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Getting a usable depth matte from a flat image usually means manual rotoscoping or pulling focus data that isn't there. Depth Scanner estimates a depth map directly from your footage — no extra cameras, no hand-painted masks.
What does the depth map actually look like?
The plugin outputs a greyscale matte where near objects render light and far objects render dark, or vice versa. The falloff between planes tends to be gradual, which helps when you feed the map into a blur or a displacement effect and want smooth transitions rather than hard edges.
How do you shape the depth?
A handful of controls let you push the range around: you can bias the estimate toward foreground or background, adjust the overall contrast of the map, and soften or sharpen the boundaries between depth layers. The adjustments are broad rather than surgical — the result works best as a starting point that you then refine with a curves adjustment or a blur.
What do people wire it into?
The three obvious destinations are depth-of-field blur (using Camera Lens Blur with the map as a matte), 3D parallax moves (linking the map to a displacement or a mesh warp), and depth-based reveals — fading between clips according to object distance. It works on both still photographs and video, which makes it usable for title-card treatments as well as moving footage.
Runs a single HD frame in about one second
On a modern Mac the analysis step is quick enough to stay out of your way — a single HD frame usually resolves in a second or two, though a 4K plate will naturally take longer. The plugin runs on the CPU, not the GPU, so you won't see it taxing the graphics card. That means a long sequence will pin one or two cores for the duration, but the rest of After Effects stays responsive enough that you can be organising bins or tweaking a separate comp while it churns.
Memory use is modest. The plugin holds the frame in RAM while it works, then hands the matte back to After Effects as a standard layer — there is no background process that sits around eating resources after the scan finishes. I have not seen it trigger the spinning beachball during normal use, though stacking it on a very long timeline with Cache Frames When Idle turned on can produce the usual AE pauses while the disk cache writes.
Stability is sound for a point release. Version 1.15.6 has not dropped a render or produced garbled mattes in my experience, provided the source footage is sensible — clean, well-exposed frames without extreme compression artefacts. If you feed it a heavily blocky h.264 clip straight from a screen recording, the depth estimate can wobble between frames, but that is the codec confusing the algorithm rather than a crash risk.
Three sliders that change the depth feel immediately
The defaults lean toward a balanced mid-range depth map, which is fine for a first look but rarely the best starting point for a specific job. Three adjustments repay the ten seconds it takes to set them:
- Depth Bias. Slide this toward foreground if your subject is close to camera and you want clean separation from a distant background. Push it toward background if the shot is a wide landscape and you need gradation across the middle distance.
- Edge Softness. The default edges can look a little hard when the map drives a heavy blur. Lifting this a few points smooths the transition between depth layers and reduces haloing around foreground objects.
- Output Range. By default the map spans 0–255, but many After Effects effects interpret mattes more cleanly if you clamp the black and white points slightly. Pulling the output range in from both ends — say, 10 to 245 — often produces a cleaner result when the map hits Camera Lens Blur.
After setting those, apply the effect once and check the matte on a single representative frame before you copy the plugin across a whole sequence.
Mistakes that show up in the first five minutes
The most frequent beginner error is expecting the plugin to give you a pixel-perfect matte straight away. Depth Scanner estimates depth, it does not measure it — the map will always need a light touch of refinement afterward. A quick Levels or Curves adjustment layered below the blur effect turns a decent depth map into a precise one, and skipping that step leaves the result looking unconvincing.
Another common slip is applying the plugin to a pre-composed layer that has a different frame size from the main comp. The depth map comes out at the layer's native resolution, and if that does not match the comp, the matte will misalign when you feed it into a blur. Un-collapse the pre-comp or match the dimensions before running the scan.
Some users also crank the effect to full strength and then wonder why their depth-of-field looks like a tilt-shift miniature. The trick is to use a shallow Depth Bias and a moderate blur radius, then build the look up in layers rather than doing it all in one hit.
Fix flickering mattes by feeding it cleaner source footage
"The matte flickers between frames." This is nearly always a source-footage issue. Highly compressed video — particularly older h.264 clips with keyframe pulsing — confuses the depth model because fine texture details change from one frame to the next. The fix is to transcode the clip to ProRes or DNxHD before bringing it into After Effects. If you are stuck with the compressed source, adding a mild denoiser before Depth Scanner in the effects stack can steady the estimate enough to stop the flicker.
"The depth map is greyscale but my effect expects black and white." Some older After Effects effects want a high-contrast matte rather than a smooth gradient. Drop a Threshold effect after Depth Scanner and dial it until the depth separation lands where you need it. You lose the smooth falloff, but for hard matte cuts it works cleanly.
"Nothing happens when I apply the effect." Check that you are viewing the layer directly, not through a pre-comp or an adjustment layer that strips the effect output. Depth Scanner writes its result to the layer's own alpha channel, so if you are looking at a comp where the layer sits above something else, you may not see the map. Switch to the layer viewer or solo the layer to confirm it is generating output.
"The plugin is slow on a long clip." The CPU-only design means a full 4K timeline will take time. The sensible workflow is to run Depth Scanner on a trimmed work area rather than the entire composition, and to cache the result with Pre-render once you are happy with the settings. For quick tests, work at half resolution — the depth estimate does not need full pixel data to give you a representative map.
