of After Effects, Adobe has upgraded few of the blur effects and made them GPU accelerated. This means that they render much faster but can also look a bit different. In this movie I'll show you how you can automatically upgrade those blurs and also point out few things to look out for when you choose to do it. To demonstrate it, I've recovered an old project from the archive. This one was made by Studio Bilderish from Tel Aviv as part of an explainer video for a company called "Start Up". If you want to see the full spot, go ahead to Bilderish.com and you'll find it over there. But we are just going to use this as an example because I know that there are few instances of the fast blur effect here. The fast blur effect is no longer part of After Effects. If I'm going to go into Effects and Preset here, and start to type down the words "Fast Blur", you can see that we have this CC Radial Fast Blur, but this is not the effect that I'm referring to. However, After Effects can still read and render those effects if you open an old project. The new alternatives, if I'm just going to clear this search and open up the Blur and Sharpen category, are the Fast Box Blur effect and the Gaussian Blur. Those effects are using a modern code and also GPU accelerated. So if you want to render this comp faster as well as make it up to date, you should think about upgrading those old blurs and replace them with one of the modern versions. Just to see over here, I'm going to switch off the particular layer. This is going to help us to concentrate on the underneath result, where we can see the blur in action. And just to show you what I mean, I'm going to type here in the search box in the timeline the word "fast" and you can see that indeed, we have two instances of Fast Blur in parentheses "Legacy". Now, in this case, we only dealing with two instances. But some projects will have dozens of them. Luckily, there is a built in script inside After Effects that can help you to replace all instances at once. But, as you may read between the lines, not all blurs were equally created. So we will get a performance boost, but also a change in appearance. Now there is no magic cure here. But at least, we can take a snapshot of this current frame and match it to the upgraded version. Before doing so, I just want to call your attention under the Effect Controls here. This is the Fast Blur Legacy, if I'm going to click on the about, it will tell us that it is using the Fast Blur Effect, something which is not shaping with After Effects. This is version 2.1, and also note that sometimes you will have also the older version of the Gaussian Blur effect, which was updated to a GPU one, as we can see over here. So just bear this in mind before activating the script. So now, I'm just going to go back to the File menu, and under Scripts, I'm going to run this script, upgrade Legacy Blurs, and this is going to ask you how you want to upgrade those Legacy Blurs. In the previous version of the Gaussian Blur effect, the Repeat Edge Pixels that we can see over here was not available. So if you want, you can tick this option in order to Edit at the same time that you upgrading the Blur. When in doubt, I highly recommend to check this mark. I'm going to say okay, and it will look like nothing has happened. Although we can see the little icon which indicate that this is now an accelerated effect. After Effects didn't change the name, but if I'm going to click on the About, it is now actually referring to the Gaussian Blur version three which is the new effect and it replace it on all instances as we can see over here as well. This is the good thing. The bad thing is that if I'm going to compare it with the previous result, we can see that this is how the Fast Blur was working before, a little bit more blurry, and the Gaussian Blur, the new one that it is using right now, different in terms of its appearance. My recommendation is to go to one of the instances in the timeline, and look for the blurriness option and then just add a simple expression, I'm just going to hold down the Alt or the Option and click on this stopwatch, and I'm just going to tell it to take the current value and multiply it by, let's say 1.5. This is because the newer version of Gaussian Blur is a little bit more gentle than the previous Fast Blur that we were using. Now of course, this is not going to yield a similar result, if I'm just going to click in order to approve it. We can see that it is now multiplying the same values by 1.5, so it will still use those key frames, but it will be a stronger blur. It won't be exactly the same, but it is, I think, a good compromise. What about the other ones? If you want to apply the same expression to all the other instances, what you can do is highlight the word "bluriness" where the expression lives, go to the Edit menu, and choose Copy With Property Links, and then you should identify the newer one. Of course, you can once again use this search in order to isolate whatever you need. But in this case, I'm just going to click on the word "bluriness" and go to Edit and Paste the same expression. But this time, it is actually referring to the expression that we've created over here. Now, if I'm going to use once again, the show snapshot, we can compare between the two. And if we think that we need to maybe change this value to multiply it let's say by 1.8, it's actually going to affect all the other instances as well due to the fact that we used Copy With Property Links. So, this is how you can upgrade Legacy Blurs using a built-in script, as well as modify their appearance using a simple expression.