Don’t forget that you can attach a Blur Matchbox shader to the camera in Gmask Tracer for a quicker soften upper
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To me, the legacy gmask node is 1000x exactly that, a legacy node. If I pick up a batch and it has a gmask node instead of a tracer I audibly groan (the only groan I groan far more audibly is the modular keyer hiding in an action, my god, let’s just move on from that).
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Ha ha. This thread has gotten off piste but I love it.
I totally agree with you on ModularKeyer within action. I don’t see it offering anything unique it is just legacy. It hides another batch within an action 
This probably needs to live in the Redundant nodes thread but as I said there I don’t want to kill anything off but if you are working with me and we are sharing setups I don’t want to find some hidden grenade inside action.
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I do kick ass shit with MK in Action. What would be the alternative?
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Depends what you are doing? Seems like it is a mini batch but with some of the nodes missing 
I cannot abide using gmask tracer to draw complicated shapes. I compare it to drawing on the iPad with your finger. It’s fine for broad strokes but when you try to get into the details, there’s this big massive finger in the way. What I mean by this is that I cannot anticipate how a curve will be drawn. I’m sure some will say it’s practise. I say that I use vector drawing programs and tracer just does not feel intuitive to me. Anyhoo, I use both. Neither are perfect for every situation and I’m glad I have a choice.
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I had a good use case for the old gmask the other day. I had to clean up some watch dials that had small imperfections. The elements had strong right angles making cleanup a bit tricky. I used the old gmask with spline blur to fix them up really cleanly.
I can’t post the job, but have done a quick example with another similar image:
The setup
The problem
The gmask setup
Fixed
This is just a quick and rough demo, was much more precise with the actual job, but you can see how useful the hard cornering of the old gmask can be.
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I can tell you of another special use case. High res files.
Some MASSIVE print resolutions won’t work in action/gmask tracer. You need to work with old gmask and comp nodes 
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100% G-mask tracer. I use too many of the advanced features. I’ll never go back.
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This is absolutely true and baffling! I would have expected the old gmask not to be able to work with high resolutions!
Turn the gmask “smoothing” down from 50% to 0%. I don’t understand why 50% is the default, because it makes the edges look like crap. Also goto the flame preferences Action tab and change the default to 0% in the upper left corner so you don’t have to worry about it again. 
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WOW!! Smoothing down from 50% to 0%
Who knew
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