From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

Creating a rack focus

We've been playing with the ability here to actually control where the focus is, but I want to do a rack focus where we purposely key frame this and animate from one subject to another. This is a cool technique to really drive what the viewer pays attention to. Let's go back here and take a look at this line of soldiers. And the camera pulls back and all the soldiers are really in focus. Well, I want to change this. Let's take a look here and we'll select this and press Command + D and we'll call this rack. Now pretty simple, let's come down to the camera and we'll just position it right about here and add a key frame. Good. I'll delete these and move this back up to the front. So now we're just getting a smaller move focusing just on the line of soldiers. That looks good, but I don't want as much to be in focus. So we're going to drive this. Now to start, I'll double click on the camera layer and make sure that depth of field is enabled. But what I want to do is open up the f stop here. We'll go with a 1.2, which is a very wide open lens and artificially bump up the blur level to 200%. Now this is going to put more of the scene blurry. Let's go to two views and take a look at where that box is set at. So to start, we'll adjust the focus distance here so it's on this part of the subject a little bit behind towards the back there. That looks pretty good. Let's delete away these other key frames and then as it gets towards the end here, we want to move that focus distance like so and pull it closer to the camera. There we go. I like that, and I'm going to bump up the blur level even higher. Let's go to 500%. You see we have a very blurry starting position. We can adjust the focus distance there slightly, set it on the crowd, there we go. And now as it moves forward, it rack focuses from the crowd to the soldiers. And the crowd goes blurrier. This is pretty cool because it makes it easy for you to control. Now I'm going to take a look at another view and switch this from custom view one to top. Looking at this, I see what's happening with my layers. So there's our soldiers, there's our crowd. Well, let's get a little more distance between those two. So we'll press p here for position and move the soldiers closer to the camera, like so. Let's switch this first key frame here. We'll change this value here to negative 1200. Then let's go back to the front here and change that one, as well, to negative 1200. So now you see there's a greater distance between soldier and background. But we have to scale that down a little bit, so as for scale, that looks pretty good. So now we have our background and our soldiers, and you see that there's a distance between them. Let's select our camera, twirl this down, all right. Let's move the camera to the beginning here and turn off the key frames for focus distance and then back on. What I need to do is make a few adjustments, so we're going to refine this here and set the focus distance on the crowd. You see the lines there make it simple. Now let's move forward and as the camera starts to move, we're going to change the focus distance and I'll pull it back. There we go. And we can set that right on our subject. Pretty cool. I'll move the zoom in just a little bit, and you see that rack focus, it goes from the background to the soldiers. Now that artificial blur level of 500% is really strong, so let's take that back to 125 for a second and watch what happens in a more photorealistic way. The background is in focus and now the foreground is in focus. That's pretty cool. Let's tweak that. 200%. There we go. The background is in focus and now it rack focuses and the foreground is in focus. So these rack focus techniques are pretty cool, but in order to make them work the best, make sure you have some distance between the two layers.

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