Alpha channel not rendering with Arnold DOF

[Jane_Smith]

My camera has ai DOF enabled. There is a focus puller consisting of a Maya distance tool, who's one locater is parent constrained to my animated character’s nose and the other locator is resting where the still camera’s lense is. The distance tool's distance attribute is connected to the camera's Focus Distance, under Arnold, in the connection editor.

For some reason the act of doing what I just mentioned above disables the alpha channel in my arnold render view. I know this, because I have tried duplicating the camera with default settings and the alpha channel is working again through the freshly duplicated camera. As soon as I connect the distance of the character to the focus distance in the camera the alpha channel immediately stops working.

I need the focus distance to be set up the way it is.

What should I do?

Any work around?