This macro was made when I was looking for a faster way to defocus within Shake.

The native defocus node looks great but unfortunately it's prohibitively expensive for large projects, especially when you have to process hi res layers one by one. Speedyfocus gives fast defocus by adaptively degrading the input resolution before the image processing, then resizes the image back to the original size.

I have also implemented an alternative method to defocus using a dilate&erode

process as shown by my mentor Steve Wright on "compositing in Shake" CG workshop.

Thank you Steve, you rule!!

Note: Tested on Shake 4.1 Mac OSX 10.4.10 but normally it should work under any operating system.