I’ve developed a fascination for interesting visual effects (and the mechanics to create them), and lately the rack focus effect has really grabbed my attention.

I used this effect in the Christmas video to provide depth-of-field changes to still images in order to give them a more 3-dimensional feel to 2D photos.  If I were really good, I would swap out lenses as I took the photos to get that effect, but it would take too long and the moment would be gone.  It would also destroy the raw data, and I like having options .   So I’ve been looking for the equivalent of “we’ll fix it in the mix” in order to capture the moment, while leaving options open.

For the Christmas video, I used a pretty tedious process to get the rack focus effect.  This video means a lot to me so It was worth it.  Basically, I separated several images into layers using Photoshop, imported the layers into Motion4, and used camera keyframing to change the depth of focus.  It took quite a while to generate just a few seconds of video so I’ve been hunting for a way to do this faster ever since.

Recently, Borisfx released a Lens Blur filter as part of the Boris Continuum product.  I’m not yet a huge fan of the Borisfx products, but still trying to keep an open mind.  My experience has been mixed with this company’s products:  documentation is marginal, performance is slow, even on really fast/beefy machines, plug-ins crash Motion, etc.  These are not effects for the casual user IMO.  But when they work, they work well.   I’m guessing this is because they seem to favor Adobe over Apple tools.    So when they announced availability of the Lens Blur filter for Final Cut Studio, I was skeptical.

The only tutorial I’ve seen thus far for this plug-in is for Adobe After Effects (different tools than I use).  A quick search of the internet for a quick-start or how-to guide produced nothing but more requests from other Final Cut users for the Final Cut version.

After playing with the plug-in for awhile, I came up with a recipe that works for me.  And here is a video of the effect based on a shot I took up at Mt. Hood earlier this week.  Note:  I purposely exaggerated some of the blur effect in order to demonstrate plug-in use.  I didn’t play with bokeh or any of the fine-grain settings (that’s my “To Do”), and  I suspect there is additional coolness to glean here.

Still not totally sold on Borisfx, but for now, this plug-in satisfies for now.

Here is my version of the missing “how-to: for creating a rack focus effect in Final Cut Studio. There are no doubt other ways to do this, but after wrestling the dragon for a bit, this worked for me.   Hopefully this helps others make use of a potentially valuable plug-in.   Comments/improvements are welcome.