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The couple of other things to bear in mind are the aperture and F stop values. Now you will notice that there is no F stop value down here in the timeline, there is only aperture. Now they are directly related to each other numerically, and if you feel more comfortable adjusting the aperture, then feel free to do so here in the timeline.

However if you do, you might be used to using aperture value specified in millimeters. Most photography is done that way. Yet After Effects insist on measuring everything in pixels at this point.

We can right click on here and go to edit value and change our units from pixel to millimeters. What that allows you to do is specify an aperture value that you are familiar with here when you then click okay, After Effects will give you the pixel equivalent. It does not change to millimeters here in the timeline, but at least you are confident that it is a value you know.

Now the other side of it is the F stop, this is something that I am more familiar with in photography as well. If you double click the camera itself and go back into the settings, you can also specify the F stop down here. Now again if we come over and change our settings to millimeters, we can see that aperture value we saw a second ago, and then we can either adjust the aperture or the F stop.

Let us say we are trying to use this shot with a very small depth of field. We might use an F stop of around 2.8. After Effects automatically calculates that into an aperture of 10, and then if we hit "okay", you will see that the focus is still on the background character but everything else has become much more blurred.

And that is because After Effects has done the digital equivalent of opening up the aperture of the camera to allow more light in, but also give us less detail on the items on the foreground or in the background beyond our focus distance if we had more in here.

Now we do not have to worry about exposure and things like that because this is not a real camera, but it is interesting to note that it does work the same way. The other effect of this has is that everything all of a sudden look absolutely tiny. When you see images like this that are very blurred out and the depth of field is very prominent, it looks like these are images maybe only about an inch high, and we have a camera very close to them. And it does not look like we are shooting at real size.

So that is when we go back to the original settings, and it will return a sense of normality to everything. So I am just going to undo that so we set our aperture back where it was. The way we can fine tune it now is just to adjust the blur level accordingly. So I am going to tweak that down just a little bit to around 300 or so. We do not want to go too high on there, but also make it very obvious that the focus is on the character in the back.

We now want to animate it coming towards the front, because remember it, the end of our shot the camera moves around. Character number 1 is in the foreground so it would be very cool if he was in focus, everything else is blurred out in the background. So let us do a quick animation here on the actual focus distance itself.

So we will turn on the key frame here at zero seconds at 1200 pixels. Remember the distance from the camera lens to the layer here in the background. We will scrub across to wherever we want the focus to be set. I am not going to suggest putting it on the final frame because that might just look a little bit too sudden.

This may be make the last second or even a second and a half actually have me in full focus over here. So at this point we now want to adjust the focus distance to the correct value that will put this image in focus. Remember that this one is 200 pixels away from the center point closer to the camera.

The camera is at 600, 600 minus 200 leave us a focal distance of 400 pixels. So if we change our focus distance here, key in the exact value of 400, that will pull the foreground image nicely in to focus. Everything else blurs away with a great depth for field. We could smooth that in just by h

The couple of other things to bear in mind are the aperture and F stop values. Now you will notice that there is no F stop value down here in the timeline, there is only aperture. Now they are directly related to each other numerically, and if you feel more... click to read more