rendering with depth of field

[farbtopf]

Ok I have found another problem...

I have these two characters set up wit one spotlight illuminating from top. What I am trying to do is having just the one in the front in focus. The camera settings are all the defaults maya gave to it when it was created. (Just the film gate was set to 35mm full aperture)
The head up display shows that the distance to the camera of the foreground character is 7.917 units. F Stop is 5.6 Focus region scale 1.0.
With focus distance set to 7.917 the IPR render looks like pic1.
The same settings but f stop to 25 doesn't make a change. And f stop to maximum moves the blured ara up about 2 millimeters. Putting the f stop to 0 blurs the image completely
Why does the camera only focus the legs and what would I have to do to get the focus right?
Thanks in advance for any help given

[Alan]

I remember seeing a tool on highend 3d that would help you visualise the DOF settings. Thing is though doing DOF in your render is a bad idea. It's always better to do it afterwards in 2d because then you can control it without re-rendering

:ninja:
A

[farbtopf]

thanks for your help,

I just rendered the vharacters individually and composited it in after effects.
It might be asking a bit much, but I came across another problem. I created a nurbs image plane and used a quick time movie as a texture (.mov) The main part of the movie is transparent.
In the movie node I check, use image sequence and it plays.
But! whenever I render, the image plane is displayed as a black square. Even when I use a file that used to work fine, as soon as I use it as a movie texture the image plane will stay black when rendered.
Why does it render my movie black?

thanks again :) for any help