I totally understand that getting into too much detail on roto, tracking and such would be out of the scope of this course, but I wanted to ask if there is a more or less automated way to track masks in Blender?
I know 99% of the time we still have to tweak the keyframes of automatic tracks, but sure they help speed up the process.
That would be super helpful on all accounts: local color adjustments, lightwraps, rotos, so on.
You can take a mask created in movie clip editor and select the points on the mask and then shift+select the tracking square and press ctrl+P to have those points follow the tracking marker. I haven't worked with this much, but I once helped a friend figure out why some of the mask points where moving on their own. It turns out that you can have different mask points parented to different trackers. We wanted the hole mask to follow just one tracking point.
Yep, exactly what Dwayne said. You can absolutely parent an entire mask or individual mask point to trackers!