Can't get a certain result with simple Blur FCP X

Ok. Opening shot of a project.

Going from black to a photo still. About 5 seconds total duration of the intended effect.

I drop Simple Blur onto the front of the clip containing the photo.

There's a nice transition from black to vague blobs to a focused, clean image.

But what I want is 4.5 seconds of very slow fade into unrecognizeable blobs, and then a quick half-second focus into the image. You don't recognize what's coming into focus until the very last moment.

Setting keyframes and curves on the simple blur and compositing opacity video animation parameters does not seem to be enabling me to get the desired effect. Even if I set both parameters to "maximum blur" and "maximum opacity" until the final half-second. The result is not what I'm after.

Moving the blur parameter doesn't do much but adjust from kind-of-blurry-but-recognizeable to perfect focus.
The opacity parameter just seems to change the brightness of the image (but not from total black to 100% image.

There seems to be another aspect of this transition that I'm looking to control, but can't.

Ideas?

"There seems to be another aspect of this transition that I'm looking to control, but can't."

I'm not sure what Transition you're using. I don't see anything called a "Simple Blur". Is this a third party transition you added on?

Exactly what parameter(s) do you want to control that you can't?

Under the blurs transitions there's Directional, Radial, Zoom, Zoom & Pan, Gaussian and Simple.

So I guess it's just called "Simple"

What I want is for the first half of the transition to occur in the first 90% and last half of the transition to take place in the final 10%.

A nice hyperbolic curve to the rate of the transition. Right now it's linear and adding keyframes and curves to them seems to change things very very little.

Ah, I see, yes, I was searching for "Simple Blur". Yes, it is literally a simple blur transition. You want something a little more sophisticated. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is one of the very few FCP X templates you can not open a copy of in Motion.

You'll have to open Motion, pick Final Cut Transition in the Template Browser, and build one yourself using parameters for Opacity and Gaussian Blur amount, and switch the Gaussian Blur keyframes to Beszier. There are ways to place markers that will allow you to adjust where the blur happens along the way in FCP X (but not the original keyframe values).

There are currently 8 pages of free templates at the URL below where you can find better Gaussian Blur filters and transitions. Or maybe try just keyframing a filter and opacity (and perhaps overlap clips) to get the desired effect.

http://www.fcp.co/forum/9-free-fcpx-plugins-and-templates