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Better DOF in After Effects?
Hi everybody,
Working with a scene with some heavy depth of field in After Effects. Since this scene is fully animated (read: not realistic) I have overdriven the aparture and blur level in the camera options.. But, the result looks awful. It’s Box-blurred with star-shaped artifacts rather than smooth gaussian blur (You know what I mean).My question is; Is there a better way to achieve better DOF. I simply can’t find any type-of-blur-settings that affects the camera.
My scene is pretty complex, so it is NOT a hot alternative to keyframe blur attached to the layers..
(Sorry for my bad english)
Best//Simon
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11 Replies
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I don’t know of a plug-in that is aware of AE’s camera, although that would definitely be nice. Most DOF plug-ins use a depth buffer (grayscale image representing distance from the camera) to generate the blur in post.
This one is a great one for example: https://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/lenscare.php
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
True DOF doesn’t look like gaussian blur. It has polygonal shapes in it. Is this not what you are getting?
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True Ian. Lens distortion in “real” DOF has polygon shapes and also some displacement.. But AE DOF really looks like low quality box blur.
As far as I know this type of blur is commonly used for previews and are much faster than for example gaussian blur. You will see this if you are exaggerating the blur level from the cubic blur shapes that appears.
The reason I want gaussian blur in this scene, is that it would look much nicer with the animated graphics. But it would surely be cool to integrate and experiment with other types of blurs in the camera, such as lens blur (wich looks awesome in other cases) and gaussian..
Do you know a good way to export just the depht information in the scene to use for a plugin blur?
Tnx//Simon
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Would this work for what you are doing?
https://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/lenscare.php
I have never used it before.
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Hello Jag,
This may not be the type of blur you seek, but for similiar results instead of the AE camera’s lens blur,
I have used a pre-comped luminance map to drive an adjustment layer with the Lens Blur filter applied. The Lens Blur has controls for different iris shapes, radius, focal distance, etc. I have yet to try this method using a grayscale z-buffer render from a 3D app, but I thought that maybe it would work that way also.Changes in blur based on distance from the AE camera are not handled automatically however, so it may not be a viable alternative for you, although perhaps some magic with expressions might tie the two together (I don’t have such experience).
At any rate, Andrew Kramer has a tutorial on this luminance map technique:
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=45
take care, wjm
Now in post-production
The House That Jack Built
https://thehousethatjackbuilt.wordpress.comOS X.5.3
AE CS3
MacPro 8-core (2X 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT -
[William J. Meyer] “Changes in blur based on distance from the AE camera are not handled automatically however, so it may not be a viable alternative for you, although perhaps some magic with expressions might tie the two together (I don’t have such experience). “
I tried to write some expressions to generate a grayscale map for distance from a camera in a comp… but it was a major pain and would not have been very accurate anyway as there is no way to generate per-pixel values via expressions (I was trying to use the 4-color gradient effect to cheat my way through the exercise). Perhaps some day when I have the time and self-loathing I’ll revisit my efforts =)
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
you may try >>
https://toolfarm.com/plugins/index.php/Red_Giant_Software_Image_Lounge#Download_Demo
short url >> https://tinyurl.com/5a8355
and its “bokeh” replicator – rack focus.
including 20 more interesting and serious filters.
no, it´s not advertising, it´s just a stunning box of serious fx Adobe never will achieve for his customers.
cheers
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Ye guys,
There’s loads of nice blurs out there – such as the built-in lens blur. I also find that lenscare and finalfocus looks very nice. But the problem consists..Is it really impossible to link the camera DOF to a plugin with better blur??
Maybe there is an alternative type of camera layer/plugin to use somehow?
The built-in camera DOF blur is still a low res box blur (but yet very easy to control together with the camera movements.)
Generating depth maps to drive the blur is a dirty work that takes ages in complex scenes..
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I know this thread is old, but it is the only one I found which is perfectly matching my problem.
I got a composition with a 3D camera, lots of movement, small DOP.
If something is out of focus, it doesn’t look like a regular blur, its just all blocky.
I know something similar from 3D software, usually there is a simple controller to increase to get a higher quality blur. Is there something similar in AfterEffects CS5 or CC? The animation was too much work to redo it with another method.. -
10 years later and I have the same issue – the DOF creates blurs that are clearly made up of a small number of feint copies. Even if this is mathematically accurate, it does not match the soft, continuous equivalent in real footage. An (untried) workaround, I realise, is to make a copy with and without blur, then comp these together with a difference blend mode. This will generate a map to apply a second blur only to the DOF-blurred areas to smooth them out a bit.
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