DaVinci Resolve Magic Mask: Resolve 21 Guide

Magic Mask 2 is a Studio-only tool. To isolate a person or an object in DaVinci Resolve 21, park on a clear frame, give the mask its own Color node, put one positive click inside the subject, track forward and backward, and then inspect the complete black-and-white matte.

At the first failure, go back to the last good frame and drag the tracked click onto a better feature before you add any more guidance. Add or subtract a click only when the mask needs different guidance, and keep Paint for a few frame-local repairs, because Paint doesn't track.

Hitting the tracking button doesn't finish the job. A Magic Mask that looks convincing on one paused frame can leak into the background, drop a hand behind an occlusion or shimmer around hair the moment the shot plays.

Resolve 21 adds a handy last step: you can render the finished mask in place as an external matte, so a track you've already verified stops being recalculated every time the project changes.

Use Magic Mask Only When the Outline Justifies It

For a circular face blur or a rectangular screen, a tracked window usually does the job better. I'd save Magic Mask for edges that keep changing shape, where a simple window would scoop up too much background and the extra processing earns its place.

If the real job is anonymizing someone, the face and background blur workflow is the page you want. It covers tracking, Mosaic Blur and privacy checks.

Magic Mask 2 is Studio-only, which both Blackmagic’s Resolve Studio feature page and the final Resolve 21 Reference Manual confirm. Version 2 dropped the separate Person/Object modes and swapped the old selection strokes for Add/Subtract clicks; Paint stays as a frame-local repair tool. Resolve Free still gives you Power Windows, qualifiers, conventional tracking and Fusion masks.

Resolve 20 uses the same Magic Mask 2 palette, and its options menu still has Legacy Object Mask for the original version. Resolve 21 keeps that command for older projects. Start new work on version 2: Blackmagic says it gives dramatically better results when objects pass in front of the subject.

Prepare the Shot Before the First Click

Lock the edit, speed and source before final approval. A trim or retime changes the analyzed range or which source frames land where, so inspect the affected range afterward and retrack only if the matte no longer follows.

Replacing the source calls for the same full-range check. Don't assume the mask broke, and don't assume it survived.

Give the isolation its own serial node and call it Magic Mask or Subject Matte. With a dedicated node, three later questions answer themselves: is the mask on, which correction does it control, and which node has to be rendered or rebuilt?

Pick a reference frame where the subject is visible, reasonably sharp and clear of anything with a similar color or texture.

The middle of the shot often works better than the first frame, because more of the subject may be visible there. Don't start on a frame smeared by motion blur just because the playhead happens to be parked on it.

Track a Person or Object in Magic Mask

1. Open the clip on the Color page and add a separate serial node.
2. Open the Magic Mask 2 palette. There's no Person/Object switch to hunt for anymore; version 2 works out the subject from the clicks you place.
3. Park on the strongest reference frame and put one positive add click on a distinctive part of the subject.
4. Look at the first overlay. If it has grabbed a background object, put one subtract click on that object. There's no need to click all around the background.
5. Use the Click List to find or delete a prompt before you add another click blindly.
6. Track forward to the end of the clip and backward to the beginning. Track Forward and Reverse does both in one pass.
7. Switch to the black-and-white mask view and scrub the whole analyzed range.
8. Stop at the first failed frame, step back to the last good one and drag the tracked click onto a better feature first. Add or subtract guidance only when the matte needs a different instruction, and save Paint for a few frame-local repairs. Then track outward from the corrected frame.
9. Refine the edge and render or cache the result only once the track is stable.

More clicks won't buy you more precision. Several prompts on the same subject can describe conflicting regions and make later diagnosis harder. I'd start with one well-placed add click on a distinctive area, then add a subtract click or another local prompt only where the matte shows it needs one.

Repair the First Bad Frame, Not the Last Obvious One

When a matte drifts, the obvious disaster often shows up several frames after the model first lost the edge. Scrub backward to the first frame where a hand thins out, a sleeve disappears or background texture creeps into the subject. Fix it there, then track forward again.

At an occlusion, back up to the last frame where the tracked click still sits on a useful feature and drag that click to a better spot before tracking again. Track One Frame Forward helps through the hardest motion, since you can nudge the click a frame at a time.

Once the subject reappears, reposition the tracked click again if it needs it. Add or subtract another click only when the mask needs different semantic guidance, and keep Paint for a few stubborn frames because Paint doesn't track.

If the subject keeps crossing foreground objects, combine tools. Let Magic Mask describe the subject and use an extra Power Window or Key Mixer logic to cut the occluder out. For hand-built isolation with more control, the Fusion rotoscoping guide covers multiple shapes, keyframe spacing and occlusion layers.

Refine the Matte in the Right Order

Finish tracking before you touch the matte-finesse controls. Clean Black can clear small background specks and Clean White can fill small holes, but push either one hard and semi-transparent hair, motion blur and fabric edges start to erode or bloat. Blur Radius can soften a hard edge. It can't bring back an arm the track lost.

Quality gives you two choices, Faster and Better. Faster builds a lower-quality mask quickly and is fine for garbage-matte work. Better keeps more detail and costs more processing.

In Better mode, Smart Refine grows or shrinks the generated mask from its image analysis without adding softness, before you reach the matte-finesse pass. Consistency adds temporal smoothing to calm edge jitter, and it only works once a click has been tracked across several frames. It starts at 0, so raise it cautiously and watch for edge lag or lost detail.

My order looks like this:

1. At the last good frame, move the tracked click to a better feature and retrack. Reach for add or subtract clicks only when the mask needs different guidance, and use a small Paint correction only for a few frame-local misses.
2. Use Clean Black for isolated contamination outside the subject.
3. Use Clean White for small holes inside a stable matte.
4. Reach for In/Out Ratio when fringing remains: raising it fills small black holes, and lowering it below 0 pushes stray white specks toward black.
5. Add the smallest Blur Radius that blends the correction at delivery resolution. Push it too far and a halo appears around the subject.

Check the finished correction as well as the matte. A silhouette can be technically clean and still look cut out when exposure, saturation or sharpness jumps too abruptly at the boundary.

Grade the Subject and Background Separately

Use the Magic Mask node for the subject correction, then add an outside node or an inverted key for the background. Keeping the corrections apart lets you soften the background, pull its saturation down or guide attention with exposure while the subject node stays untouched.

I wouldn't stack a hard subject grade, noise reduction and a heavy background effect before the mask has proved itself. Bypass the corrections and inspect the matte first.

Once the isolation holds, add the creative work one node at a time. If the node structure is new to you, the Resolve nodes guide explains serial, parallel and outside-node decisions.

Remove or Replace the Background with Magic Mask

Magic Mask can cut the subject out of its background entirely. The mask only selects; the transparency comes from the Color page's Alpha Output, which lets a clip composite against clips on lower video tracks. Put the new background on V1 and the subject clip on V2 above it.

1. Build and track the mask on its own node until the black-and-white matte holds across the whole shot.
2. Right-click the gray area of the Node Editor and choose Add Alpha Output. It appears under the Node Tree output on the right.
3. Connect the Magic Mask node's key output to the Alpha Output.
4. Check the Viewer. If the subject turned transparent and the background stayed, click Invert Mask in the Magic Mask toolbar.
5. Add a node after the mask node, keep it selected, right-click the background clip in the Color page thumbnails and choose Shot Match to This Clip to pull the subject's color toward the new background.

The composite plays on the Edit page as well as the Color page, so you can trim and move the background clip like any other. To deliver the cut-out subject to another app, the transparent video export guide covers the formats that keep an alpha channel.

A green or blue screen changes the choice. I'd pull a key there before reaching for Magic Mask, because a key reads the screen color on every frame and has no track to lose. The 3D Keyer guide covers the Color page route and the Delta Keyer guide covers Fusion, and both keyers come with Resolve Free.

Render Magic Mask in Place in Resolve 21

Resolve 21 can render Magic Mask 2 as an external matte. In the Magic Mask palette, open the three-dot options menu, choose Render in Place Magic Mask and pick a location for the cached matte frames. Resolve then creates a separate external matte node that can feed later corrections or effects.

Both the final Resolve 21 Reference Manual and the 21.1 manual document the exact three-dot-menu command: Render in Place Magic Mask.

The rendered frames become an external alpha source for downstream nodes and hold the approved result until the source, timing, matte, render location or the rendered frames themselves need updating. The Resolve 21 AI tools guide gives the wider Neural Engine picture; this page stays with the shot-level workflow.

Render only after you've checked the complete matte. A rendered error is still an error.

Keep the original Magic Mask setup until approval, choose the render location on purpose, and include the external matte frames in the project handoff or archive. A DRP alone doesn't carry source media or arbitrary external files, so check the receiving system. Transient cache and matte media won't travel just because you hoped they would.

When a grade goes to Fusion Studio as an exported DRX still, the mask stays behind: Magic Mask is on the manual's list of attributes that don't transfer through the DaVinci Resolve OFX Renderer Plugin. Render the mask in place first and send the matte frames along with the DRX.

Use Magic Mask on the Fusion Page

The Fusion page has its own Magic Mask node, and it runs the same version 2 as the Color page with a few Fusion-specific controls. Its output goes into any mask input, for example the effect mask of a Color Corrector.

Load the node in a viewer on a frame where the subject is completely in view and unobstructed, then click the subject for a blue positive point. One point is usually enough. Option-click and drag, or set Point Mode to Subtract in the Inspector, to place a red negative point on something you want out of the mask.

Choose that frame with care. Reference Time marks where the first points are drawn and where tracking starts, and it can't be changed later without destroying the existing tracking. From there, Track Forward Then Reverse in the Tracking tab runs to the end of the clip and then back to its start in one pass.

Refine on the Matte tab with the viewer showing the Alpha channel. Erode/Dilate shrinks or grows the matte, Blur softens its edge, and Restore Fringe brings back hair the matte clipped. For an older comp built on version 1, tick Use Legacy Magic Mask at the bottom of the Inspector.

Keep Magic Mask from Taking Over the GPU

Magic Mask, temporal noise reduction, Depth Map and heavy Fusion work all compete for GPU memory and processing time. Track the mask before you add the most expensive downstream nodes. Drop to a lower working timeline resolution if you have to, but inspect the final matte at full resolution before approval.

If playback slows after a good track, render the mask in place or cache that specific result. Clearing unrelated cache over and over won't help. When Resolve reports a capacity error, which is a different problem from ordinary slow playback, follow the GPU memory troubleshooting sequence to isolate the failing node or clip.

How Fast Magic Mask 2 Tracks in Published Tests

Published results put Magic Mask 2 tracking at about 30 fps on fast NVIDIA cards, with little gained above an RTX 5070 Ti. In PugetBench’s public results database, the RTX 5090 averaged 32.2 fps in the Faster tracking test against 29.0 fps for the RTX 5070 Ti, while the RX 9070 XT averaged 12.7 fps and the 40-core M4 Max 6.9 fps. Better mode ran a median 9.7% slower than Faster on the same card. In postPerspective’s HP Z4 G6i workstation review, Magic Mask 2 reached 28 fps on ARRI RAW and Sony clips but only about 7 fps on a RED clip, and its ZBook X G1i and ZBook Fury G1i laptop reviews landed at 7 to 10 and 15 to 21 fps.

Method: the database figures are averages of user uploads in PugetBench’s group for Resolve 20.0 to 21.1 and PugetBench 2.0 to 2.1, on mixed systems, and only cards with at least 10 uploads in a mode are listed. According to Puget’s benchmark notes, the tracking tests run through Resolve’s scripting API and report the frame rate the API returns. Puget doesn’t publish the test clip’s resolution, so compare cards with each other rather than with your own timeline. Each Better-to-Faster gap comes from one card’s figures on the same database page. postPerspective doesn’t say which quality mode it used, ran Resolve 20.1.1 or 20.2.2 on the laptops and the Resolve 21.0 beta on the workstation, and doesn’t explain the RED result on its fastest machine, so its numbers stay per machine and aren’t pooled with the database. NVIDIA’s own Magic Mask timings aren’t included.

My verdict: if Magic Mask is the reason for a Windows GPU upgrade, I’d stop at an RTX 5070 Ti-class card. The RTX 5090 tracked only 11% faster in the database averages, while dropping to an RTX 5060 Ti cost 36% of the 5070 Ti’s speed. Better cost a median 9.7% against Faster, small enough to use it for every matte that ends up on screen and keep Faster for rough garbage mattes. On an M4 Max, tracking averaged under a quarter of the 5070 Ti’s rate, and the RED clip on postPerspective’s fastest machine still tracked at about 7 fps, so render the approved mask in place instead of letting Resolve track it again.

Common Magic Mask Failures

The mask selects part of the background

Strip out the prompts you don't need. Start again with one add click on a distinctive part of the subject, then put one subtract click on the specific background object that's leaking into the matte.

A hand or leg disappears

Go back to the last good frame and first move the tracked click onto a feature that stays identifiable. Retrack and inspect. Add a local positive click only if the matte still lacks subject guidance, and use Paint for a handful of frame-specific patches. Clean White can't reliably rebuild a large missing limb.

Hair flickers during playback

Inspect at full resolution, back off aggressive cleanup and add only a touch of edge blur. Once the clicks are tracked across the shot, a small Consistency value can calm jitter in frizzy hair. If hair crosses a background of similar color, expect some frames to need new guidance or a manual helper mask.

The track is lost after trimming or retiming

A trim or retime can change the analyzed range or which source frames sit at each timeline position. Inspect the complete affected range first and retrack if the matte no longer follows. Set timing before final approval, then render or cache the verified result and check again after any later editorial change.

Resolve keeps recalculating the mask

First work out what changed: source media, clip timing, upstream processing, matte guidance or the rendered frames. After approval, Render in Place Magic Mask gives downstream work an external matte to read, so the live AI track isn't evaluated over and over. Update that rendered matte whenever an upstream dependency changes.

Review the Matte Like an Editor, Not a Screenshot

Play the shot at normal speed, then pause on the fastest movement, the heaviest motion blur and every occlusion. Check the black-and-white matte and the finished correction. Look for pulsing edges, background color shifts, holes inside the subject and single-frame flashes at the start or end.

A strong Magic Mask uses as few clicks as the target needs, holds up across the whole shot and comes with a clear handoff plan. An impressive overlay on the reference frame proves very little. What you're after is a correction nobody notices during playback.

The DaVinci Resolve color-grading hub shows where this mask sits in the node workflow. When repairs start costing more than they're worth, I'd switch to deterministic manual isolation with the Fusion rotoscoping workflow. Edition-dependent tools are compared in the Resolve Free versus Studio breakdown.

DaVinci Resolve Magic Mask FAQ

Is Magic Mask available in DaVinci Resolve Free?

No. Magic Mask is a DaVinci Resolve Studio feature. In Free you can still isolate subjects with Power Windows, qualifiers, Fusion masks and conventional trackers.

Does Magic Mask 2 still have Person and Object modes?

No. Magic Mask 2 dropped the separate Person and Object modes. Put an add click inside the person, feature or object you need, and use a subtract click or a Paint repair only where the generated matte needs correcting.

Why does Magic Mask lose the subject?

Go back to the last good frame and first move the tracked click onto a better feature. Add or subtract a click only when the mask needs different guidance, and keep Paint for a few frame-local repairs.

Can I grade inside and outside the same Magic Mask?

Yes. Use the matte for the subject node and an outside node or inverted key for the background. With separate nodes, both corrections stay easy to bypass and tune.

Does Magic Mask work on a retimed clip?

It can. Retiming changes which source frames appear when, so inspect the complete affected range and retrack if the matte no longer follows. Set the speed before final approval, then render or cache the verified result.

What changed for Magic Mask in DaVinci Resolve 21?

Resolve 21 adds Render in Place Magic Mask. It writes cached matte frames and creates an external matte node you can reuse once the track has been verified.

Jason Miller I run DaVinci Resolve Club, an independent publication. My guides explain editing, color, Fairlight, Fusion and delivery, with clear Free vs Studio limits.