DOF PRO v4.0.28 released

[theotheo]

Looks amazing, as always. Any plans of turning it into a plugin for fusion/nuke/shake etc?

-theo

[Skamierski]

same question here

such a plugin only as a photoshop solution ? strange

[mental]

According to the FAQ, DOF PRO does support both file sequences and keyframing:

What image file types does DOF PRO support?

For single frame processing (from within Photoshop or a compatible host) DOF PRO will support any file format so long as it is a 24 bit RGB image (8 bits per channel). 48 bit (16 bits per channel) support is intended to be implemented into future updates. For depth maps and batch / animation / keyframing processing, v3.0 supports all common 8 or 24 bit graphics file formats including .bmp, gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff, .tga. 32 bit images, as well as alpha channels, are not yet supported. Additional image file formats may be implemented in future releases.
Unfortunately it does not appear to support:

- 64bit Photoshop (Which is what the entire shop is using atm).
- EXR (32 Float/16 Half)

Richard, DOF PRO looks quite impressive feature wise but the two items above kill the deal for those willing to feed a file sequence outside of their normal package.

[FreakWizz]

According to the FAQ, DOF PRO does support both file sequences and keyframing:


Unfortunately it does not appear to support:

- 64bit Photoshop (Which is what the entire shop is using atm).
- EXR (32 Float/16 Half)

Richard, DOF PRO looks quite impressive feature wise but the two items above kill the deal for those willing to feed a file sequence outside of their normal package.

Indeed Photoshop CS4 x64 and EXR support are quite important to myself as well.

[pete]

This looks like a great tool, but it seems like it doesn't hook into a compositing app. Which could be annoying for a good workflow.
So what would the work flow be? Comp and tweak your levels etc in say after effects then add depth blur in DOF Pro?

[CHRiTTeR]

Would be cool if this worked in after effects and had hdr support

[klingspor]

I totally agree with what's been said here. The DOF quality may be second to none, but for anything more than one-off usage we'd need this to directly run in After Effects in native bit depth.

Exporting to an 8-bit sequence is way too much off a hassle for production environments.

[CHRiTTeR]

Exporting to an 8-bit sequence is way too much off a hassle for production environments.

My main concern with 8bit images is that the dof wont be correct on highlights.

[CaptainSam]

You guys are loosing a lot of sales by not supporting Nuke/Fusion/Afx. Having to run 120 000 EXR frames on a feature through Photoshop is not an option.

[klingspor]

You guys are loosing a lot of sales by not supporting Nuke/Fusion/Afx. Having to run 120 000 EXR frames on a feature through Photoshop is not an option.Especially when EXR files aren't even supported... the plugin only works in 8bit mode, so you'll need to convert those nice floating point EXRs to something like a TGA first!

And that means the depth maps are 8bit too, which can seriously impair the quality of the DOF...

[JDex]

You guys are loosing a lot of sales by not supporting Nuke/Fusion/Afx. Having to run 120 000 EXR frames on a feature through Photoshop is not an option.
Aye... and even with actions/droplets, you're still going to face all kinds of frustration if you need to animate a setting over time. Shake/Nuke/Fusion/AFX... maybe even the XSI's FXTree, Blender's Compositor and Apple's Motion would be worthwhile candidates.

[Ikaria]

Yeah, I've been following the dev of this little app for a few years now hoping the animation/floating point issue would get addressed in this release. Alas...

On my last project, I've evaluated three solutions for DOF -- Frischluft Lenscare, Evasion 3D XDOF Studio, and Generator.

I first purchased XDOF Studio for it's HDR, animation support and great DOF/chromatic abberation. It does what it's described to do, but processing thousands of frames x a dozen layers outside of an compositing app is brutal. The interface is clunky at best, something you might expect in a vintage '91 app, and Evasion people 'evade' all support requests.

In the end, I went with Lenscare for everything, except still, single frame elements. It can't compete with XDOF on quality, but is a joy to use inside of AE. As render elements get updated and comps get tweaked, it's just there -- an applied setting ready to render in 32-bit.

As for Generator, I used it on still images and loved the results. A solid AE implementation could be well worth triple its current price. They should really team up with one of the reputed plugin developers.

One other DOF app I considered was irisFilter from Sakurai. It's an AE plugin, has 32-bit support and seems to produce beautiful results, but the cost is purely insane. $1800 for
an HD project. Practically the cost of a Maya license!

[richardrosenman]

Hey guys;

Thanks for the feedback. I figured I'd add a few comments...

Regarding EXR - that's on the to-do list but unfortunately, not as high as multithreading was. You have to keep in mind software needs to be developed and it takes time. Therefore we have a priority list and, although EXR is quite important, multithreading is far more important than that (at least for all our existing customers). Therefore, that came first. EXR will come next once we expand DOF PRO to 16 / 32 bit color which is one of the next requests on the featurelist.

Fusion / Nuke / Shake is an often requested port but ports require complete re-writes and since this project is a two-man project, that is not realistic at this point. Possibly in the future, we may collaborate with a third party to do this but this also requires substantial legal work in order to protect intellectual property and such.

Regarding workflow: we have thousands of customers in the print and broadcast industry, and some in film using DOF PRO. Some studios output from Inferno and use DOF PRO as a final post pass. Others work on Macs and move the final output onto PC's for the DOF PRO process. At the end of the day, it all depends on the user if the output is worth dealing with the pipeline limitations of DOF PRO. For many people, that seems to be well worth the effort.

Regarding actions: DOF PRO doesn't use Photoshop actions. They are buggy and unreliable. It has its own built-in sequence reader and keyframer like most compositing apps, with editable function curves. We haven't received any negative feedback regarding the keyframing and animation workflow as of yet.

Regarding other DOF packages: This is something I'm quite experienced with and the whole point of DOF PRO - quality. DOF PRO's output can rival the best of them because we've worked hard to excel beyond the quality of others. We also have some pretty cool tech that many of the others lack. But in the end, every package always offers unique features that others don't which is great for the end user because they have as much choice as possible.

So to summarize, these are all good comments and some are on the to-do list. At the moment, this is the stage at which the software development is at and, although those features will most likely come soon, they have to be added carefully and in due time. ;)

-Richard

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