Digging Into The Depth Map – One of Resolve 18’s Best New Features

A Powerful New ResolveFX Plug-in You Need To Use

The public beta of Resolve 18 was announced just before NAB and is now available for download. Among hundreds of new features – one has stood out to me as a favorite: the Depth Map ResolveFX plug-in. In this Insight, I want to focus on what it is, how it works, and how you can use it in your day-to-day grading.

What Is A ‘Depth Map’?

The Depth Map plug-in generates a grayscale representation of the 3D depth of an image. These depth maps are most commonly seen as a render pass for CG assets, where all the geometry of a scene is known. They are also sometimes called Z-depth passes.

These greyscale maps represent depth via brightness:

• White represents objects closest to the camera.
• Black represents objects the furthest away from the camera.

The resulting image can be used as a matte/alpha channel for color grading, or as an input for various other depth-aware tools.