That animation is weak. As I recall, Japanese companies sometimes do flash animation videos for promoting new toys, and they're better than this.

As for scanning, to be fair to Transformers, Animated reintroduced the requirement of TFs needing their ship to reformat themselves. Scanning by themselves is just a story cheat to speed the plot along. Like the Decepticons being able to fly away when they are defeated or the Autobots being able to drive to the artic to dig up Skyfire so he can fly them down to South America.