Magic Mask Tracking Data Fix

For all those that use magic mask and are experiencing tracking data loss, here's the simple fix.

After you track your magic mask in the color page, simply go back to the edit page and render clip in place. Make sure to render to ProRes 4444 in order to keep the alpha channel intact. Once rendered, you can do anything to the clip you want. Hope this ends a lot of frustration for folks.

Not exactly a fix, but a good workaround.

I have seen reference to this before, but could someone then explain how you could use this "render in place" clip as a mask on the colour page? Do you have to place that clip in the colour page somehow to use as a mask?

So for example if I wanted to use the mask for another node in that clip, how do I do this?

Not a fix.
at least not in 18.1.1

I just spent a whole lotta hours using MM with a room full of agency creatives, they loved the results. the problem is, of course, when it came time to do anything with that clip afterwards.

I did a render in Place on the timeline, and about half the time, the MM would become undone in the RiP.
no idea why. it would flicker, or play the old color, the pop on for the 1 Reference frame.

the way i got it to work consistently, without putting every clip into a Compound container, is do a RiP on the original clip, then Option Shift Drag the clip up to another layer. back to the layer 1 original, decompose in place. now disable that clip. leaves me, and the others i work with, a Rendered Clip, and the original to go back to if needed. No idea why this worked "better". i will be exploring the Compound clip method more from now until 18.5.


This worked, but barely. MM is flaky. and very badly managed by the software. apparently, it uses the Render Cache location for it's files.. which is really bad in shared environments. Also, even though there was tracking done on a node, and most times i was able to re-track (dozens of times) sometimes, i couldn't even retrack, and had to rebuild the MM from scratch.

Also, add the MM as a first node. and only do MM on that node, send the mask output to a serial node.

Terrible problem - costing so much time. As soon as render cache is emptied, all tracking data is lost. Even with the MM in DR 20. Many times, the masks won't even re-track so I had to start from scratch. I wish the devs would fix this!

As soon as render cache is emptied, all tracking data is lost.

The tracking data is stored in the Cache, so that's expected.

Staff has said they're working on a better way, but it looks like that hasn't arrived yet.