Openexr/zdepth to After Effects

I want to take a blender render via openexr to after effects. I want to use After Effects depth of field because I find the blender node for defocus somewhat limiting.

But I cannot seem to make it work after working on it most of the day and reading a bunch of things.

has anyone done this and can give me some pointers?

thanks

I have. I do it all the time in fact.
First things first: Theoretically we can render all to MultiLayer, import it to AE, use “Extractor” plugin to extract passes, but I don’t recommend this, because it takes too long to render in AE.
I always extract passes into separate sequences in Blender and import those to AE. One of them could be z-pass.
I often pass the z-pass through “Normalize” node and import “normalized” z pass to AE.
Use “Lens Blur” effect. Play with it and you’ll see that it works decently.
Sometimes it’s good to blur z-pass a bit before it’s used as depth map in AE, but do it in AE, because if you do it in Blender, you can’t go back.

I use zdepth a lot as well in AE, but I prefer to blur my 3D elements in blender. The reason is that an anti-aliased z-depth matte isn’t possible (the aliasing would suggest changes in depth, as we fade from black to white, e.g.). This is one of the reasons that z-depth in blender often looks jagged. But if you render z-depth with Full Sample anti-aliasing, you get BEAUTIFUL depth blur, much better than what you can produce in AE (in my opinion). Bartek has a good point that you can’t go back, but for my work it’s worth it to blur in Blender, then use AE’s camera DOF for any 2D composites.