- Posts: 1
- Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2024 12:12 am
- Real Name: Zachery Bielicki
This is a reoccurring theme it seems, that users post about and probably Blackmagic should be better at explaining how it all works.
Magic Mask in particular, is sensitive to how you tread it upstream vs downstream in the workflow. Much like fusion nodes or color page nodes, there is a flow to consider. And magic mask is a color page effect so it behaves like that.
The basic rule is that you can do almost anything downstream and almost nothing upstream or you will break the tracking information and have to retrack, because magic mask gets its information to track from edit page. Or nodes before in the color page. I'm not counting fusion here because that is extra layer to consider. However if you have made your tracking on edit page timeline, than you are only seeing a preview of magic mask on the timeline in the edit page. The real information is in color page. Because it happens downstream of edit page.
So when you make tracking with magic mask on color page, you are feeding something from edit page to it to track. once it has tracked it, it will remember reference frames and strokes independently of anything else, but to track the rest of the footage it needs information from edit page. If you change source of what is used for magic mask to track, it will have to be retracked, with exception of the reference frames remaining intact, because they are not cached.
Regarding split clips, if you apply magic mask to original clip on your timeline, and than you chop it up into parts, you will only preserve tracking on the original part which was tracked, with the rest you broke the connection because you have made a change upstream of what magic mask is using as source for tracking.
As I've said, upstream from Magic Mask will break everything, downstream will break virtually nothing. I think that in your case there are far better ways to work with green screen footage, but if for some reason you want to make it more complicated and still have a split clip with magic mask there is a little known way, that is logical if you follow the concepts I mentioned. Upstream vs downstream.
Create a compound clip of your video clip on the timeline. Right click on the compound clip and choose open in timeline. Than new timeline in the tab called compound clip should appear. In that timeline, that you just opened, apply magic mask. And it will be applied to your compound clip on original timeline. Now you have protected the clip from breaking the connection at the expense of working with compound clip. But now you can chop it off anywhere you like or duplicate it and it will retain magic mask track. You would have to make changes to magic mask if you like in the compound clip timeline itself. But compound clip on original timeline is now prevented from breaking the connection, in a direct way.
Another way is to use fusion which sources from media pool not timeline hence it won't break the connection either, but if you do green screen, fusion is probably best place to do it all. Not edit page. Edit page is for editing not green screen work. And its something that is in the pages or modules of resolve, before fusion and color page. That is a hint of what should come first and in what order. While some overlap exists and there are ways to work between the pages, its not a best thing, its usually what people do when they don't understand how it all works and try to stay where they are most comfortable, which is usually edit page. But it leads to more problems than it solves because it goes against the way resolve is designed and intended to be used.