Creating DOF effects in animation

[Jonathan]

I, as perhaps most people, found Alex Roman's 3rd-7th animation an amazing piece of work, particularaly the DOF effect which creates movement from inanimate objects. I believe there arre a number of ways to acheive this effect but which is the most efficent/effective? Should this be solely post work or could Max do some of the work?

[Fooch]

Best to always do this in post. You get full control over it.

Render out a zdepth pass, and work it with say the default lens blur of your comp program or lenscare (frischluft)

[Tommy L]

I find the default lens blur in Aftereffects a pretty bad tool to work with. I use it in a pinch, but much prefer to use DOF Pro as a batch tool in Photoshop for image sequences.

[BVI]

I, as perhaps most people, found Alex Roman's 3rd-7th animation an amazing piece of work, particularaly the DOF effect which creates movement from inanimate objects. I believe there arre a number of ways to acheive this effect but which is the most efficent/effective? Should this be solely post work or could Max do some of the work?

 

Alex Roman did it all in post in AE. He used several plugins as well, there is an interview at evermotion.org I think he mentioned which ones he used.

[STRAT]

I find the default lens blur in Aftereffects a pretty bad tool to work with. I use it in a pinch, but much prefer to use DOF Pro as a batch tool in Photoshop for image sequences.

 

2nd DOF Pro.

 

it's an amazing photoshop plugin that really flexible to use with either stills or zdepth image sequences. i love it.