I’m trying out the DOF plugin from Frischluft, which seem easy to use, but has huge render times. I have two simple images that go in/out of focus, but the render time in After Effect is 5hrs.
what res. and how many frames? depending on the those factors and the strength of the blur it can be pretty slow, but sooo good! i generally use it with pretty low blur amounts, and it takes a few seconds a frame on a 720p frame.
I just animated from no to blur to a 2.8 blur across 30 seconds
but at what resolution..? this is another key consideration.. however 900 frames in 5 hrs is approx 20 secs a frame… which is not really outrageous for a full hd jobby.. imagine how long it would take you to render 900 frames with real DOF…
Okay. I dropped the resolution from 3000 to 1024, which is now giving me 45 minutes. I guess I thought it would be seconds… now I know 
what’s your cpu load? do you have multi threading enabled in after effects?
That’s just not sounding right. Frischluft would do the same image in photoshop in seconds. Have you tried DofPRO?
My experience with DOFPro and Lenscare in Photoshop is that both are pretty good, and both are pretty slow. All good lens blur effects I have tried take time. I think your expectation of how long it would take is just low.
That said, it makes a huge difference how much blur is applied too. The heavier the effect the longer it takes to process, but on hi-res files, even on a fast system, it can take anywhere from 30secs to minutes.
/b
Last time I used them I end up with ETA 24h, since them I didnt use them again
Definitely way too long. Frischluft should be much faster. AE or Photoshop?
PS, 10k res 16 bit image.
glorybound’s final result of 45 mins is for 900 frames dont forget.. thats 3 secs a frame processing time. not too shabby.. i think the effect rendertime goes up rapidly as you increase the res.
ahhh, make sure your files are on your local hd, that might help, they probably already are, but it’s worth mentioning.
I’ll have to play with things. I’m not sure why this can’t be done in realtime since they are just stills. I do have DofPRO, but I never used it for animation.
Well is same as applying gausian blurr u still have to wait few seconds for it to process. Dof is even harder since it has to calculate fade in/out etc etc…
real time DOF? who would have thunk?
well to be honest looking at that video, even on that relatively simple scene, the DOF isnt realtime. it incrementally improves over several seconds. and although its hard to tell from the video, id guess it wont look as nice as frischluft.
not sure I’d ever want mine to look like that video…just my 2c