DOF PRO v1.0 for After Effects Overview Tutorial

[@fliptopjim]

Not only is this an incredible tool for After Effects it's also supremely interesting (as is the DOF PRO page which is a wonderful lecture on light in its self). Absolutely brilliant, thank you Richard.

[@marczwaneveld2663]

I've waited yearrrrrrs for this to be ported to after effects!

[@sophiakyriacou8296]

Totally agree Marc. I must have this beautiful plugin!

[@kertgartner]

This is absolutely insane. Thank you for brining this to After Effects.

[@ZekeFaust]

Congrats Richard! This looks amazing. I will be telling everyone about this.

[@richardrosenman]

Zeke Faust Zeke, your help was very valuable to me and your render contribution to the tutorial, equally so! Thank you!

[@WCMT-tj8um]

Sick man. Didn't know you were still working on this plugin. Will check it out!

[@pfuispinne]

This plugin is way to smart! By the way I learned a lot from just reading the product page of DOF Pro for PS. I'm happy it's finally available for After Effects. Oh and maybe just a small feature request: I noticed that the image scales according to the selected focuspoint in real life, which can be easily reproduced by a transform effect in After Effects, but it would be nice if it would be a built in feature if it makes sense.

[@Cubricon]

This looks awesome!

[@magicxox]

Cool! Lens blooming in next version? :)

[@SlippyJoe]

This is a very powerful plugin and pretty much the only one out there that looks this clean and has this many options. Just wish there would be a GPU accelerated version of it because man render times are long as soon as you start working with 4k and up even with a high end workstation CPU.

[@richardrosenman]

Yes, the rendertimes can be long indeed due to the complex and lengthy calculations. The DOF amount will directly affect performance the most out of all variables. I’m not sure if I can realistically do any GPU acceleration but my goal is to recompile with MFR as soon as I have some time to do so as that can result in some really good performance boosts.

[@redflag4255]

This is fantastic. Take my money xD

[@SmartAim33]

This looks very interesting. I tried the demo, but unfortunately, it crashed every third time I change a parameter (win 10, AE 2020). And it works very slowly compared to Frischluft. Also, AE crashed when I rerendered/updated the zBuffer. And another time when I tried to render a screen region to speed up the workflow. So the features are neat, but stability and speed are an issue.

[@richardrosenman]

Alexander LSR Hmmm... That’s odd as I haven’t received any other similar reports but I’ll look into it. Regarding the computations: they are heavy but that’s expected with such an expanded feature set.

[@nemanjas9742]

@@richardrosenman Hi Richard, for me the demo crashed AE twice in the same manner. I applied the effect, and then moved to another frame in the timeline and it crashed. Win 10, AE2020. My depth map source is a pre-composed OpenEXR sequence where zDepth is selected with EXtractoR. So I wonder if something is not supported here? It does work until I change frame.

[@richardrosenman]

Nemanja S I use EXtractoR as well and I didn’t run into any issues. Would you like to send me your test scene and I can check it out? If you have a high level of defocus, it will take some time to render. One fellow had the same issue but he wasn’t waiting for the frame to finish rendering. You can also press Escape to abort the current frame render if you have set a high value.

[@nemanjas9742]

@@richardrosenman For me it renders fast. The crash happens even if I just add the effect, select the depth source, leave all the default settings and move somewhere else in the timeline. I can reproduce the crash. OK, I will package it up and email. Thanks for offering to take a look at it.

[@richardrosenman]

@@nemanjas9742 Thanks to Nemanja's help, I have identified this issue. On some systems, interrupting the current render by moving to another frame or changing parameters prematurely can result in a crash. The temporary solution, until a fix is released, is to wait until each frame finishes rendering before making new adjustments or frame changes within After Effects.

[@L0gelis]

Will this have GPU support, multithreading? The speed of this is looking poor. Taking a 2hr render to 4+ would be a pickle in real world projects...

[@richardrosenman]

L0gelis It’s 100% multithreaded so the more cores you throw at it, the faster it’ll go!

[@L0gelis]

@@richardrosenman alrighty then! may be worth giving basic spec of system that this demo is running on, thanks!

[@richardrosenman]

@@L0gelis This demo was performed on an Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.2GHz, with 32GB of RAM.

[@L0gelis]

@@richardrosenman nice one guy!

[@petersolomon5227]

Richard Roseman, your product looks very useful. Do I understand this product can produce Z depth mattes, and be applied to 2D along with 3D composites in After Effects? If so, what is the learning curve; does your product come with a written user manual and can I use it on a Mac?

[@richardrosenman]

As per your other question, you need a 3D app to generate an accurate depth map. The product features full documentation on the product page and the After Effects version is available for both PC and Mac.

[@alaezalfa]

I always find frustrating not being able to anitalias the depth field multipass and getting artifacts, does this plugin help with that somehow?

[@richardrosenman]

Hi Alberto - DOF PRO PS (Photoshop) has tools to alias an antialiased depth map. However, I didn't bother adding it to DOF PRO AE (After Effects) because it's so commonplace now for all 3D apps to easily export aliased or antiliased depth maps.

[@JustSubscribeYuvi]

👌💯

[@chronokoks]

DrNipples?

[@dysnXO]

this doesnt work on after effects 2020? i tried downloading the free trial version and the preset isnt showing up.

[@richardrosenman]

dysn There’s no reason it wouldn’t work. Please email me directly and detail out the steps you’re taking.

[@dysnXO]

@@richardrosenman ah it appears i was typing a wrong name into a search bar, its all good now!

[@dysnXO]

btw, im using this plugin on a 1080 comp and it takes ages to render 1 frame, like more than 1 minute per frame.. is it normal?

[@richardrosenman]

dysn You should have a powerful machine with as many cores as possible for DOF PRO as it makes some extremely computationally-taxing calculations. Check out the documentation section for tips. In general, high levels of DOF will take time to compute.

[@dysnXO]

@@richardrosenman is there any way you could make this plugin use GPU instead of CPU in the near future? i think it would be alot faster and easy.

[@reelinspirations]

Um, looks cool, but don't try to be Andrew Kramer.

[@TEREX12]

столько воды, а главное то и не показали, это установка и расположение плагина в самой программе, сиди теперь тыкай ищи в какой же он папке лежит....

[@Coroconogka]

Too slow... Standard Camera Lens Blur 10x faster

[@richardrosenman]

I would suggest you do some reading on the product page to understand the differences between the two, especially in features sets. Then review the detailed render comparison section between the two. It sounds like you missed all this. This may not be right tool for you if you need basic DOF and don’t care about poor quality and artifacts but all the professionals using DOF PRO do. Cheers!

[@Coroconogka]

​@@richardrosenman Thank you, I'll read.