Depth Scanner 1.15.6

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon building a luminance matte to fake a rack focus, you’ll know it’s a job that eats time and never quite looks right. Depth Scanner sits downstream from that frustration. It gives you an actual depth map—a grayscale image where white is close and black is far—without a single keyframe.

Drop it on a clip, get back a depth map you can use anywhere in the comp

Think of it as an analysis pass. You drop it onto a clip, let it read the frame, and it hands back a map you can use anywhere in the comp. Here’s the typical flow:

1. Apply Depth Scanner to a pre-comp or adjustment layer. It analyses the image using machine learning, working out which objects are nearest to the camera. No manual masking required.
2. Use the generated map as a track matte or blur map. Feed the output into Camera Lens Blur or a compound effect on your main footage layer. You get natural depth-of-field that follows the scene’s actual geometry.
3. Drive a transition with the same map. Because the grayscale information is already there, you can repurpose it to hide a cut behind foreground objects, revealing the next shot from back to front.

The plugin lives on the effect stack of a single layer, so it slots into busier timelines without forcing you to rearrange your whole project. Once the map is baked or pre-rendered, it behaves like any other matte—light on resources and ready for whatever creative routing you throw at it.

A compositor’s morning, speeded up

Picture a motion designer working on a product launch teaser. The client sent drone footage sweeping low over a picnic blanket, and the brief asks for a smooth pull-focus from a coffee cup in the foreground to a laptop screen fifteen feet beyond. Before Depth Scanner, that meant duplicating the clip, rotoscoping the cup with a feathered edge, animating a blur radius, and hoping nobody notices the hard matte line when the breeze moves a napkin. It took forty minutes, and it still felt like a cheat. With the plugin applied, the analysis runs in a few seconds and returns a soft, continuous depth map that already understands the cup is near and the laptop is far. The designer feeds that map into Camera Lens Blur, dials in an iris shape, and the shot breathes. What was a morning task becomes a coffee-break tweak, freeing up time to experiment with a gentle parallax move on the blanket’s stitching—something that would never have made the schedule otherwise.

A 4K still processes in under three seconds on Apple Silicon

Depth Scanner does its heavy lifting during a single analysis step, and you can almost set your watch by it. On an Apple Silicon machine a 4K still typically processes in under three seconds; a ten-second HD clip at 24 fps might take fifteen to twenty seconds for the full analysis pass. While it works, you’ll see a modest spike on the CPU graph—nothing that locks up the interface or stops you browsing another comp. Once the map is generated, the plugin idles. It does not re‑analyse every frame during playback unless you deliberately clear the cache, so timeline scrubbing stays fluid. Memory usage is equally polite; the generated map is a grayscale frame buffer that occupies about the same RAM as a single uncompressed still. In a session with several instances stacked across pre-comps, I noticed no creeping memory pressure, just a brief pause whenever a new analysis was triggered. If you tend to work with adjustment layers that feed multiple effects, you’ll appreciate that Depth Scanner releases its temporary working buffers cleanly—no orphaned allocations ballooning in Activity Monitor after an hour of tweaking.

The plugin has been stable through long grading sessions where After Effects itself was juggling heavy third‑party blurs and a dozen dynamic link comps. I have not seen it cause an unexpected quit. The only real-world caveat is that the analysis step requires the frame to be fully decoded, so heavily compressed H.264 media with variable bitrate can occasionally add a breath of latency; transcoding to ProRes before applying the effect makes the analyser’s life easier and keeps the whole pipeline predictable.

It handles a 24‑megapixel still even more happily than video

“Does it work on a photograph as well as video?” Yes, and it is arguably even happier with a high‑resolution still. A 24‑megapixel DSLR image gives the machine‑learning model crisp edge detail to chew on, so the depth map often comes back with cleaner separations around hair and foliage than you’d expect from a moving shot. The output is just as usable for a depth scanner after effects free download mac user who wants to build a cinematic slideshow as it is for a compositor pulling keys from camera moves.

“Will it run natively on my M1 or M2 Mac?” The current build is a universal binary, so there is no Rosetta translation layer to slow things down. The analysis routine calls Apple’s Neural Engine when it can, which is why the processing time quoted earlier feels so brisk. Intel Macs are still supported, but they do the same work on the CPU or discrete GPU, so expect analysis to take roughly twice as long on a 2019 sixteen‑inch MacBook Pro compared with an M1 Pro machine.

“Do I need Depth Scanner 2 to get the depth scanner 2 mac experience everyone talks about?” Depth Scanner 2 is a separate, more advanced plugin from the same developer. The version covered here shares the same core analysis engine but keeps the feature set deliberately focused: one click, one depth map, no extra parameters. If your work demands a depth scanner 2 mac free download to access multiple depth layers or per‑object segmentation, that is the upgrade path. For the majority of depth‑of‑field and transition jobs, the original plugin remains perfectly capable.

A handheld market shot, selective focus rack from onions to street

Imagine a Tuesday afternoon. You have imported a thirty‑second handheld shot walking through a market stall—onions in the foreground, fabric rolls mid‑ground, a busy street behind. The director wants the onions sharp for the first two seconds, then a gradual rack to the fabric, then a snap back. Here is how it plays out.

You duplicate the footage layer and rename the copy “Depth Map.” On that layer you apply Depth Scanner and wait six seconds while the progress bar crosses the frame range. The viewer now shows a grayscale interpretation of the scene: near‑white onion crates, mid‑grey bolts of cloth, dark grey buildings. You pre‑compose this layer, moving all attributes, and name the pre‑comp “DepthPass.” Back in the main comp, you apply Camera Lens Blur to the original footage layer and set the blur map to the “DepthPass” pre‑comp. Instantly the onions soften while the fabric stays crisp—or the other way round, depending on where you set the focal point in the blur effect. You add two keyframes to Blur Radius: zero at frame one, forty at frame forty‑eight, creating a natural rack focus that follows the actual geometry of the market. The onions don’t bleed into the background because the map’s transition between grey levels is genuinely continuous, not a hard‑edged rotoscope.

By minute six you have a rack focus that looks optically shot. You duplicate the “DepthPass” layer, hide the original footage briefly, and drag a gradient wipe across the timeline, using the depth map as a luma matte. The transition hides the cut behind a stack of fabric bolts and reveals the next shot exactly where the depth map says the mid‑ground sits. Without the plugin you would still be drawing mask points. With it, you are already opening the next comp, wondering what else that single map can drive.

• Adobe After Effects