Basic Fusion Tutorial for Beginners - Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Training

[Music] hey everybody my name is Kasey Ferris I make videos on DaVinci Resolve here on YouTube make sure to subscribe for more of that today we're gonna look at the fusion page of DaVinci Resolve and take you through all of the very basics so that at the end of this video you should know what fusion is and basically how to use it we're gonna keep things simple but we are going to move pretty quick by the way if you like my style of teaching I actually have a master class on DaVinci Resolve you can click that right here there's also a link in the description first a little note on how fusion kind of talks to the other parts of resolve Fusion is a page because resolve is broken up into pages these are just different parts of the program they're like different specialties so we have the edit page we have the color correction page we have Fairlight for audio and fusion is all about basically all the fancy stuff it's about visual effects it's about compositing about titles think of everything that you would normally use After Effects for that's pretty much what happens in fusion the advantage of it is that it's integrated with the timeline of results so if you want to do something fancy to one of your shots in your timeline you don't have to round-trip to another program all you have to do is just be over it in the timeline and click on the fusion page and it will open up the clip in Fusion and then once you do stuff to an infusion all you have to do is switch back to the Edit Page and your changes will be there in your timeline the other way that you can kind of work with things in Fusion is if you go up to the media pool in the upper left hand corner you can right-click anywhere in the media pool and select new fusion composition and that just creates a blank composition for Fusion and I'll hit create and then if you double click on that it'll open up that composition here in the fusion page and you can make something from scratch so you can either open stuff from the timeline or you can make it from scratch we're going to be doing both of those so what kind of things does fusion do your imagination is basically the limit but the three categories I like to think about our graphics like creating text and all kinds of fancy little pop-up things visual effects which are things like you know smoke and fire and explosions and lightsabers and all of that kind of stuff and then compositing which is kind of similar but it's more about combining different things together to make a changed image that's stuff like sky replacements screen replacements upset extensions things like that so let's start with something really basic I'm just over one of the shots here in my edit page and I'm gonna go and click on the fusion button right there now this switches everything over to our fusion interface let's talk about that for a second you're also might look like this there's a couple different parts up here we have the buttons that open up our panels like the media pool the effects library stuff like that we have similar things over here in the upper right hand corner which we will get into in a minute basically this is how you open menus and panels and stuff and that's common throughout resolve actually below that we have our viewers these look like the source and timeline viewers from the Edit Page which you know we have one on the left one on the right but they don't quite act the same way this viewer on the left in the Edit Page is all about looking at your source footage right it's like previewing stuff before you put it into the timeline this right-hand viewer is all about what's happening in the timeline what the person who watches your movie will actually see in the fusion page it doesn't really work like that these are just two different copies of the same kind of viewer you can really view any part of your composition in either the right-hand viewer or the left-hand viewer and we'll get into that in a second another important part is this inspector this is pretty much where you adjust all the properties to anything that you have selected and again this is something that's true throughout resolve but if you have something selected that you want to adjust you're going to adjust it in the inspector below the viewers we have our toolbar and these are just the most common tools that you would use inside of Fusion these are the exact same thing as going to the effects library and twirling things down here you just have a lot more options here again we'll get into that in a second but these are tools that are available to you and they're just a little bit more convenient now let's talk about the node graph this is the part that's a little bit intimidating for some people when you talk about doing something in Photoshop or After Effects or you know a lot of different programs and you want to let's say put some text over a background you'd think about having your background layer and then having a text layer on top of it the thing is that fusion doesn't really use layers it uses nodes and the difference is rather than stacking up a bunch of layers you're kind of building instructions for fusion to build whatever you like so this node graph here is just a play where all the nodes live and each little box here is called a node and each node is an instruction telling fusion to do something right now by default when you open a clip from the timeline you have two instructions there the first one is media in media in is just hey grab a clip from the timeline this is some kind of media grab it and work with it and then this is connected with this little arrow all the way to media out media out is okay now render it alright so we have a really simple instruction here grab a piece of media and render it and we're not really doing anything to it we're kind of just picking it up and setting it down now because we're building instructions here we have to tell Fusion to actually do something with it the easiest way to probably think about this is with a blur so I'm gonna go up to the toolbar here and there's a little drop here I'll grab that and just drag that into the node graph and that makes a blur node and now that we have this node will notice in the viewer nothing's really happening that's because we haven't connected this node everything has to be connected in order for it to actually matter it can't just be down here in the window so how do we connect this in any time you have a connection here if you hover near the end of the arrow it turns blue click on that and that will get rid of the connection then you can grab this little gray square which is the output of the node and you can drag that and connect it to other things if you just drop it on a node it will just decide what you probably want to connect it to which is usually right but if you mouse over these little input arrows it will tell you what it is this is just what you're going to blur blur one input there's also a little blue arrows these are masks which we'll get into in a little bit anyway so we've connected this now we're gonna take the output of our blur and connect it to our media out and now in our viewer we see something happening but it's not very blurry and the reason for that is because if I select our blur node and go over to our inspector you'll see our blur size is only one so let's grab that and pump it up a little bit and now we can see that really getting blurry so now we have a pretty simple instruction grab a piece of media blur it and render it so if that was all that we were going to do infusion for some reason we could just go to the Edit Page and look at it in our timeline and here we have it in our timeline all blurry so if that concept makes sense the rest of this isn't going to be too hard it's really just building on that concept the you can take something from the timeline open it up infusion and link together some instructions and whatever is connected to the media out node will be rendered to the timeline so this is great let's say that we want to put some text over it remember we don't have layers so how the heck does that work well first let's make some text I'll go up to our toolbar and I'll grab this T this is a text plus node and I'll just grab that drag it down into our node graph and I can decide to connect this however I want and where I connect this is going to matter a whole lot because things kind of flow in order they flow along these arrows so what I really want to happen is to put some text over this blurry background but how the heck do you do that without layers like I can't drop it on here or anything there's no layers panel to figure out where things go we just have to tell Fusion what to do with this text layer because right now it's just made a blank text layer the instruction we're gonna use to tell it to actually do something is called a merge node up here in our toolbar next to this second separator there's a tool called merge and grab that and drag that down as well and now we can link that up and tell fusion what to do with this text node this is going to seem really complicated but I promise it gets simpler I'm going to undo our blur one node and connect it to our merge one and connect the output of merge one to our media out and you'll notice we have two inputs on this merge this yellow one is the background the green one is the foreground so I'll grab the output of our text and connect that to the foreground and now we're gonna have our text merged over our blurry background but hey nothing's happening that's because we haven't actually typed any text in our text node so if we go over here to the inspector I can type some text and now we see the text is over our Lurie background and we can adjust all of the properties of our text here in the inspector maybe I'll make it a little bigger change the font and you can go crazy like you normally would with a text title you can adjust its layout its color all kinds of stuff but for now we'll leave it like that and this is what our composite looks like again if I were to go to the Edit Page we'll see that's there in our timeline so this is cool but not really something that you would need to use fusion for right you could totally blur a clip here and then put just a basic title over it and get a really similar result right but where Fusion comes in is when you want to do something a little bit fancier when you want to animate or mask things or have them you know pop onto screen so let's do a little bit of that I'll click back into the fusion page now let's do something fun let's put a little box behind this I always think that looks classy so there are a bunch of different ways to do that but this time I'm just gonna add a background node behind this text in my tools here the far left one is called a background node I'll grab that and just drag that in now I'll select my nodes and kind of move them over here and what I'm gonna do is put my background after my blur because really I want my blurry video to be behind this background and then the background to be behind the text and it's not really important where the nodes are you can have them go right to left if you want to it's all about how they're connected right but this just makes a ton of sense to me to have our nodes sort of flow from left to right and that's what we'll do so now to put our background over our blurry video we would have to make a merge node but a faster way to do that is just to grab the output of our background and I'm just gonna drag that over the output square of our blur one just like this and that will automatically make a merge node and merge our background over our blurry video that's a huge time-saving thing you don't have to make another node and then connect everything every time it's really just about as simple as it would be to drag a layer on top of another layer you just do that right so now we have our background over our blurry video but we don't even see the blurry video it's just black that's because we have a black background that's full screen and it's full opacity so we can do a few things with that we could go over to our inspector with our background node selected and we can change the color if this background is completely black we can take this alpha and turn that down so we can see that video behind it but what I'm gonna do is mask this and what that means is just drawing a shape that's going to control pretty much where this node shows up here in our toolbar we have a few different shapes here I'm gonna use this rectangle mask and I could just grab this and drag it in and then connect it like this drag it over to our background node which I'm going to mask take the output and drag it onto our background and that will add a mask but a little shortcut if you have a node selected and you want I'm asked to it just have it selected and go and click this button and that will do the same thing so now we have this rectangle mask masking our black background and again with the node selected I can go up to the inspector and adjust all kinds of things about the mask how wide it is height width corner radius all of that stuff anything that you want to change about the mask happens in the inspector with the mask selected I can soften it sky's the limit for some tools you'll even have a little widget that pops up here on the viewer and you can move things around that way so what I'm gonna do is just set my width and my height to be just a little bit bigger than our text keep it classy like that and now we have our neat little graphic here and the cool thing about using nodes is we can see exactly what's happening down here in our graph I'm grabbing some media blurring it and putting a background with a mask over it and then putting text over that and then rendering it so right now we're still kind of at a point of you know you probably could build this in the Edit Page now let's do something that you would definitely want to do in fusion and that is making some animation here so let's say we want this to animate on kind of out of nowhere and just kind of go Shoop and we'll do that by keyframing this rectangle mask so I'll select it here and over in our inspector to the right of all of our controls there's a little diamond here this controls your keyframes so if you click this diamond at any point in time that will set this value to be that value at that time which is called a keyframe so what we're gonna do is animate this on and after about probably a second I want this to look exactly like this so I'm gonna move my playhead over to 30 frames which depending on your frame rate might be around one second and I'll go over to the inspector and here where it says width I'm gonna click on that keyframe diamond that's gonna set at 30 frames this to be point four to five now let's move this playhead all the way to zero and now I'm gonna change this value I don't have to click the keyframe diamond again I'm gonna take this width and push it all the way down so now if I click out of the inspector and then press spacebar we can see that animating in pretty nifty but let's say we don't really like the way this animates it kind of jerks to a stop a little bit too fast it's just not very smooth right maybe we want to adjust that that kind of adjustment happens in the spline panel in the upper right hand corner click on spline and down here in the lower right-hand part of the screen it opens up this little graph this is just a graph of the animation in your project so whatever you have selected right here it'll show you a graph by default it doesn't really make any sense you have to click this button right here zoom to fit and now we have a little graph of our stuff so this is how this value changes over time and what we want to do is not have this jerk to a stop right here we want it to ease in so if I select this keyframe I can grab a little handle here and move it around and adjust the way that this animates I can also just hit F on the keyboard to flatten that out which is actually what we want when something comes to a stop it kind of comes to a nice curve right here so let's take a look at our animation now I'll back up and now it just kind of eases to a stop that's nice so you control stuff like that in the spline panel when you're done you can just close it so this is really cool but at this point we could probably do everything that we've done with layers in a different app but let me show you something really cool about nodes a node doesn't really have to be at a specific place in the graph where is a layer has a certain place in the layer stack the nodes can really do anything and they can actually do multiple things so I can actually take this mask and I can mask not only my background but I can also mask the text I can just grab this output again and connect it to the text also and so I'm masking two different nodes with the same mask which remember is animated and now if we take a look at our animation here it actually masks both the text and the background so you can get some really fancy things going on and control it all just with a single mask pretty cool so here's our basic graphic let's say we like that I'll just go back to the Edit Page and here's the graphic in the edit page so that's how you build things for the most part everything is built with nodes and you can really just think through logically if you are going to ask a program to do something for you how would you ask it and then you just build the instructions in the nodes so let's switch to another shot which I could go back to the Edit Page and do it that way I'll just go back to the edit page and this time let's talk about a visual effect we've been doing graphics but visual effects are really fun that's stuff like fire smoke explosions things like that we're not gonna get quite that crazy but it's gonna be the same kind of workflow I'm over just the still of a coffee cup and I'll click on fusion just like before we have simple instructions open this still and render it to the timeline let's say we want to add some steam coming off of this coffee cup because really this is just a still and maybe we want it to look more like video right like there's some nice little steam coming off yeah well there's about a million ways that you can do this an easy way to do something like steam or fog or smoke inside of fusion is to use a node called fast noise so I'll go to our tools to the left-hand side and the second icon is called fast noise I'll grab it and drag it down into the node graph and I'll take the output and drag it over the output of our media in that'll make a merge node so let's take a second and talk about these two viewers because remember these are basically duplicates of the same type of viewer but you can choose to view any node in either of these viewers right now by default we have the media out one node showing up in a right-hand viewer which makes a lot of sense because that's what the people who watch our movie are actually going to see I think we're all used to having this right-hand viewer be what the final thing is and that's usually how I have it but you can view any node by itself just by selecting it and hitting one or two on the keyboard if you hit one that will load it up in the left-hand viewer if you hit two it'll be in the right-hand viewer and so you can look at any part of your composition just by hitting one or two I'm gonna switch back to media out hit 2 on the keyboard and I use this kind of in a similar way like if I just want to look at part of our comp usually do that in the first viewer and then keep media out in our second viewer but you can use it however you want you'll also notice there's a little dot thing if you have something loaded in the viewer it has a white dot so this is in the right-hand viewer a little white dot little white dot so this is really nice because you can view things by themselves before they're merged onto other things and it can be really convenient to see what's going on so this fast noise this is basically just a effect that generates kind of a cloud and so I'll select my fast noise and go over to my inspector I have all kinds of things to adjust in the inspector but I'm gonna push the scale up a little bit that'll change the way these clouds look and how big they are I'll also mess with the detail I can push that up and that just makes them a little bit more defined and less blurry and there's a ton of other stuff that you can mess with for now we'll leave it like this and we're pretty much just gonna use these clouds that were generated as our steam for the coffee cup the first thing that should probably happen is we should mask this because we don't want just fog everywhere we want just the steam to happen above the coffee cup so we're gonna do that almost the exact same way as we did with that background we're just gonna add a mask to our noise so I'm going to select that but this time instead of grabbing the rectangle mask I'm gonna grab this polygon mask and click on that once that's gonna add a polygon mask node to our node graph and then here in the viewer I can actually just draw what I want my mask to look like I can hold down my middle mouse button to grab this and pan it but I'm just gonna start here at the side of the coffee cup and just draw kind of a blobby shape around our coffee cup and now it's gonna limit that noise to be just inside of that shape and in the inspector with my polygon mask selected I can grab my soft edge and push that up a little bit to just soften the edges of this and I can just click to another node to get rid of that outline and we can see it already looks pretty good the problem is that it doesn't really move or anything and if this is going to be a video it should probably move so remember how to keyframe things what we can do is just animate this noise to move like Steam does probably the easiest way to do that is just a keyframe this Center which happens to be this widget - if I move this around we can see it moves that steam and so what I'll probably do is just start it down here and I'll go all the way to the beginning of our comp go to the inspector and click this keyframe diamond for Center and I'll move down to the end of the comp and I'll grab that little widget and just move it up I'll move it up quite a bit because I want it to rise quite a bit rewind and hit spacebar to play it back and it'll play trying to slow because it's thinking about things but once we have a green bar throughout this we can kind of get an idea of how fast this steam is moving probably a little bit slow right now so I'll go to the end of our comp and I'll just grab this number in the inspector and just roll a lot more up to like three or something so it's just a little bit faster again we'll just play this back see how fast it goes that looks pretty good so that's cool probably could be more realistic so let's grab the fast noise I'll go over to the inspector and I'm gonna adjust something called see the rate see the rate is just how this kind of changes over time you know like the clouds change and you can kind of preview this by just grabbing C's and moving it back and forth and you can see kind of the clouds just kind of animate right well see the rate will just change this over time it'll just animate it as the animation goes and so we'll just start with something small like that and we'll just see how fast this changes and if we have it seed a little more then it won't look quite as robotic it'll move just like fog or steam usually does so something like that that looks good now we have our steamy cup of coffee of course we want to tweak this to be tasteful what I think I'll do is grab the scale and bring that down a little bit just so it's not quite as defined and I'm also just gonna turn the strength of this down the best way to do that is in the merge node merge pretty much controls everything about how one node goes over another that's including its transparency its angle its size its position things kind of live by themselves and the merge node tells them how to interact with each other so in this merge node there's a control called blend blend is just how opaque your foreground is so I'll grab this blend and just bring it down I just want to bring this down to like a tasteful level so like point for something like that so now we have that just steamed in a little bit and you can tweak that as much as you want but that's basically how you would do it now again since our visual effect is done I can go over to the Edit Page and here it is in our timeline alright now let's do one more thing let's do a composite now a composite is a really general term but really it's like combining two different images together so what we're gonna do is replace the sky with a little bit more interesting sky right now we just don't have many clouds or anything we could put some fluffy clouds in here so again I'm just over this clip in the timeline and I'll click on fusion and we have our instructions grab clip and render it so one thing that we're definitely going to need is a fluffy cloud sky we could certainly make our own sky with a fast noise it's not gonna look super realistic but you probably could do something like that but what's gonna look better is to use an actual photo so let's import a photo we can do that a bunch of different ways the easiest way the one that I always use is just go to your Explorer or finder window grab your image and just drag it into your node graph that's gonna make a media into node if I hit one on the keyboard we can see what this is and really we have a couple jobs here we need to put this sky over our shot we need to make sure that it looks like it's behind the mountains and we need to make sure that it moves along with the shot so let's take a look at what we're working with here so we have the two paddle board ladies if we look really far away at these hills they're just moving a little bit to the side so again there's a bunch of different ways that you could go about this you could select the blue of the sky and delete that color and put the sky under it but what we'll probably do today is just keep it really simple and just draw a really soft mask and put the sky over this because it's kind of hazy I think that will work just fine so what I'll do is grab this media in - I'm gonna actually rename this just by hitting f2 with the node selected and I'll call this sky I grab my sky and merge it over my media in one and let's adjust the size in the inspector here just to make it fill up the frame and actually I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger because I know that this shot is moving back and forth and I want to be able to have a little bit of room to move it around so let's try something like that to start with and now down in my nodes I'm just gonna select media in one and hit two on the keyboard that's gonna let me look at this shot before we put the sky on even though the sky is already on so I'll select the sky node and I'm gonna select a polygon mask because I'm just gonna draw a shape where I want the sky to be so I'll click that mask and that will add a polygon mask to our sky now I can draw on this viewer even though I'm not looking at the sky layer I can draw my mask and this is a really nice way to do it so I'll start over here and I'm just gonna draw a really rough shape around these mountains something like that and I'll drag and I'll make it a lot bigger than the screen because we want to soften that and I don't want to run into any problems so now we can see in our left hand viewer we have the sky masked which I can go back to our media out to you and hit two on the keyboard and we'll see we have that masked over everything now the problem is that our mask is kind of scaling different than our background footage and that happens sometimes that's okay I can adjust this I'll click on polygon one and in the inspector where it says size I'll just size that and move it back to where it makes some sense not a big deal now I'm gonna adjust this soft edge and I'm just softening this out and moving the mask to where it starts to look like it belongs there and we're pretty much wanting this just as soft as we can get it soft as we can get away with without it looking weird and it's amazing how bad of a job that you can do and how it still look pretty good that works and isn't overly strange if we want to make this a little bit more believable we can grab this merged node and adjust our blend and push that down a little bit and fade the sky in you know and make it six or seventy percent strength but now we have a huge problem this looks nice right now but when we play it back the sky doesn't move along with the video why don't we do well when you're gonna do a sky replacement or you want anything to look like it's stuck to something in a video you pretty much have to use tracking so what I'll do is grab our media in one and now we're gonna use an effect that isn't in our toolbar and it's called a planar tracker up in my effects library click on that under tools we have something called planar tracker and grab that and drag that down into my nodes and if I know where I'm gonna put it I can just actually drag it on top of this line and once it turns blue I can let go and that'll be connected now the planar tracker is going to track whatever is put into this yellow input let's hit two on the keyboard to bring this up in our right-hand viewer and now what we're gonna do is select an area that moves the exact same way as our sky and that tracker is going to track its motion so I'll zoom in a little bit I'll just select these hills and you usually want to just do the smallest area you can but I think something like this will work now over here in our inspector under operation mode we have track tracker we have point motion type these are all different that you can adjust to track this in a different way we aren't gonna need perspective we're just gonna do translation and rotation this time because I know that this shot is really just moving back and forth and it might be rotating a little bit so we'll call that good and I'm gonna go and click on this button right here that looks like a play button with a line to the right that's gonna track this all the way to the end and once I have this stuff selected I'm gonna go up here to where it says reference time and click set that's just telling it hey I want to start at frame 26 which is where we happen to be and I'll hit this button right here track 2 end so I'll click on that and we'll see what happens it's just going to track the motion of those mountains and because we started in the middle I'll just hit I'll just click on go that'll go back to frame 26 and I'll track this backwards and now we've tracked the whole shot and whatever we use this tracking information for is going to look like it's stuck to the background ok so now we have this all tracked but how do we control where the clouds appear with the tracking stuff what I like to do with the planar tracker is use a planar transform which is over in the inspector if you scroll all the way down there's a button called create planar transform now click this once what that does is create a node that pretty much moves everything along with that track and so I'm just gonna run our sky node through our planar transform before it gets merged and we'll see it moves along with the mountains now we do have a problem it's actually slipping a little bit what that means is that part of this is moving a little bit differently you can kind of see that especially here the clouds are moving faster than the mountains the reason for that is because in our merge node we're adjusting the size and center and stuff here in the inspector and it's messing stuff up so if you're gonna do it this way make sure do you reset your merge node and everything will act nicely the problem is that our sky node needs to be sized and everything differently so we can use a transform node to make that work which is down here kind of towards the middle and I can drag that in between our sky and our plane to transform because I want to adjust where it is before we apply the tracking data so with our transform node selected I'll go over here to our viewer and we can move this around and scale it I'll move that around until it looks good and now we'll have our track being great do that now we have a beautiful sky it's freakin awesome right look at all the magic things we can do so here's before and here's after pretty cool so there you go there are some examples of the main things that you could do in fusion and how to make that work I hope that's inspiring for you if you want to learn more about nodes and how those work if that's still a little bit fuzzy check out this video right here it'll go over the basics and also talk about peanut butter and jelly which is I think really nice nice yeah sweet also it's important

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 393,754

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 16, blackmagic, fusion, vfx, davinci resolve 15, davinci resolve fusion, resolve 15, blackmagic fusion, compositing, fusion tutorial, fusion basics, resolve, blackmagicdesign, video, fusion tab, motion graphics, color grading tutorial, resolve 16, blackmagic design, fusion basic training, fusion tab basics, fusion tutorial for beginners, fusion training for beginners, fusion tutorial 2020, blackmagic fusion tutorial

Id: jeFrwXSJ5Xc

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020