How can I render magic mask in timeline without losing it?

Hi everyone!

I've had Davinci for about 2 weeks and I'm loving it.

I just started using fusion because I wanted to clone myself, so I used the Magic Mask. It works well, however when I go back to the editing timeline, it gets really laggy and I can't see if I have to do some adjustments to the mask.

I tried to Render in Place, but then the transparent background disappears: I end up with my mask and a black background (which is useless). Tried to put it into a compound clip and then render but didn't work either.

I also tried quarter proxy, didn't help either.

I'm running Davinci on M1 Max 32GB RAM so I doubt that it is because of my processor.

I just need help with the rendering of the magic mask, so I can see how it looks and where to do the adjustment.

Anyone to help? Would appreciate it so much because I'm going crazy about this!

Maybe you could cache the magic mask node in Fusion to speed things up? There are many posts on this forum describing approaches to this workflow. For example, some advocate that you use a SAVER node in Fusion to save out the magic mask node results and then bring them back in as an image sequence with alpha. Some workflows are a bit complex for someone just starting out. I'm sure there's a YouTube video illustrating various techniques and if not, there should be since this topic comes up quite often. Cheers.

Btw - the 'Render-in-Place' issue with alpha turning black is probably because you didn't select a render codec that supports alpha such as ProRes 4444 or DNxHR 444, etc.

Here was a past discussion on how to permanently render the Magic Mask matte, export it as an actual matte, then bring it back in as an External Matte and attach it to the shot. That way, it never has to be re-rendered or re-tracked.

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=200472

Seconded, that's how we do it all the time.