How to use Depth Map in DaVinci Resolve (Studio)

Hello editors!

In this guide, we’ll go through a tool that will help you to do a lot of astonishing tasks - remove and blur background, place titles behind objects, add visual effects, and more. The tool we’re talking about is Depth Map.

As expected, it’s only available in the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve, but definitely worth using.

Learn how to remove the background in the free version of DaVinci Resolve.

How to apply and customize Depth Map in DaVinci

The best way to get the effect looking like it should is to use a clip with an object or person close to the screen and the background easily differentiates from this object.

Go to the Color Tab and open the Effects menu. Find the Depth Map effect and drop it to the Node window. Once we added the effect, DaVinci Resolve will analyze the distance between objects and show us the depth map of our clip.

Here you can customize a bunch of effect controllers, for example, switch the Quality from Better to Faster if your PC is not strong enough. To switch between preview modes, you can just check/uncheck the Depth Map Preview option.

If you want to customize the selection of the map, you can do it via Resulting Map Adjustment>Adjust Map Levels. To remove more parts of the background, you can increase the Far Limit. To increase the selection of the object close to the screen, you need to decrease the Near Limit controller.  

To isolate the background and the object completely, you just need to click on the Isolation checkbox. You can also adjust the Tolerance and Softness parameters to customize the selection further.

This is not always required and only depends on the effect you want to add - for example, if you want to add a cinematic blur to the background, you will need to leave gray areas for a softer result.

An additional controller you can use to soften the edges of the object is Map Finesse. By activating the Postprocessing checkbox, you’ll get a thin blur on the edges. Customize it further by adjusting Post Filter and Blur parameters.  

Finally, you can any time invert the selection to apply effects only to the background, or only to the main object. To do this, check the Invert option on the effect menu.

Now that our Depth Map is customized, we can start adding the effects.

Applying effects

Add a new Corrector node and link both of the arrows to the node with our Depth Map. Also, you’ll need to connect it to the Output. Now, any changes we’ll apply to the video would only affect the Depth Map selection.

Remove the background

With the Depth Map applied, you can now correctly remove the background from your video. Right-click on the node panel and select Add Alpha Output.

Now just connect the blue square of our Depth Map node to the blue alpha output circle to remove the background.  

Blur the background

For example, we can easily blur the background. Find a Gaussian Blur effect and drag it to our Corrector node. Customize the effect to your liking and see the changes applied to the Corrector node.  

Add text behind the object

Another thing you can easily do now is to add text between your object and the background.

Go to the Edit tab and duplicate our clip. With one of the clips selected, go to the Color tab. Add a Depth Map node and customize it like in previous examples. Add and connect the Alpha Output to the node, like previously. Now, all you need is to go back to the Edit page and add a text to the video track between both clips, with and without the background.  

To sum up

Now you can use the Depth Map to add various effects, enhancing and removing objects to your liking! For the free version of DaVinci Resolve, it would only be possible to apply the selections via Mask and tracking. If you want to know more about masking in the free version of Resolve, check this guide.