Using digital blurring instead of an M2, Brevis etc.
 

Has anyone used a program like combustion to create background blur (to help focus the viewers attention on the foreground) instead of using a 35mm adapter such as an M2 or Brevis.

To do it right you really need to do a lot of rotoscoping. But there's a tutorial to do this online with After Effects:

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/...pthoffield.htm

You could also do it in layers with a bluescreen.

Paul, Jon, thanks - that's an interesting tutorial - the combustion 4 package comes with a similar demo, but using multiple gradient masks to mark depth within a scene. I thought it would be a cool alternative to shooting with M2's and the like, but it's a lot of effort to go to, maybe worthwhile on key scenes.

Jon,

How can you use this method on a Vegas 7.0 platform?

duplicate your track. on the upper one, mask out your subject frame by frame (rotoscoping). Then apply a slight Gaussian blur to the underlying video track. This doesn't work where the focus needs to become progressively off, however. If you take time, it works and works well... if you take time.

Film the background, put it on one track and filter it to death. Film the foreground over a bluescreen, put it on another track, and chroma key it over the background. Don't filter the foreground.

This doesn't give you smooth progressive focus, but it works well if there is a large distance between foreground and background. And no hand tweaking or rotoscoping is required.

I've successfully tried it by using keying tools and rotoscoping in AE, BUT it is a PAIN and VERY time consuming! And it becomes much harder and poorer quality if there is no really good color or luma separation between the foreground and background. Plus, you don't get the natural gradient in the focus as you do in a natural shot with shallow DOF. It worked for me because I was simply trying to separate people from a deep background that was essentially a vertical plane behind them. If you can do it on a green screen you should not have too much trouble, but trying to work with raw single layer footage is the hard way to go. I wish I would have used a 35mm adapter, even though they have other issues.