DaVinci Resolve: Track with points outside of a window

Question

I am completely new both to video editing and DaVinci Resolve 14.

I would like to apply stabilization to a clip which has a constantly moving and changing object in the middle. Therefore I only want to track points which are outside of a certain region in the middle of the screen. Is it possible to mark the middle region by drawing a power window and then track everything that is outside of it?

So far I have been trying to manually draw an "inverse window" which selects mostly everything except the middle. Is this the right way to go about it?

Answer 1

The button to invert the power window is next to the tool that you used to create the selection. You're using the pen tool in this case, but the same is true for ellipses, rectangles, gradients, etc. Immediately to the right of the tool is an icon of a square outline around a solid circle. That's the invert selection button. If you click it before you start your tracking, the tracker will follow everything outside of the shape you drew instead of everything inside the shape.

It's often helpful to toggle "highlight mode" so that you know what's currently selected. Shift+H is the shortcut for that. Everything that's grey with highlight mode on is not part of the current selection. The tracker will follow everything that IS selected, i.e., everything that you see (that isn't grey) when highlight mode is on.

As you become more proficient with power windows, qualifiers, and trackers in Resolve, you'll want to learn how to combine multiple shapes, combine shapes other qualifiers, or combine any/all of the above with alpha channels from external files. The "invert" power window button is a small part of a larger toolset. There's more to explore under the "Key" tab, which will let you control how one node passes a mask or matte to another node. There's also the "Key mixer" node, which allows boolean operations. To access the Key mixer, right-click in the background of the node editor, and select it from the "Add node" submenu.

Answer 2

The tracker is designed to track whatever you put inside the tracker's window. It doesn't matter whether you want to track something in the middle of your frame or on the edge. All that matters to the tracker is that it can "see" enough detail of whatever it's being told to track that it can lock on it in the various dimensions it can track: pan, tilt, rotate, zoom, and 3d perspective.

Your background looks really tricky to track because it's very low contrast (relatively speaking). You could dramatically boost the contrast of your background, for the purpose of building a good track, then use that tracker data on the non-contrast-enhanced image. Just use a square or a circle over a small but distinct area you want to track and it should be good.

BTW, now you know why people who need to do VFX use Tracking Markers