DoF in Cycles: Which method is more effective?

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1

Hey guys,

I’m preparing a pipeline for a little animated short and I was asking myself which DoF-method would be the best for my project. On one hand, I have the cycles camera setting, directly rendering the image with the specified depth of field. On the other hand I can create depth with the defocus node in the compositor.

It seems to me that the first option is more precise, especially with huge differences in distances, whereas the second way gives me more freedom to tweak; if I don’t like the settings it doesn’t mean I have to re-render the whole scene.
Also, the burnt-in method seems to mess up my masks for composition (see picture). Any way to improve this, or should I just stick to the defocus node?

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Am I missing anything out? Is one method superior? Which one do you prefer (for stylized animation)?

Oh, and another small question:
I have multiple scenes, combined in the clip editor of one arrangement-scene. The overall arrangement’s stamp only gives me the option to draw the global frame number. Is there any way to additionally draw the frame number inside of the scene currently running as a clip?

Thank you already!

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The Depth of field in cycles, will be correct… and the edge weirdness you are getting is probably because your samples (or aa samples if you are using branched path tracing) are not high enough… more samples = cleaner mask.

I have used both, and i prefer using cycles DoF, purely because it is physically accurate and when dealing with strong DoF amounts, you get the proper result… if you fake it, you cant go so crazy with the actual DoF amount due to it being a faked effect.

What i would do though, is during test renders… figure out what level of DoF you like in the compositor… what works for you… then when you go to do your final render, try to mimic the same look in cycles DoF… that way you get the flexibility of the compositor and hte greatness of cycles DoF (the values will not transfer 1:1)

For the other question, turn stamp on in each indivdual scene, instead of the scene which holds your sequencer. when you press f12, it will look correct