I have no idea what it uses for the fore and background reference. But did you notice the leaves in front and behind the statue? Amazing trick that! Plus the way it "pops-out" the object you want? Totally weird and wondrous. I can only think it would require LOTS of light level . . I was ready about a plug-in that uses grey-scale of a picture to reference distance to be blurred. But this kinda separation is well, . . .beyond my comprehension. Now THAT'S not difficult to achieve!

Grazie

In the past have tried the demo of this, and some of their other tools as wel. You need to assign the area you want and also create a matte...it takes the info from the matte. Some other plug-ins work the same way. Lerns Care sort of does the same thing. I do not have it open in front of me but I believe it will take all black and use that as the depth matte. All white info will be "in focus", all black will be "out of fous".

There's a veg that ships with Vegas that shows you how to do this.
There's nothing really magic going on however for doing this with video an app that has motion tracking would help.
The hardest part of all is generating the masks that isolate each plane in the image.
The one thing I do see that would create an FX that I can't see any way to simulate in Vegas is using a B&W grad mask to control the level of say GB within a frame, you'd sort of come close by say compositing to 10 tracks with different amounts of GB and using the grad mask to control the composite but that's not quite the same thing and no doubt it'd be a render hog.
Bob.