AI Depth Map

The good news is AI Depth Map works... if you have a lot of patience and are up for some trouble shooting. For the price AI Depth Map is the best affordable option for Mac users (that I know of) but here are the issues I had after spending 5+ hours attempting to Depth Map a 4.5 second 720p video clip: 1. It does not work with video files. It doesn't recognize .MOV and when I ran an MP4 file through it the final result was just four frames (it exports .JPGs into a folder to use as an image sequence). I tried a few times with other video clips and got similar results with 6 frames being the most it exported. 2. I created an image sequence from the original video clip and tried it that way. Better. Of the 130 frames in this clip it exported 29 frames from random points in the video. I tried inputting small quantities of images (10 per processing session) and had much better luck. No missing frames this time. 3. While rendering these small quantities of image files the render times for 10 images (1280x720 res) was about 7-10 minutes. But, the program often would seem to be rendering for much longer than needed (even let it run for an hour one time to see if maybe I was just being impatient but no luck) so I would quit and restart. Found the success rate to be about 1 out of 3 tries for a successful render of ten image files. Because of these issues it took almost 3 hours to process 130 frames. 4. The quality of the Depth Maps rendered is pretty good on a frame by frame basis. Has pretty accurate definition of depth and objects which I was impressed by. The issue here is that there does not seem to be any relation to frames before or after the frame it is rendering so once aligned into an image sequence there is a very noticeable amount of "flicker" in some areas of the Depth Map video. 5. There is no way to modify the settings of the Depth Map. It's literally just one button and it processes the files. So, you cannot fine tune the Depth Map in any way. The video I was processing was of a guy standing in front of a house and a tree. The tree is in the middle distance (dark gray values) but the house is all black so it is registered as the same depth as the sky. Ideally there would be some variation in depth from the house to the sky. All-in-all this program does work and creates useable Depth Maps but it is wise to proceed with it more as a batch image processor more than a video processor. And, again, for the price it's impressive. The only other options for Mac require Flame and/or cost much, much, much more. Hopefully this version is just the start and future versions will improve upon this one in both reliability and functionality.

Haven't used it yet, but I'm NOT HAPPY that in fact, it only installs for AE and PR (or FCP). NO OPTION for Resolve, as advertised.