After Effects Depth Scanner Plugin Tutorial | PremiumBeat.com

hey guys it's charles with premiumbe and in this video we're going to look at creating depth maps on our video footage and images using an after effects plugin called depth scanner we'll look at how the plugin works the strengths and the weaknesses i also want to share with you guys some really fun ways you can use the plugin with other effects but hold up if you don't want to have to buy a plug-in then no worries i'll also show you guys how you can instantly create depth maps for images in photoshop using one of their new neural filters so stick around guys because we're going to look a lot of fun stuff in this video so let's go ahead and get started [Music] all right guys as i mentioned we're going to be using an after effects plugin called depth scanner which is available on ae scripts it uses artificial intelligence to generate a depth map based on your original footage or image at this time it's only compatible with windows and i'll have links for everything that i mentioned in this video on the blog post so check for that link in the description if you need to find something now let's go ahead and jump over to after effects and take a look at how depth scanner works all right guys i'm using after effects 2022 you will need to use after effects 2021 or above for this plug-in to work i also already have the plug-in install i do want to briefly mention that the installation process for this plugin is a little bit more lengthy than most plugins once you download the installer it has to download quite a bit on the back end i'm assuming for the algorithms and everything else that this plugin uses it takes about 10 minutes or so depending on your internet connection so just keep that in mind as well and what i've got here is some footage of this astronaut this is just a shot from shutterstock and i thought this would work quite nicely for kind of demonstrating this plug-in we have subject in the foreground and the background's a little bit out of focus here and we have some parallax going on so let's go ahead and apply depth scanner to this shot get my footage selected come here to effect and you're gonna see blaze plugins and depth scanner and immediately we can see we have a very low resolution depth pass on our footage let's go over here to the effects controls and the primary settings that we're going to be looking at are going to be the model and the resolution here so let's go to resolution first it's set to tiny and if we come down here and bump this up to medium we're going to see we get a much better resolution here on our depth pass and i'm actually going to bump this up to large and you can kind of see the differences here we're getting let's go to original that's going to be the original resolution of your footage i typically said this to be large i found that when i bump it up to original there's not that much difference depending on the shot and if your shot's 4k it can really slow down your machine here sometimes even crash the plug-in so i've typically use this at large if we zoom in here you can see the results are quite nice on everything we're actually 200 so here it is at 100 percent and we're getting really clean edges on everything especially for a depth pass as far as that goes so i like the results i get from this now with the model resolution here let me zoom back out you can see we're using faster you can bump this up to accurate and you can see the difference we get there's a little bit of subtle differences on different things and depending on whatever footage i'm looking at i'll typically toggle between the accurate and faster and whichever one looks nicer i'll go with that in this case actually like the faster one a little bit better just because to me it looks like it's picking up less of the background here so most of the background's totally white and now if you're using this on an image you're basically already done but we're obviously using this on a video clip so let's go ahead and kind of scroll through here and you can see what's happening we are getting quite a bit of flickering going on and that is one thing to note with death passes on video here this is going to be very common on any shots you're doing this with and that will affect how you're going to be able to use your death pass and what effects you're going to be able to use so you can see we're getting flickering here on the subject here in the front and we're getting a little bit of artifacting around the edges so if you're expecting this to be perfectly clean it is not going to be but i've actually found you can do quite a few different effects still even with it in this state i was actually kind of surprised as the results in a lot of cases and i'll show you guys kind of the best ways you can use this as well to kind of work around some of these issues one of the things they have built in here is this temporal averaging let's go ahead and check that on you'll definitely want to use this if you're using this on a video shot and what this basically does at least my understanding of it is whatever frame of video you're on it's going to take the frame before and after it and kind of blend those together and give you a better average and the reason i kind of came to that conclusion here is if we zoom in here kind of like some of this movement you can see we kind of have three different layers here kind of being overlaid so i'm assuming that that's what's going on and hopefully they continue to kind of refine this because this is definitely something that's needed with video but again we have to kind of give the plugin some credit because it is generating this strictly from a video clip so there's definitely a lot going on in the back end let's go ahead and preview this now you can kind of see it has reduced that flickering there is some flickering still present but it's definitely dialed it back quite a bit now the next settings we can see here just kind of what we want to use to process this so we have the gpu use half the gpu and then fall back to the cpu i typically leave all these check the defaults next we have the mapping default it's going to be set to normalize and it just kind of generates an automatic depth pass for us but if we want to we can uncheck this and you can see this is going to give us total control of the depth map so we can go ahead and kind of adjust this and you can see how this kind of scrolls through the depth pass we want to kind of isolate something specific or if we want to kind of bring out something a little bit more and you can see as i increase this you can see kind of how that affects the shot in a lot of cases the normalize option here that's already checked will give you pretty good results but it's nice to kind of have that as a backup or if you just want to kind of isolate different areas of your shot and speaking of that we have the modes here the initial one is the depth map we have another option here which is slicing and this is really cool because it's kind of like what we did with the mapping here under normalize but we can do this on our footage so you can see we can kind of slice out different parts of our clip so i go ahead and adjust this you see i can slice out just the background and i can continue to bring this forward and slice out our subject or i can leave this back set and maybe just slice out the subject here so we're just kind of slicing through and this can be good for transitions and things like that i'll show you guys some cool stuff we can do with that let's go ahead and look at another shot here i've got of some drone footage and i've gotten some really good results with shots like this or shots of objects so far shots of people can be kind of hit or miss depending on kind of all the accessories they've got or if they have a lot of hair hair definitely something that this plugin kind of struggles with as you can imagine let's go ahead and apply the effect to this drone shot here you can see it's just a flyover shot so i've got my footage selected come to effect blaze plugins and depth scanner now we have a low resolution let's go ahead and bump this up to be large and you can see how it's already kind of like generated some nice looking stuff here around the kind of chimneys and stuff on these buildings when you see those going off in the distance i'm going to check and see what the difference is with accurate here and i do like that a little bit better just kind of makes the death pest come out a little bit better let's go ahead and check on the temporal averaging here now we'll go ahead and preview this and you can see we are getting obviously some flickering still and some edges artifacting around the edges of the buildings and when i first saw this i kind of thought well this probably won't work very well for a kind of a blur pass if i use this as a depth map but i was actually quite surprised and i'll show you guys some results that i got from this so what i wanted to do in this case here is i want this to be in focus in the background to be out of focus if you notice the flickering is not nearly as prominent or hardly noticeable at all in the background back there so what i decided to do is uncheck normalize here and let's use this absolute depth here i'm going to bring this back quite a bit and by doing that we can get a result more like this we're kind of more in focus here of these front buildings let's jump over to the composition where i've actually applied the effects already and so you can see what i've got here is i've got two different layers of the footage and what i've done here on the normal layer is i've just applied basically a camera lens blur effect this is crossfire bokeh which is the it's another blur plug-in very similar but you can see we get this nice depth of field i check this on and off and this gives me the option to set a depth map and a lot of effects will have this option so what i've done is i've just set this to a second copy if i solo it down here of my footage which has depth scanner applied to it and we've done that same thing we've generated a depth pass and i've used the mapping here to set the depth here to be more focused on the front so let's go ahead and unsolo that come back to our original footage and you can see we get this nice bokeh effect kind of like a miniature looking effect here on the shot and when i first applied this before i previewed i actually expected this would not look that good because again of those edging artifacts and stuff like that and the flickering but as you can see here on the actual shot the results are very nice and you're not really noticing that much flickering at all definitely some usable applications for this type of shot and i think the results of this look quite nice another creative way you can use this plug-in is creating these depth transitions which look really neat so i'm going to come over here and i'm going to check this back on to be normalized here for our mapping and then for the mode let's go ahead and change this to slicing and what i'm talking about like a transition with depth we can use we can keyframe this minimum and maximum setting here if i go ahead and you can see we could create a transition of our footage just using this so it basically animates on based on the depth of the video you've probably seen similar transitions like this but it typically works on just the luminance of the image not the actual depth so when we're doing this based on the depth it can create some really cool looking shots let's take a look at another example i've got here i'm kind of obsessed with this effect the way it uses the depth for the transition i think it looks really unique and it looks a lot cooler than something just like that using the luminance or any other like video value and here's another scene where i tried this out on i had to try this on several drone shots because i love the results all right guys let's pause for just a second before i show you some other cool stuff you can do with depth scanner let's go ahead and look at how we can automatically create a depth pass on an image in photoshop all right guys i am in photoshop version 2022 it's one of the latest releases here you know probably going to need that in order to access the neural filters we're going to use i've got this image here of just a b on the flower here we have a little bit of stuff out of focus in the background let me show you guys how you can automatically create a depth pass here in photoshop and we can compare this to depth scanner as well again you don't need any plugins for this you just need photoshop so what i'm going to do is i've got my image here i'm going to come here to filter you're going to see neural filters go ahead and select that now we'll open up this neural filter panel and you're going to see we have this depth blur right here and in your version you're probably going to see this cloud kind of the arrow icon there and you will need to download this you say just click that and it'll download it i think it's about 250 megabytes but don't quote me on that but i've already got it downloaded for mine so all i need to do is just check on the switch here and that's going to start processing the image and when that's done you may see a blurry image here we have these settings here we can set the focal distance and things like that but we're not really interested in that what we want to get is down here at the bottom you're going to see output depth map only go ahead and click that and now we can see we have a depth pass here let's go ahead and click ok and it's just going to add that depth pass onto a new layer here where you can toggle that on and off so now if you want to you can just go ahead and save this out come here to file and then save it out for whatever you need to save a copy as a png or photoshop file whatever you want and you can see here the depth results we get from this are pretty good and i'll just show you guys on the screen here here's the photoshop version and here's a version of the same image processed through depth scanner both of them look quite nice i do think the depth scanner one looks a little bit better and we would expect that because that is a paid plug-in there's a little more detail i noticed kind of on the b if we zoom in here to the photoshop version you're going to see we get a little bit more aliasing around the edges of things you can see kind of around these flower petals here kind of get some stair stepping there that we're not getting on the depth scanner version and again if you just want to try out some of the depth effects that i'm using by all means generate some passes in photoshop and just follow along all right guys jumping back over to after effects this is going to be the fun part right to show you guys some cool creative use cases that i kind of came up with for using dev scanner with other effects so check out this this is another transition here i'm using the slicing effect but you can see it's almost like it's loading in everything you see on screen here kind of like a matrix or digitized version of everything i thought that looked pretty unique and the way i'm doing this is i've just got two different layers of footage so one if i solo it here is just the regular footage animating on using the slicing effect here i've just got two keyframes you can see just here on the maximum value so that's animating that on and what i did was i had a second copy and if we go ahead and solo that so it's just below it and it's just offset a little bit here with its animation and then what i applied to that was a preset which is this video game preset that we have available on premiumbeat if you want to follow that tutorial and check that out but i just applied that preset to this footage so it gives us kind of this digitized version and so when i have both of these playing together and they're just kind of offset slightly so the digital one comes on a little bit before the regular it looks kind of like it's loading it here on the screen another thing i want to show you here is kind of a cool solution to one problem we often get with depth passes so what i've got here is some footage here of the astronaut again and i've got another copy of it below here which just has the depth scanner death pass on it so let's go ahead and let's apply a lens blur effect to our original footage so effect come down here to blur we'll just select camera lens blur and i'm going to set the blur map to be the depth pass back there i want to make sure the effects and mask is turned on so it actually processes the depth scanner effect that's applied to it let's go ahead and increase the blur radius and when i do that you're going to see one of the most common problems we get with depth passes on footage and you can see how it's kind of fringing it's blurring you know the guy in the background there it's creating this fringe around what should be in focus you know obviously with real world footage we're not going to get a fringe like that so that's obviously a problem you get with a lot of depth passes because again it's referencing the same footage so it's just kind of bleeding out around the edges and using dev skinner we can do a cool creative solution to this so let me jump over to this other composition here i've got and this composition you're going to see i've applied the same effects here i've got a blur on the background but we're not getting that bleeding edge around our subject and the way this is happening let me go ahead and show you kind of break this down so i've got the same original footage here and i've got the same depth pass in the background there but i've got this middle background plate let me show you how i created this let's jump into this composition so what i've got here is i just used the slicing effect to just slice out the astronaut here if i jump into this one sorry for diving down into so many compositions here but you can see i just have this slicing him out with that kind of minimum and maximum setting there on the slicing mode and when we do that we're left with obviously a hole here of where our astronaut's supposed to be i added a matte choker effect here just to kind of soften this edge i didn't even tweak any settings just applied it so it would just soften and get rid of a little bit aliasing around that edge there as you can see and so i pre-composed that and what we're left with here is obviously this footage with a hole in it and the first thing my mind went to was okay let's go ahead and throw this through content aware fill and that's what i did we have a tutorial on that i'll link to that on the blog post as well if you want to check that out but it's pretty much just a one click you know automatically generating a fill here but if you need to get to it it's under window and you'll come down here to content aware fill that will open up a panel there and you can go ahead and generate that fill layer let's go ahead and close that back up and what that does is it's going to spit out this fill layer and i can turn this on you can see what it's done is it's filled in that hole now as it is right now you can see there's a little bit of artifact in here with this line and stuff but it did a pretty good job and considering this is going to be blurred out it's going to work perfectly for us so let's jump back over to the main composition we've got here and so what this allows us to do is then blur this background i can set that footage to have a blur effect on it and for the depth pass and when it blurs that background now we're not going to get that bleeding edge around our subject it's kind of giving us that fringe that we don't want and so this allows us to basically come up with a creative solution to mask that out just saves us a lot of time obviously a lot of time having to mask that out so that's another solution you can do with depth scanner let's come here to another composition with the astronauts the last one i promise with this guy but another thing that's kind of cool is with that depth pass if you ever have any vfx or you need somebody to pass through kind of like a you know fake wall or fake layer like a sci-fi effect or going through a portal you could also use this slicing effect to kind of create that effect as well so we go ahead and scroll through here you can see it's almost like he's passing through this whatever sci-fi field barrier we've got here but you can see it gives us a pretty nice result it's not perfect in all cases but as you can imagine kind of having to mask this manually what a pain that would be and how long that would take and considering this took about two seconds to kind of create this pass i think it looks pretty good so that's another option you've got there for creating passes like that with vfx now let me show you guys a cool kind of exposure effect you can do to kind of isolate the exposure of things so again it's kind of like masking but it's kind of doing it for us automatically so i've got this shot of this girl it's a shot from shutterstock and what i've done is i've got the depth pass here already done let me go ahead and toggle it on so i'm going to use this now to adjust the exposure of my shot so what i'm going to do here let's go ahead and apply an invert effect to this shot temperature effect we'll go to channel and invert so we want to invert this so the stuff in the background is darker here and what i can do with this shot is i'm going to set it now to be a multiply blend mode now you can see everything is much darker behind her and i can just hit t for opacity here and i can adjust this so i'm actually adjusting kind of the exposure of the background selectively obviously if i said this 100 it's a little bit too extreme and you can see we're getting a little bit of kind of artifacting on her hair there but if i set this something like 40 percent you know it doesn't look too bad it's a nice way to kind of put more focus here on the subject so it's a cool way you can adjust the exposure of a shot without having to do a lot of masking it's going to save you a lot of time with that here's another shot where i've done the same thing so i've just duplicated the same shot twice here go ahead and check it on and you can see the depth pass we're left with so let's go ahead and apply the invert effect to this and again set this to be a multiply blending mode and you can see it's very dark in the background there we're getting a little bit of a fringe line kind of around her here but again we can adjust that and again you want to be kind of subtle with this i think that's where it works best but again it helps you kind of isolate put more exposure here on your subject and again saving you that time of having to mask around them before we get to my favorite examples i want to show you one little troubleshooting thing you can do if you do encounter issues using depth scanner so i'm going to turn it on with this shot here this drone shot i've got and i noticed occasionally i will get this weird artifacting in the sky and i'm assuming that's happening uh because of the banning these colors here uh it's difficult for it to kind of interpret what that is and i thought to myself you know hopefully there's a solution for this but there actually is just from an experimentation i did i'm in 16 bits per channel here if i just go ahead and alt click and bump this up to 32 bits it just gets rid of all that artifacting so if you do encounter that definitely try cycling through the different bit channels there and probably at 32 bits it will get rid of that artifacting all right guys here's two of my favorite examples i want to show you guys so this is an image i took a drone image that i took in the matrix awakens game experience which is an unreal engine 5 demo that you can kind of play around with and obviously this is all cg but depth scanner still works on this so i can go ahead and solo this and you can see i've created a depth pass from this image and then what i've done here on the image is i've applied the effect ae pixel sorter 2 which is also available from a scripts which you can see we have an input option here and you can set the source of this to be that depth pass so i'm going to toggle this on and you see we get this awesome kind of slit scan result from this and how i've achieved this is under the output here default it will be sorted pixels so it looks something like this but i've changed this to be the gradient and that gives us more of a slit scan effect but check this out because we have the input here to that depth pass on the threshold if i go and adjust this you can see it will actually adjust through the image and so you can do like a cool animation effect giving it that depth if we go ahead and zoom in here you're going to see we get this a little bit kind of like a jagged you know it's not like a clean edge here on this and the way i've achieved that is on that depth pass we go ahead and solo it what i've done is just applied a little bit of noise to that you can see and that way it'll break up that smoothness just a little bit and gives it more of kind of a jagged edge there it's not quite as clean you can see as i scroll through here kind of what that looks like again that's just on this image so this might be pretty cool to apply and try this on video footage well we've done that as well and you can see this here we're basically using the same technique to do this to drive this animation so i just recorded this game footage here did depth scanner for a depth pass and use the same pixel sorting technique i feel like we're just scratching the surface with all different effects we can create using a depth scanner on real world footage these are some of the ideas that i could come up with myself let me know down in the comments if you guys have any other ideas for combining depth scanner with any other effects i'm definitely interested in checking those out all right guys hope you enjoyed taking a look at using dev scanner and if you made it this far in the video be sure to give us a thumbs up and check out some of the other new content that we have on the premiumbeat channel we have a lot of cool things planned for this year and with that we'll catch you guys on the next one [Music] you

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 67,956

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Id: OLV8Q93KKHQ

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022