Using Planar Tracker on different resolutions

One of my favorite features of Fusion is its resolution independence. It makes it so easy for me to swap out high-resolution master footage for low-resolution proxy footage by swapping out Loader nodes.

The Planar Tracker, however, seems to rely on absolute pixels to do its transforms. If I track a 1080p proxy of a 6K image, I can't seem to use the resulting Planar Transform node on the original 6K image. A Polygon > Planar Transform > 6K image Effect Mask results in a mask that's entirely the wrong size.

Is there a way to make the Planar Tracker use relative coordinates? Or resize the result Planar Transform to use with the higher-resolution image? My 1080p tracks much, much faster and it would be great for my workflow to not have to constantly chug through the 6K image just to track.

For anyone who was also looking, the Planar Transform node is entirely reliant on the Frame Format setting in Fusion preferences.

When I switched over from my 6144x3240 source to my proxy 2048x1080 source, I needed to also change the Frame Format the 2048x1080 to make the Planar Transform update to the new size. Would love to know if there's a better way of doing this proxy workflow.

If anyone on the engineering team cares, this process was made much harder for me to figure out because the Polygon node is so consistently buggy. When I'm rotoscoping and jump between keyframes (ALT-[, ALT-]), the Polygon shape in the Display Area almost never "lands" in its actual spot. It's usually 50 or so pixels off from where I set the keyframe. If I manually advance one frame forward, and then one frame back to the keyframe, it returns to the correct spot.

I don't really know what to do about reporting bugs with Blackmagic anymore, it kind of just feels like shouting into the void. I'd also love some guidance on how to report problems to the right people.

Here to answer my own question again!

You can assign a proxy file in the Loader Node by using Proxy Filename.

I did find this on page 874 of the manual, I suppose that if I had read it page by page I might have found it eventually. Is there a good reason that the manual is not online, where it can be indexed by search engines? Google is far more powerful that Control-F on my keyboard. I looked around for "proxy workflow in fusion" for awhile before I accidentally stumbled on this.

Since this answer may eventually turn up on Google for some luckier Fusioner than I, note that file pointed to by Proxy Filename must have exact same aspect ratio, file format, frame rate, and have the same naming convention as the source image in the Loader Node. For example, my source image sequence starts at A002_C007_0101W6000.dpx and goes to A002_C007_0101W6205.dpx. Every image file in the proxy DPX sequence must be numbered exactly the same from 6000 to 6205.

If you make an error in any of these proxy requirements (for me it was the file numbering), the proxy footage will simply and silently not play with no warning or error, because this is Blackmagic Fusion.

Forgive the snarkiness, but implicit behavior like this costs hundreds of users many, many hours of work. This is a mature product and I just want to challenge the engineering team to do better.

Hey,

While I'm a heavy Mocha Pro user anyway (and then won't discuss the tracking in Fusion [good but stuping UI for me]) , I think you may try this in the Fusion tab of Resolve...
Basically to use the Resolve Workflow for proxies, like optimized media or your own made proxies if you prefer. While the rest of the job should be the same (I don't really know, I'm on Fu9 studio standalone), you may get rid of the proxies pain...

Thanks for your input, Sam. I'm also on Fusion Studio, the workflow I posted above with the Proxy Filename has been working quite well for me.