Please fix Face Refinement

It's skipping single frames. Sometimes at the start of clip, sometimes middle.

Problem is it removes the mask on skipped frames. PLEASE stop it from doing that, thanks.

I agree, Face Refinement can be very frustrating in some cases. My main problem with it is if the tracking fails, it simply turns off -- sometimes for just a frame -- which is often enough to wreck the shot. We've asked many times for Blackmagic to make the default mode to always stay on, or even better, allow user adjustment of the mask for problem areas. No change yet.

Some general tips for Face Refinement:

1) you often get better results if you use PTZR to zoom into the face and THEN run the F.R. analysis mode. Once it's tracked, go back to normal framing and the mask should still fit.

2) if there's conflicts in the background, consider using a temporary black mask in a previous node to mask out everything else except the face. This will give F.R.'s internal engine fewer distractions to work with. This is particularly useful if you have 2 or more people in the same shot.

3) note that it's possible to use a mask on top of F.R. in case it's catching any details behind the actor's face. Of course, you can also manually adjust the size of the F.R. mask area itself.

4) I find that F.R. alone is not enough to add beauty to "actors of a certain age." I find you also have to pay attention to their neck, visible chest, and hands, and you've got to blur or denoise or use Minus Midtone or OFX Beauty.

5) I also think you have to use manual methods to get rid of crow's feet and jowls, which often have to be windowed and tracked. OFX Beauty is a good way to use frequency-selection to only soften the skin details and leave everything else intact.

6) the moment the actor turns sideways or otherwise gets covered up, F.R. can't recover, and for that, you have to go to an all-manual method. It takes more than 8 power windows to recreate what Face Refinement does. Bear in mind that anything Face Refinement can do, you can also do manually... but it's a lot of work.

7) don't forget that LESS IS MORE. Avoid cranking in so much skin softening that the actors start turning into plastic Barbie dolls. I generally will back off at least 25% on whatever settings I initially try in the firsts pass. I'd rather see a few tiny minor wrinkles than plastic skin.

8) NO AMOUNT of processing can overcome bad makeup (or a lack of makeup). There's a reason why the HMU people on set make a lot of money: good makeup makes all the difference in the world on an actor's face. Trying to do makeup in post is fraught with problems, and takes 10 times more effort than it would just to get it right on the day.

For me it's always one frame somewhere in the middle. Or the first or last frame.

Nothing special about the skipped frames. Nothing is covering the face etc.

Could be fixed by algorithm copying the mask directly from the previous or next frame, when the face detection fails on a single frame.

I tried it on some footage of my own face.

What is an "Hahahaha -- there is not enough GPU power in the whole world to fix that face" error?

I totally agree that Face Refinement needs a change in the software so that when it stops tracking on a face that you DON'T LOSE all of the tracking information before that point. I have tried zooming in, masking the face, etc and there is no logical reason for the Face Refinement to stop tracking the face.

I feel like the Face Refinement in 18.5 (5) is not as good as it was in previous versions. Seems like it is getting more unreliable.

Erik

I totally agree that Face Refinement needs a change in the software so that when it stops tracking on a face that you DON'T LOSE all of the tracking information before that point. I have tried zooming in, masking the face, etc and there is no logical reason for the Face Refinement to stop tracking the face.

Two additional tricks I didn't provide above:

1) sometimes you get better results tracking backwards, and letting F.R. anticipate where the windows need to go based on that.

2) in worst cases, you can try splitting the clip at the point where the window fails, and then re-tracking and see if it picks up where it left off and then works.

Usually, there's a point where I just say "to hell with it" and I do it all manually, which just takes a lot of time.

Thanks for these extra tips Mark. Appreciate it. Forwards or Backwards unfortunately isn't working for me as well as it used to in the past. Splitting the clip is certainly an option but provides a bit of complexity as well.

I have a camera walking/talking shot that I have added stabilization to on the timeline so splitting the clip means I will need to either add stabilization last or try rendering the stabilization pass and then adding face refinement and then making ABOUT 15 SPLIT CLIPS to make it through the roughly 20 second clip.

Again, in the past, merely by controlling the image (zooming in, etc.) I was able to work around Face Refinement issues. Seems now it is getting worse.

I have a camera walking/talking shot that I have added stabilization to on the timeline so splitting the clip means I will need to either add stabilization last or try rendering the stabilization pass and then adding face refinement and then making ABOUT 15 SPLIT CLIPS to make it through the roughly 20 second clip.

If you just did the Face Refinement by hand, with hand-drawn windows and tracking those, you could do it in one clip. But it might require some roto. There's a lot of "it depends" here.

I have this weird issue with it too where it just doesn't work and wont tell me why. It will appear to track all the way through completely fine but simply will not generate a mask at the end. I tried a million different things The only thing that fixed it was messing around with other nodes until the clip was different enough for the error to stop occurring and then deleting the other nodes I added. I genuinely have no idea why I was having that issue. I do have a simple solution that helps with the skipped frames tho:

It's skipping single frames. Sometimes at the start of clip, sometimes middle.

just running a deflicker afterwards fixes like 95% of those single frame skips I encountered.

in my system (windows 11) face refinement crashes Davinci all the time... is there anything i can do ?

no message at all...just quitting Resolve , i tries everything (new timeline, new project etc) .

in my system (windows 11) face refinement crashes Davinci all the time... is there anything i can do ? no message at all...just quitting Resolve , i tries everything (new timeline, new project etc) .

If you're running into crashes, go to the Help Menu and select "Create Diagnostics Log on Desktop." Place that on a download site like Dropbox, and leave the link in a forum message (like this one). It also helps to provide info on

• specific Resolve version number
• your OS
• CPU
• GPU (and driver version)
• available RAM.

Generally, my theory is that Resolve crashes sometimes when the system just can't keep up with it. But not always. Face Refinement tracking is a resource-heavy process.

Thanks for these extra tips Mark. Appreciate it. Forwards or Backwards unfortunately isn't working for me as well as it used to in the past. Splitting the clip is certainly an option but provides a bit of complexity as well.

I have a camera walking/talking shot that I have added stabilization to on the timeline so splitting the clip means I will need to either add stabilization last or try rendering the stabilization pass and then adding face refinement and then making ABOUT 15 SPLIT CLIPS to make it through the roughly 20 second clip.

Again, in the past, merely by controlling the image (zooming in, etc.) I was able to work around Face Refinement issues. Seems now it is getting worse.

Try to compound clip after stabilization and later work with FR, sometimes not work well together


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