5 Biggest Concepts in Fusion - My BIG Beginner Tips for Compositing and GFX in DaVinci Resolve 17

[Music] oh hello my name is casey ferris i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube and today we're talking about my five biggest concepts for fusion so if you're getting into fusion these are like really important things to wrap your head around it will help everything be easier let's jump in these are in no particular order because they're all important concept number one each node in fusion essentially has one job i said this on a video a little while ago and got some pushback but i don't understand why because it is true media in one has pretty much one job import some media media out has pretty much one job put the media back in the timeline something like a blur node has one job blur stuff right a text node has one job make some text now you can do a lot of different things in each node but they're all sort of grouped together in doing that one main thing right so i can make text or i could make text with a stroke right but it's all kind of part of making text so really why this is helpful i think is because if you're trying to figure out how to do something in fusion i feel like sometimes we'll look around in one node and say okay i have this making text why can't i run this media in through my text and have it put the text over my footage it's because if you want to do something else major like put something over something else you need another node this makes the footage this makes the text a merge node which is this icon right here i can just click it once with my media in one selected this merge node has one job put something over something else and now we have our result so that's kind of the thing even though a node can sort of do multiple things for instance this text node you can add shading element 3 which is basically a drop shadow right or you can add a shadow node and get a similar result and that kind of stuff like which you choose is really up to you but for the most part if you want to do something else major you're going to need another node next big concept is that you can use one node for multiple things so for instance if i want to have multiple copies of this text i could ctrl c double click off control v and connect this and then you know move my text down right but then if i have to go back and change my text then i'd have to do that on both lines which might not be that big a deal for something like this but as things get more complicated that might be a little bit a little bit bigger a deal so remember you can always take a node and put it into multiple places and have two copies of the same node and then you can instantly update it because you only update one thing this is really nice if you're doing something like drawing a mask because then you can mask multiple things with one mask for instance i could make a mask around this rock and i could mask my text as well as my background in fact if i go to the settings tab of the inspector of whatever i have selected whatever i'm masking i can even invert this mask and do all kinds of fancy things here all with one mask that i don't have to remake or copy pretty neat next big concept is what a mask does what a mask actually does is limit what a node does a lot of the time we might think of a mask as something that changes the transparency of something so if i take like this circle mask and put it on my text we can see okay this makes it transparent outside of the mask and it only shows up inside of the mask right that seems to happen for something like text and that's kind of how it works if you mask a text node you're going to also get sort of the same result if you mask a merge node very similar things show up inside of the mask and don't show up outside of the mask but the reason that mask controls the transparency of either of those is what it's really doing is telling the node to do whatever it does just inside of the mask and these nodes happen to be make some text and you're saying okay make some text but just inside of the mask which comes out as it's clear outside of the mask and solid inside same thing for the merge put this text over this footage is what the merge is doing but just do it inside of the mask so you get sort of the same result but where i would get confused is if you have something like a blur node right and you mask the blur what i often thought when i was starting to learn fusion was that okay i'm going to make this text and i'm going to blur it and then i want all of that only to show up in this circle and what actually happens if we blur this is that it's only blurry inside of the circle so this mask isn't controlling the transparency anymore it's just controlling where the blur happens it's limiting what that one node does so what would happen is i'd string all these effects together and i'd wonder why i couldn't like cut it out because that's what i always wanted to do with the mask was just cut something out well the answer if you want to do something like that is grab the matte control node you could also do this in the merge but sometimes you don't want to do this in the merge maybe you'll want to mask multiple things before you merge them in different parts of the comp or something you can take this matte control node and if you select it and go up to the inspector there's a couple little options under combine hit combine alpha and then down here click on post multiply image and now what this will do if you take this ellipse mask and i plug this into the mac control under the green foreground triangle then we have it limiting to just inside of that mask which if we take this around that cuts everything out so that's a special way to use a mask but generally if you hook up a mask to a blue input it only limits what each node does another major concept that's really important to get your head around with fusion is that fusion will set the comp size by default based on your first node or your background node so this media in one this is setting the comp size so and you can see it up here 2048 by 864. and that's really important to know because sometimes that'll mess you up especially if you're doing something like drawing a mask on something and trying to use it for something else like if i were to take this picture which is a totally different size and aspect ratio and everything and merge this over our media in one i could totally do that i'll add a transform node here bring the size down then a mask that i put on this image is going to be a lot different than a mask that i put on this background image even if i scale this up right like this let's say i grab a mask and i start to draw this on my mountain here i do a really really great job look what happens when i try to actually connect it i take my mask and i connect it to my media in2 which is my mountain picture and look what happens it messes everything up it's so weird and the reason for that is because it's drawing this mask on a 2048 by 864 comp and then it's squeezing that comp to try and fit this 4000 by 6000 and it just doesn't work at all now watch what happens if we switch this around i disconnect our media in one grab our media n2 and let's just put this in our merge there we go and now if i try and draw my mask [Music] it works out great because my mask again is based on the sizing of our background of our very first node here so that worked out fine and the reason they do this i'm assuming is because you want to work on the highest quality footage anytime that you're compositing right so if i have something like this in my timeline and i have this zoomed in here and then i switch back over to fusion it wants to work on the highest quality footage it can so it opens up the original footage in its full resolution so that i can work with that and then it will apply the transform and everything for the edit page so this is really frustrating and kind of hard to work this way and at least for me chances are if i'm going to zoom this in on the edit i'm really only concerned with how this part looks at this resolution right so here's kind of the work around for that if i'm going to do something like this what i like to do is go into fusion and i'll make a background node and this background node over here in our settings under image i'm going to uncheck auto resolution right here and then set my width to 1920 height to 1080 and now i can use this background as the first node and look at this it sets the settings for the comp based on that background node and now anytime that i have something like this picture and i want to make a mask i can draw the mask i'm going to do a really great job this time i can draw the mask right here then when i connect it to something like my merge that will mask that perfectly and everything kind of works how you think it would now if you connect this to your media in one it'll still get messed up because it's applying that mask and kind of trying to stretch it to our original footage still you can put that in a merge and it will totally work out this is why pretty much any time that i start a new comp i start with the background node because if you make a new fusion composition like this it'll automatically set that background node to your comp settings 1920x1080 for me and now we kind of start with a clean slate and everything's going to work how we think it'll work and there's going to be no surprises last big concept changing a fusion comp that's happening in the timeline is different than changing the fusion comp that lives in the media pool for instance if i double click on this fusion comp from my media pool connect my background and let's put some text on it all right we got our big hello text on kind of a blue background okay we drag this into our timeline we have this blue background and it says hello let's say we want to change this oh i don't want this to say hello so i hit fusion right because i'm over the comp in the timeline switch to fusion go back here and say hello to go back to the edit all right great that is good and then later years later i want to be like oh yeah i need to use that hello to title again oh here it is right here grab it put it in here and look it just says hello again what is the deal with that well any time that you drag a fusion comp to your timeline or duplicate a comp in your timeline it makes a new copy of it and they're all independent from each other so this one can say lo3 and this one will say hello four and then this one still says hello so if you want to change something about this that you might want to reuse like oh i actually want all those backgrounds on purple you'll want to change it in the fusion comp right here we'll turn this purple and now none of these have turned purple but if i drag a new one it's purple so a lot of people say okay well what if i want to change the source footage and i like i want everything to change well a way around that is to drag this into the timeline right click and say new compound clip and we'll call this hello title like that and then we can reuse this as much as we want i'll just hold alt and drag this out right so these are all purple and then if we were to right click open this in timeline and then go into this fusion comp and turn this background red go back to our timeline one by clicking this little breadcrumb down here now we have all of our titles red because it's really reusing the same timeline comp right it's a little bit confusing i imagine they're going to make a way to like set this as a master comp or something in the future but that's the way that you do it right now and i don't know about you but most of the time if i'm going to make another copy of something like a title i usually want to change it without worrying about changing everything but there you go there's five major concepts inside of fusion if you guys like this make sure to let me know by hitting that like button and if you want more concepts well i have some here in the queue so let me know in the comments if that's what you want and i'll make that video speedy quick you know speedy quick real fast

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 26,480

Keywords: 5 Biggest Concepts in Fusion - My BIG Beginner Tips for Compositing and GFX in DaVinci Resolve 17, davinci resolve, davinci resolve 17 tutorial for beginners, Fusion, tips, concepts, how to, davinci resolve 17 fusion, blackmagic design, resolve 17, davinci resolve fusion, davinci resolve tutorial, how to use fusion, blackmagic fusion, fusion basics, fusion 17, fusion tutorial for beginners, fusion in resolve, resolve tutorial

Id: g_zNZ_XdJzQ

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021