Depth Scanner 1.15.6

If you have used any tool that generates a 3D point cloud from footage, you know the intermediate data it relies on: a greyscale depth map. Depth Scanner sits earlier in that chain. It takes a video clip or a photograph inside After Effects and produces a depth map you can route into other effects.

1. Apply Depth Scanner to a 2D layer — footage or a still.
2. Let the plugin analyse the frame. It writes a depth matte where pixel brightness corresponds to distance from the camera.
3. Duplicate the original layer and use the depth map as a track matte or luma matte. You now have foreground and background isolation ready for colour grading or blur passes.
4. Feed the map into a displacement effect on a duplicate layer to drive 3D parallax motion. The greyscale values control pixel shift, giving a convincing sense of volume without a 3D camera rig.
5. Pipe the same map into Camera Lens Blur to get depth-of-field falloff that tracks the actual content, not a hand-drawn mask.

The plugin appears in the Blace documentation alongside Depth Scanner 2, which suggests a more recent engine exists, but this version still holds a spot in comps where a lightweight, single-pass depth estimate is all that's needed before handing off to a blur or a transition effect.

How Depth Scanner Fits into a Real Comp Workflow

Depth Scanner is not a finishing effect. It is an upstream data generator. In practice, you drop it onto a pre-comp or an adjustment layer early in the stack, let it bake a depth map, then route that map into three or four other effects downstream. The plugin itself does not blur, displace, or matte anything — it only writes greyscale pixel data.

A few combinations that show up in production comps:

• Camera Lens Blur — feed the depth map into the blur map input. Near pixels stay sharp; far pixels soften. More convincing than a gradient ramp because the falloff follows actual object edges.
• Displacement Map — apply to a duplicate of the source layer, referencing the depth map. Horizontal displacement driven by luminance gives a quick 3D Ken Burns effect without leaving 2D space.
• Set Matte + Levels — crush the depth map with Levels to isolate a narrow depth slice, then use it as a track matte. Useful for colour grading only the midground or dropping a transition between two depth planes.
• Fractal Noise + Depth Map — use the depth map as a luma matte for atmospheric fog. Noise appears denser in distant areas, thinner up close.

macOS Integration Points

The plugin writes no standalone files to disk unless you pre-render the depth map pass. Within After Effects, the generated map lives on the layer stack like any other effect output. You can pick it up with expressions that reference effect("Depth Scanner")("Depth Map") — handy when driving multiple properties from one depth estimate.

On macOS, the plugin's AI inference runs on the CPU. No Metal acceleration is exposed in version 1.15.6, so render times scale with frame size and clip length more than GPU headroom. If you work on an Apple Silicon machine, After Effects runs the plugin through Rosetta 2 unless you are on a native Apple Silicon build of After Effects — Blace has not published separate architecture notes for this version, but the plugin loads without issues on M1 and M2 systems under emulation.

The Baked Transforms Trap

Depth Scanner looks deceptively simple — one effect, one output. That simplicity invites a few recurring errors in the first week of use.

Applying the plugin to an already pre-comp'd shot with baked transforms. Depth estimation works best on the raw source clip before any scale, position, or rotation changes. If you pre-comp first, the plugin analyses the raster at its current resolution and aspect ratio, which can skew the depth estimate when the pre-comp is later transformed in the main comp. Apply Depth Scanner to the source layer directly, then pre-comp the result if you need to nest it.

Expecting a clean depth map from low-contrast footage. The AI model looks for edges, texture density, and motion parallax cues. A flat-lit shot of fog over water gives it almost nothing to work with. The resulting depth map will be noisy or uniformly grey. If the source lacks depth cues, no plugin can invent them reliably. Test on a clip with clear foreground-background separation first to understand what the plugin considers a strong signal.

Routing the depth map to the wrong input of Camera Lens Blur. After Effects' Camera Lens Blur expects a blur map, not a matte. If you apply the depth map as a luma matte on the blur layer instead of placing it in the effect's Blur Map layer picker, you get hard cutouts instead of graduated defocus. The right path: leave the blur layer's track matte set to None; inside the Camera Lens Blur effect, set Blur Map to the depth map layer and adjust Blur Focal Distance until the sharp plane sits where you want it.

Forgetting to set the depth map layer as a guide layer. A rendered depth map layer sitting visibly in the comp output is a common giveaway in draft exports. Set it to Guide Layer so it remains available for other effects to reference but never appears in the final render.

Flickering Depth Maps Are Gone

Version 1.15.6 is a maintenance release. Blace did not publish a detailed changelog for it, but the behaviour differences from earlier 1.14.x builds are visible in daily use:

• Frame analysis stability — earlier builds occasionally produced a flickering depth estimate on the first frame after a RAM preview loop. 1.15.6 locks the estimate on frame one and holds it consistent across preview restarts. Less re-rendering when you scrub the timeline.
• High-resolution stills — the plugin handles 6K and 8K still frames with fewer memory allocation errors than 1.14.x. Render times are not faster, but the plugin no longer drops frames on large canvases when RAM is tight.
• After Effects 2024 compatibility — the 1.15.x line was updated to load correctly under After Effects 2024's revised effect sandboxing. Users on 2023 builds reported no regressions, so the update appears limited to compatibility fixes rather than engine changes.

The core depth model has not changed. Output from 1.15.6 looks identical to 1.14.x on the same source frame. This version is about stability, not a new AI model.

Drop It in MediaCore and Restart

Installation follows the standard After Effects plugin routine: place the plugin file in the MediaCore folder, restart After Effects, and find Depth Scanner under the Blace Plugins category in the Effects panel. After that, a few habits make the first two days smoother.

Build a depth map pre-comp template. Set up one comp with Depth Scanner applied to a placeholder solid, a Camera Lens Blur layer referencing it, and a Displacement Map layer for parallax. Save it as a project template. When new footage arrives, you swap the source and adjust two parameters instead of rebuilding the chain each time. This cuts setup from five minutes to about thirty seconds per shot.

Render depth maps to an image sequence early. If your comp has five effects downstream all reading the same depth map, do not let After Effects re-run the AI inference five times per frame. Pre-render the depth pass to an EXR or PNG sequence at half resolution (depth data does not need full raster detail), import it, and point all downstream effects to that sequence. Render times drop noticeably on complex timelines.

Test on a 2–3 second subclip first. Depth Scanner's processing time per frame is not trivial on long clips. Before letting it churn through a 30-second shot, set the work area to a representative 2-second segment and evaluate the depth quality. If the map looks wrong on the test segment, adjusting the source or switching to a different approach costs minutes instead of an hour.

Keep the depth map at 16-bit. If your project works in

• Adobe After Effects