Hi friends, I see this question has been asked a few years ago, and most results suggest a feature request… I’m on 2025.2. … any chance this has been updated and you can now, in some way that I’m not seeing, use a matte (not live gmask) as an analysis constraint for planar tracking? I’m thinking no… but worth asking. Thanks!
If you temporaritly mult them with your fill, the places not in the matte would blacked out and untrackable, no?
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Unfortunately it would then just track black objects instead of the info you want to exclude. Using them as a matte input also doesn’t work; when you F8 and snap to view the track ref, you still see the objects that need to be excluded.
Track the roto with a gmask and then use that as the exclusion?
I played with it some last night. There doesn’t seem any way still. Unfortunately the gmask link only works from a gmask, not a surface with alpha. Otherwise you could route that way. And the inclusive/exclusive options don’t help.
I guess retracking the matte may work depending on shape and details. I would use Mocha magnet tool and then export Mocha layer as gMask into Flame.
Of course at that point you could do the planar tracking in Mocha where exclusion may be more versatile.
Not strictly planar tracking, but the mono analyzer will take a matte and frequently works quite well for planar and object tracking, particularly when combined with motion vectors.
I do this all the time for motion vector tracking, but I’ve never done it for planar. I think it’d work. Here’s my node setup: Color Mgmt → Color Correct → Sharpen → Pixel Spread → Blur → Color Mgmt → Action/Gmask Input
Color Mgmt 01 - Convert to Log
Color Correct - Use the histogram/levels section of the node to crush the blacks and highlights to make it Rec709 Adjacent, but not blow out the highlights
Sharpen - Self explanatory. Just a pinch, like salt bae.
Pixel Spread - I plug the matte in here, and use expand/interpolate to create a nice soft edge on everything outside the matte.
Blur - Feed your roto in to a matte edge that crates an outline, then feed that into a blur node to soften the edges of your roto (so the tracker favors the details inside the matte)
Color Mgmt 02 - Tag the clip as unknown before feeding into action or Gmask.
I did an indie feature recently with a nasty face injury that needed to be tracked to a bunch of shots en masse and this really did the trick. I would guess it’d work with planar as well as motion vectors, but you’d have to try!