Just to get this out of the way: You can also add the Transform effect to an adjustment layer in Pr or Ae, avoiding nesting/pre-comping if you want.
But I thought a summary of my meandering problem solving might help others avoid it. TL;DR: I did all my blurring in Ae with the effect CC Force Motion Blur added to an adjustment layer above every layer I wanted to blur. This way, I could keyframe the blur’s duration and strength in the effect controls. The effect Pixel Motion Blur was just as good but caused more lagging for me. In addition, using a camera tied to a null in Ae to do the scaling and position moves retained my resolution even at extreme scaling, something the Transform effect has an issue with in either app.
I'm doing 2D animation and, as in this case, want blur on some layers and not others, often in the same frame at the same time. From one large comp (roughly 5000 x 2500) constructed in Ae, I wanted a shot that starts extremely zoomed in to follow a vehicle driving through a valley with a pan across the comp, then does a swish pan to other vehicles on the other side of comp, and seconds later a quick zoom-out. The vehicles are PNG sequences with wheels animated frame-by-frame that I didn't want motion blur on, but their motion paths are also animated--via Ae. I wanted blur only on the camera moves, the pans and the zoom-out (scale and position).
-- I first decided to render it out as a clip in its full size from Ae to Pr and try applying these camera moves with the Transform effect in Pr. This led to the issue of the randomly shifting frame position.
-- Still in Pr, applying the Transform effect after Nesting the clip or to an adjustment layer above the clip led to the issue of badly decreased resolution when scaling. Compensating for that issue by first scaling up the clip with its own Motion settings eliminated the ability to pan and zoom in the adjustment layer beyond the bounds of the adjustment layer’s frame.
-- Since this clip was constructed in Ae, I returned to that and first attempted Ae’s version of the Transform effect added to an adjustment layer. It did not throw my frame positioning off as in Pr but did lower the resolution, though not as badly as in Pr. [If you're not scaling as much as I am, this solution might work for you.]
-- I then created a camera and parented it to a null object that I used to set my zooms and pans--this retained my full resolution when I scaled. [I don’t know why; I'm not paid by Adobe to care about why.] Next, the blur; I could not simply turn motion blur on for all layers, because the resulting blur for to the vehicles’ motion path animations would smear out the clarity of their frame-by-frame animation for the entire duration. To be able to keyframe the blur’s duration and strength, I added Pixel Motion Blur to an adjustment layer above everything. I compared it with CC Force Motion Blur, which proved a little less laggy on my previews (both cause mega-slow rendering).
If you made it through all of that, I told you it was meandering. I was more intimidated learning Pr than Ae, so I’m sure you can learn at least the steps above in Ae to give you the best blur controls, even if it’s for a single layer. It’s also a very dramatic thing to see precise blur on one layer with no blur on the layer behind it in the same shot. I suggest the tutorial on CC Force Motion Blur by Jake In Motion on YT.
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