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Tutorial 202: Depth Mattes

Added 2020-01-12 00:22:43 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone! We hope you had a great holiday and that you're 2020 is off to a great start. We were finishing up a project right before CES, and ran into an issue that was a little bit of a pain. Thankfully, with a bit of code, we were able to get ourselves out of a lot of additional keyframing and get out of the studio a little earlier.

Sev, Andrew Embury, and I were using Redshift. For some reason, depth passes from Redshift are true depth passes—i.e. there's no info for focus. The depth is basically colored solely based on distance to camera.

Unfortunately, that means that keeping something in focus inside of After Effects is rather tedious since you can't just select a single grey value and be set. Instead, you have to keyframe the entire sequence so that your focus point is maintained. If you could tell Frischluft or Camera Lens Blur to stick to a point, then you could at least track a spot to keep in focus. Unfortunately, the focus selectors aren't keyframeable. So instead, I built my own workaround, as you'll see in this tutorial.

Note that there's not an associated project file for this one as we can't share any of this and it's just workflow.