Depth Scanner Mac 1.15.6

Slapping a blur on the background is one thing. Getting a clean, usable depth matte out of a flat 2D shot without rotoscoping for an hour — that's the problem this solves. Depth Scanner hands you a grayscale depth map straight from your footage, no manual masking required.

Three Things You're Probably Wondering

• Does it only work on video? Nope. It chews through stills and moving clips the same way.
• Is the depth map actually useful beyond a quick blur? Absolutely. Throw it on a displacement map for 3D parallax motion, or drive a depth-based transition where foreground elements wipe before the background.
• How much babysitting does it need? It leans on artificial intelligence to generate the map automatically. You drop the effect on a layer and it figures out the depth.

Single-Purpose AE Plugin for Instant Depth Mattes

This is a single-purpose plugin from Blace Plugins that lives inside Adobe After Effects. It's not a standalone app. The moment you need a depth matte for a composite — a rack focus fake, a particle system masked by distance, a 3D photo animation — it's the quickest route to a working map. From there, the look is all yours.

A Cleaner Matte Starts with a Pre-Compose

Most people drop the effect on a layer, glance at the result, and move on. That works, but there are a handful of tucked-away moves that make the matte cleaner or the workflow faster.

• Pre-compose before you scan. If your layer has a bunch of color correction or a transform animation underneath, Depth Scanner is reading the original source, not the corrected frame. Pre-compose the adjusted clip first, then apply the plugin to the pre-comp. You get a map that matches the final look, and you avoid the head-scratching moment where the blur doesn't line up.
• Double-click the comp viewer with the effect selected. The plugin shows a preview of the depth map directly in the viewer while the controls are active. It's easy to miss if you're tabbing between panels.
• Use the depth map as a luma matte, not an effect mask. Copy the effect output to a black solid, set the track matte of your adjustment layer to Luma, and suddenly you're grading the background separately without touching the plugin controls again.
• Keyframe the source frame for stills. When you need a single depth map from a video clip, park the playhead on the sharpest frame, set a hold keyframe, and disable motion blur on the layer. The scan runs once instead of every frame, which keeps your timeline responsive.

When to Stay Native vs. Reach for BCC Depth Map ML

Depth Scanner isn't the only depth map generator on the Mac, and depending on the shot, another route might be faster. Here's how it compares in practice.

Depth Scanner vs. BCC Depth Map ML — The Boris FX Continuum version lives in a much larger effects suite and comes with its own set of blur and fog presets tied to the map. That's handy if you're already deep in the Continuum ecosystem. But Depth Scanner loads faster on a single layer and doesn't pull a dozen dependencies into your project. For a quick rack focus on a talking-head shot, I'd reach for Depth Scanner first; for a complex scene with integrated atmospheric effects, BCC makes more sense.

Depth Scanner vs. building a manual depth matte with Roto Brush — Roto Brush gives you frame-accurate control. If the AI map guesses wrong on a tricky edge — say, loose hair against a busy wall — rotoscoping wins on precision. But on a tight deadline, spending 45 seconds on an automatic map versus 20 minutes painting strokes is a no-brainer. Depth Scanner gets you 85% of the way there instantly.

Depth Scanner vs. the old Lumetri + mask trick — Some editors fake depth by duplicating a layer, adding a mask around the subject, and blurring the duplicate. That works for static shots but falls apart the moment the camera or subject moves. Depth Scanner recalculates per frame, so the matte tracks motion without keyframing a mask path. For a locked-off interview, either method does the job. For a handheld shot or a gimbal move, the plugin pulls ahead immediately.

Motion Blur Smears the Depth Map

The tool is straightforward, but a few habits can produce frustrating results.

• Expecting a perfect edge on high-motion shots. Motion blur confuses the depth model. A fast whip pan or a subject sprinting across frame produces a smeared map. The fix is to pick a reference frame with minimal blur or to pre-process the clip with a directional blur reduction before scanning.
• Applying the plugin to an adjustment layer and wondering why nothing happens. Adjustment layers composite effects over everything below them, but Depth Scanner needs an actual image to analyze. It has to live on a footage layer or a solid with a source assigned.
• Forgetting to change the working color space. If your comp is in linearized color and the depth calculation assumes gamma-encoded values, the contrast of the map shifts. The plugin handles standard Rec. 709 or sRGB frames best. Switch the comp to a non-linear working space if the map looks washed out.
• Using the depth map at full resolution for a 1080p deliverable. The map doesn't need to be 4K. Render it at half or quarter resolution to speed up the effect that reads it, especially if you're driving a heavy displacement or a particle simulation downstream.

First-Frame Analysis Takes Two to Three Seconds on Apple Silicon

The first frame of analysis takes a beat — maybe two to three seconds on a modern Apple Silicon machine — and then the map pops in. On a MacBook Pro with an M-series chip, the plugin feels responsive during playback once the initial scan completes, though scrubbing the timeline triggers a recalculation that introduces a brief delay. That's normal for any ML-driven effect running inside After Effects.

RAM usage stays modest. I've had it running on a 16 GB machine without triggering a low-memory warning, even with a few instances stacked in a comp. The plugin doesn't spawn background processes that survive an After Effects quit, which keeps things tidy when you're hopping between projects.

Stability has been solid through version 1.15.6. No hard crashes during renders, no corrupted frames in the output. The one hiccup I've seen is a render stall when the source footage is an unsupported codec wrapped in an MP4 container — ProRes and DNxHD files sail through cleanly, but h.264 long-GOP clips occasionally make the analyzer hang. Transcoding to an intraframe format before applying the effect sidesteps the issue entirely.

On the resource side, a single instance barely nudges the CPU during playback. Stack three or four layers with depth maps driving different effects — say, a blur, a displacement, and a particle emitter — and the render bar slows down as expected. The plugin itself isn't the bottleneck; it's everything you attach to the matte. For complex comps, pre-rendering the depth map to a matte pass and importing it back as a still sequence keeps the timeline fluid.

• Adobe After Effects