Now if we click this stop our RAM preview and just hit the tilda key so we can bring our work workspaces. We are going to look at one more feature of the cameras inside of
After Effects and this is one of my favorite things about them, the depth of field function. We have the depth of field composition over here in the project pane O2 depth of field just go ahead and double click to open this up. And we will see a very fun composition here. This is actually me and my four identical brothers.
And what I have done is I have arranged them very simply in 3-D space. If you go ahead and scrub through the timeline, you will notice that the camera does indeed animate. So we just take on a different view in the scene and we end up focus on the front version of me. But what I want to do is use depth of field to actually add some great reality to the shot. This is something that after effects does incredibly well.
What I am going to do for the sake of quality? I am just going to zoom in to 100% here so we have perfect anti-aliasing on all of these and then come over to the timeline and select camera 1. Now, there are a couple of ways you can activate the depth of field. First way to do it is simply to double click the camera and bring out the camera settings dialogue box. Remember we have used this plenty of times by now and over here on the right hand, this is a button that we chose to turn off at the beginning of this lesson, enable depth of field.
If we go ahead and turn that on, we do have settings such as the focal distance, the aperture, the F stop, and the blur level. So all of these are very much computer generated effects but they do have certain links to the real world. Now, we are not going to change this to just one second. I just want to see how it looks. So go ahead and click okay and you may notice a very, very slight shift in the quality of what we are seeing. It does not look like anything is really become blurred out. We do not really know where the focus of our camera is.
Let us change the setting here and make that more apparent. If we twirl down the camera options in the timeline and then open the camera options. This is the zoom value that we looked at earlier on. You can see underneath there it says that depth of field. This is the other place that you can turn depth of field on and off. Underneath that we have the focus distance. We will look at that in just a second. We also have the aperture of the camera importantly down here we have the blur level.
If you find that you have got focal distance and aperture set to something you think is realistic. The blur level can actually be cheated and increased or decreased accordingly. A 100% is the default level but a lot of times that will not give you the required results. You may have to increase that. So let us just click on a 100% and key in something quite extreme like 400% and now we see a very noticeable change in our composition. The focus now appears to be on the clone number 2 over here.
The fun image is slightly blurred out and the others become more progressively blurred out as they go further away from the camera. Well this is true depth of field being rendered here and it really does add to our effect. Now, how do we control it? How did the after effects choose this layer to automatically focus on? Well the fact is it did not. It simply did it all automatically. Currently, the focus distance of the camera is set to 560 pixels which is actually the same as the current zoom value.
Now the focal distance means the distance from the lens of the camera to the point of which the focus is it most accurate and intense. Everything behind or in front of that value can then be blurred out using accurate depth of field. Now this is easily more understandable if we look at this image in a completely different way from the top. Remember these are just three dimensional layers adjusted down a Z axis. If we look at them from the top we can figure out what is going on.
So let us change our view here to just the standard top view and if we scroll down we can see this is o
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