Camera Lens Blur effect and camera depth of field properties in After Effects CS5.5

After Effects CS5.5 includes many improvements related to 3D cameras and depth-of-field blurs. It’s now much easier to get high-quality animated rack focus, bokeh, and other results that depend on selectively blurring items depending on their distance from a camera. It’s also a lot easier to set up and animate cameras.

• Added new Camera Lens Blur effect.
• Added new camera layer settings related to depth-of-field blur, iris shape, and highlights.
• Added new camera commands for automating common tasks related to focus distance: Link Focus Distance To Point Of Interest, Link Focus Distance To Layer, Set Focus Distance To Layer.
• Added new camera command for automatically creating a null-object layer and connecting it to a camera: Create Orbit Null.
• Removed discrepancies in behaviors of Track Z Camera tool and Track XY Camera tool depending on whether they were activated directly from the Tools panel or by using the mouse buttons with the Unified Camera tool. In After Effects CS5, the behaviors differed with regard to the point of interest and zoom.

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a detailed set of video tutorials about these new features:

• depth-of-field and iris properties in camera layer
• camera depth-of-field utilities
• orbit camera rigs
• Camera Lens Blur effect

One of the things that Chris mentions about the Camera Lens Blur effect is that it renders much faster than the old Lens Blur effect. Yep. Much. One of the big reasons that the Camera Lens Blur effect is so much better is that it doesn’t disable Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, as the Lens Blur effect did.

Video2Brain also provides a set of videos explaining and demonstrating these new features:

• Create Orbit Null command for camera rigs
• Camera Lens Blur effect
• depth-of-field and iris settings for camera layers

For a complete list of what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.