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why are the horizontal and vertical blurs done separately? wouldn't it be faster to use one less view and do them together?

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First it would be kinda slow as Scorpion already mentioned.
Second you would get a "star-shaped" bloom effect and not a "circular" one as you aren't able to use the blurred scene again in the same pass and blur it again horizontally/vertically

Oh and btw you can do this in A6, but you have to use some workarounds. As you aren't able to use stages as in A7 beta, you have to render PPEed scene to a plane, put a view in front of that plane, render the plane through the view and use this rendertarget in the next step. It works, but you also get some kind of "bloom-motionblur" effect, as you need 3 frames to compute the whole bloom thing (brightpass,hblur,vblur+combine)... sooo.... go for A7