Layering Twinkling and Color Wash That "Falls Apart"

[Gary]

I wanted to create a monochrome twinkle on my trees that matches a color wash on my house, so I took the color wash and added it as a layer to my trees. After some fiddling, I was able to get it to work by making the top color wash layer as "2 is Unmask", and the bottom twinkle layer as "Average".

The thing is, about 1/3 of the way through the effect, it starts "falling apart" and the pixels that twinkle start to disappear until I get darkness.

I've spent a well over an hour trying everything that I could think of (color brightness curves, buffer settings, roto zoom, in/out transitions, etc.) to prevent this from happening. I tried changing the color wash to a basic On effect with no difference. If I move each effect to separate times so they aren't layered, the twinkle effect lasts as long as it's supposed to... slide the color wash back on top, things start to "fall apart" again.

Any ideas??? I've attached sample files.

Thanks in advance...

[Gary]

A bit more info...

I thought I'd just proceed with doing something else with my sequence, and I noticed that with other effects that I add (such as a plain ol' On effect on my stars) mysteriously fades even though the Start and End Intensity are set to 100, my Color brightness curves look fine and the Layer Blending's Out Transition is set to zero seconds. For what it's worth, Roto Zoom is off as well.

[Gilrock]

Never give us fseq files we can't do anything with them.  Provide the xml file for the sequence.

[Gary]

Sorry, it was a long day. I do know better when I'm thihnking clearly.  When choosing files to compress, I know I Ctrl-clicked the xlights*.xml files and I thought the sequence's xml file as well, but when zipping up the files it looks like I just got the FSEQ file. 

I will upload the correct files tonight.

[Gary]

Here's the file with a better name to boot...

This sample file is my sequence with everything removed except the offending effects for clarity, I noticed that if I add a few other effects to this sequence, the mysterious forced fade isn't happening on them...

[Gilrock]

Don't use that "Morph" checkbox and pull the slider beside the blend mode back to 0.

[Gary]

Thanks for the speedy response. I must have really been sleep deprived not to try that?