DOF with Depth Blur

Hi guys,

This is my first post. I'm new to fusion and have joined the forums in the hope of improving my skills. I have a basic knowledge of compositing, nothing special at all.

But i'm struggling to create depth of field using a zdepth pass. I'll post some screenshots of what i have so far:

I have my beauty pass (an exr) plugging into the BG of a channel boolean node. I have a copy of my beauty pass with its RGBA channels set to my zdepth channels (ZdepthR, ZdepthB etc), plugging into the FG of that boolean. See Image1.

In my channel boolean node, i have set all of the colour channels to 'do nothing'. In the aux channels tab, i have checked 'enable extra channels', and placed the Lightness FG into the Z Buffer channel. As far as i am aware, this will place the Lightness of the FG (the zdepth exr) into the Z channel of the comp, ready to be used. Viewing the z channel results in everything turning white, is that right? Using the colour inspector i can see there is Z data there! (In a range of 0 to 1)

Now i add a depth blur node and use the pick focal point tool to pick my area that is in focus. Playing with all of these values and sliders does nothing. Sometimes i can get a result of everything being out of focus. It's like the depthblur is not respecting the information in the z channel (providing i've placed data into the z channel correctly of course).

Have i done anything wrong? Why isnt my depthblur responding to the z channel? Why does viewing the z channel look pure white anyways?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me.

This is exactly the same issue that I'm having, have you had any replies elsewhere or worked it out yet? AE works fine with this workflow and using EXtractoR, but I get exactly the same issue that you are having. Anyone?