Create Your Own Effects in Fusion - Everything You Need to Know!

Are you tired of spending time recreating  the same effects over and over again in   resolve? This is one a lot of you have  been asking for so let's get into it   here's everything you need to know to create  your own effects intervention resolve [Music]   there's a bunch of different ways that you can  create your own effect and resolve but if you   want something that's really accessible the best  method is to create a macro or a DOT settings file   a macro is essentially your own node that you can  bring into your composition whenever you need it   I've got this little Twitter handle animation  going on here and it's taken me some time to   put this together so I've saved it as a macro  the great thing about a macro is that you can   completely customize it to have whatever controls  you want in the inspector section it's sort of   like creating your own little plugin within  Fusion which is really handy so let's rewind   and I'll show you how I actually made this side  note here if you're interested in getting your   hands on this Twitter animation I'm giving it away  for free there's a link in the comments for you   to download it so this is the full con position  with all the nodes that are needed to recreate   this effect a couple of parts I want to call  attention to first because it will be important   later on first of all the main ingredient color  of this oval shape is being controlled by this   background note here which I've labeled as main  fill so as you can see I've got a gradient set up   here on this background node and I've got these  nice blue and purple colors going on now the   little neon Shimmer that runs around the edge has  actually been driven by this background node here   which I've called neon fill which we can change  the color of using this node if we wanted to turn this into a macro first I'll highlight the  whole thing everything here is set the media out   now you never encode the media out in the creation  of a macro and there's a pretty good reason for   that which I'll come back to later in the video  with the rest of our nodes highlighted I'm going   to right click one of the nodes and go to macro  create macro at this point the macro editor box is   going to pop up with a whole bunch of different  options for check boxes and this seems overly   complicated at this point but these are just  all the parameters and controls for all of the   nodes that we just highlighted a moment ago so  first things first let's give our macro a name then what we can do in these check boxes  is we can select the parameters that we   want to include as options in the inspector  window once the macro is saved I'm going to   just move this window over at the side  about for now just to show you how this   works so if I click on our text to node  which is driving this Twitter handle here   and then I scroll down to find texture in our  list you'll see that all the parameters that are   normally in a text node are here too so I'm going  to go in in the text section and just enable style   text which is the text box I'll also include the  color as well just remember if you are including   a Color Picker you do need to include all three  RGB channels so I'm going to tick all of these   for this animation I really want to be able to  change the background color later on as well   as the main color of the neon animation that's  running around it so I'm going to find my main   fill in neon fill nodes that I showed you earlier  and include the color parameters from those nodes   too I can also rename these parameters if I want  to just to make it clearer what they are in the   macro now we don't have to worry too much about  what we want to include at this stage because we   can always come back and change these later if  we need to anything that you've selected will   be highlighted as read for now so once you're  happy with all the parameters you've included   you can come up to click on the three dots here  and here we're going to have a bunch of options   for signer macro open lets us open a different  macro if we want to edit it later save and save   ads are fairly self-explanatory but one you might  want to be aware of is this save as a group option   save as a group will let you keep the editability  of your nodes in the macro so rather than saving   it all as one node it will save it as a group node  where we can open it up and edit or move the inner   Americans of the macro as we place which depend on  what your building might be something you want to   do if you want that flexibility later on but for  this one though I just want to save it as one node   so I'm going to go ahead and hit save as this is  going to pop up with your Macros folder which is   buried away in an application folder for DaVinci  Resolve but it's the right place to save our macro   to to go ahead and save this as a DOT settings  file in that folder now once you've done that   you can go ahead and close that window because we  can now bring this macro into our composition at   any time so I'm just going to switch to an empty  composition here first now from up in the effects   window I can search for my macro and bring it into  our Cone position as one single node and connect   it up now with it selected you'll see that we've  got all the parameters that we had selected in the   macro editor here in the inspector window so I can  change the value of these really easily from here if you want to come back and change the parameters  that you have in the inspector window then you   come down and right click in the node window  and go to edit macro then you can select your   macro and it will bring the editor window back up  again or you can make the changes you want to make   as long as you save it from that three dot menu  when you're finished again it will update it so   this is where fusions are its most powerful  creating reusable effects like this but we   do have to come into the fusion tab to create  it so what if we wanted to add something like   this to our effects tab in the edit page  and thankfully all the effects in the edit   page use the exact same macro function there's  only a couple extra steps that we need to take   something you'll notice in the edit page is that  your effects are actually filtered down into   different types depending on what you've created  you can actually add your macro to one of these   categories by saving your dot settings file in  the right folder path to show you what I mean   I'm going to use this little Twitter animation  again I've gone ahead and created a DOT settings   file for this but rather than saving it to the  default macros folder that we saw earlier instead   I've gone ahead and saved that on my desktop from  within the fusion page we want to come into the   effects panel and scroll down to templates in this  drop down you'll see an option for edit and then   within edit you'll find the same categories from  our edit page with all the same effects that we   have on the edit page now for the purposes of this  effect I want to save this as a generator so I'm   going to select generator I'll then click on the  three dots up here and select show folder which   will pop up with the exact location that we want  to save our macro to so that's a really quick hack   that you can use to find the right folder path  if you're ever unsure where to save your macro   I'll then drag my DOT settings fill and to this  folder and if we come back into results edit page   we'll see that it's now added this Twitter macro  to this section if you can't see it in there yet   you might have to do a quick restart of resolve  but if you followed those steps you should see   it on the edit page and you should be able to  drag it into your timeline when you please all   the controls that we set up in Fusion will now  be in the inspector window on the edit page as   well which is really handy it means you can update  things without having to jump back into the fusion   page which is really cool okay so right now you  may be thinking does it really matter which of   these categories that I saved my macro to the  answer is yes it does it matters a lot each of   these categories gets treated differently in the  edit page depending on what one you're using this   part might seem kind of self-explanatory but stay  with me here because it's key to understanding how   macros work do you remember earlier in the video  when I said no you never encode the media out in   the creation of a macro and there's a pretty  good reason for that well in some cases you   don't want to include a media in either let's  say for example you're making something like   a filter effect where you have a clip of video  footage being fed into a bunch of other nodes   and you want to be able to replicate this as  an effect for the edit page you should only   copy the nodes in the middle that are actually  affecting the footage not the footage itself   whenever we have a piece of video footage on our  timeline as far as Fusion is concerned this is a   media and node being corrected directly to a media  out so when we drag an effect onto a clip from the   effect category Fusion automatically slots our  macro in the chain and between the media and and   the media out on the other hand if you're dragging  in a title or a generator for example then Fusion   assumes you're generating an image and just  directly connects this up to Media out which is   why these automatically generate a clip whenever  they're dragged onto the timeline as opposed to   effects which are applied to the clip so when  you come around to creating your first effect   for the edit page think carefully about where you  want it to go because it's really easy to drop it   in their own folder and then it doesn't really  function the way you want it to I've made that   mistake myself now speaking of effects in the edit  page something you may have also noticed about the   default title effects you get in resolve is that  they automatically re-time themselves to match   exactly how long the clip is which if you're doing  something like a lower third animation or title is   really handy this is something you could set up  for your own animations too to do this we use a   process called anim curves Adam carbs will let you  animate any parameter you want in Fusion just like   a keyframe does but unlike keyframes and curves  work as a percentage of your overall composition   length which means that when you change the  clip length in the edit page the animation   automatically retains itself there's a few  different scenarios where you might want to set up   an atom curve but by far the simplest example is  a pie chart timer like this now I'm not going to   show you how I set this up but I have set it up as  a macro just like I showed you earlier I've left   a link in the comments if you want to download  that for free in this macro I've set up a single   control for the percentage of the pie chart and  as you can see here this will fill the pie chart   when I move the slider here pretty simple let's  say I wanted this to start is zero at the start   of our composition and then automatically fill to  one over the course of my entire clip length now   instead of keyframing this across a predefined  number of frames I'm going to right click click   the percentage parameter and go to modify width  and select atom curves and just to remind you this   will work on any parameter in Fusion now it's  actually made our pie chart disappear just now   but that's totally normal if I jump over to the  modifiers tab you'll see that this anim curves   modifier has been added so we can see a bunch  of controls here so for the purposes of this   I'm going to set the source to duration because  we want this parameter change over the duration   over composition and then we're going to leave the  rest of this section as it is for now but we will   come back to this if we play back our composition  you'll see that it's animating exactly the way we   want it by itself which is amazing so it starts at  the first frame with nothing and then fills over   the course of the composition length I can go back  to the tools tab here to see this in action too   this is pretty easy to say oh but what exactly  is happening here well it's because of the scale   offset time scale and time offset controls which  won't mean anything to you just now but here's   exactly what these parameters are doing scale is  essentially how much you want this parameter to   change so in this case we want the percentage  slider to end on one but if we said 0.5 for   example it would only fill up half of our pie  chart over the duration of the composition because   that percentage parameter is only being asked to  scale by 0.5 offset essentially is what number   do you want your parameter to start on in this  case we wanted to start on zero but if I was to   put in 0.25 you'll see the effect that has on the  pie chart it now starts a quarter of the way full time scale is essentially how fast do you want  this animation to go you can kind of think of this   as like a speed modifier so one would be one times  the speed two would be two times the speed and it   would finish halfway through the chord position  and then four would be four times the speed and so   on and so on and then the last part is time offset  which just lets you shift at what point in time   you want the animation to start so positive values  are going to add a small delay but negative values   will mean that your animation starts later in  the chord position if you're totally lost at this   stage then please don't worry I was totally lost  learning this stuff as well the main thing to do   is just go in and play about with those parameters  and see how it affects your anime should because   once you master those four controls you could  basically recreate any kind of reusable animation   that you want and as you can see from the edit  page this pie chart timer is automatically   retiming itself to suit the length of our clip  regardless of its size which is much more useful   than having to go in and change keyframes every  time you want to use this you could just stretch   that clip out and then you know that that timer  is going to lapse around that entire time scale now you could actually use atom curves  to create in and out animations that   automatically retain themselves just like  this text animation here and this is the   method that you'll most commonly find across  YouTube for creating this kind of reusable in   and out animation I'm not a fan of it it's  kind of messy because stretching the clip   also stretches the timing of the animation  so the longer it is the slower it animates   which you probably don't want most of the time  you just want to be able to stretch the middle   bit and keep your in and out animations  consistent you can actually get around   this using Expressions but a much simpler  method is just to use the keyframe stretcher so he'd have got very similar in and out animation   and if I jump into Fusion you can see that we have  a whole bunch of keyframes that animate our scene   in everything then holds for a few frames and then  it animates back out again all using keyframes now   in the effects tab I'm going to search for a tool  called keyframe stretcher and this node does get   a very simple function this is going to hold the  keyframes for any node that we feed into it and   right now I'm going to feed my entire node tree  into it now up here you'll have a global in and   out point for the tool and this will usually  be automatically set to 120 frames so we want   to change this to be the same as our composition  length so this one I'm working on here goes from   zero all the way to 151 frames at the end and just  below it you'll find these two handles here which   set the end point and out point for the keyframe  stretcher so what we'll do is we want to come over   to our timeline here and find the point where our  in animation ends which is right about frame 48 so   I'll then set the stretch start to 48. and then we  want to find the point right before the animation   animates out again which is at frame 90A so then  I'll put 98 into the stretch end and once you've   done that you've basically done everything you  need to do if I go back into the edit page I can   freely stretch the clip out and it will shift  my end animation along to the end of the clip   basically the keyframe stretcher tool is  taking that middle part of the animation   that we selected and extending that out to be the  size of our composition and everything outside of   that just gets shifted along to the end of the  clip which is pretty clever and if you've just   watched all of that and you're thinking man that  is way too complicated for me I just want a way   to save my Fusion called possessions then you  probably want to use dot comp files instead com   fails are quite simply a way for you to explore  exactly what you've made in Fusion node for node   if you go to fail export Fusion composition you  can see if your entire node tree is a conferral   which means you can then re-import it into another  project in Fusion by going to file import infusion   called position and that and a lot chill is how  Fusion comp feels work you export them from one   project and then re-important them into another  one whenever you need them if you're looking   for some cool animations and effects that you  could slot into your own videos then head over   to my buy me a coffee page I'm using this as a  place to house some of the stuff that I've made   on the channel so far and I've got some stuff  in this video that I've put in there as well   or if you want some more Fusion tutorials hit the  Subscribe button and I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Ryan Osborne

Views: 12,946

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Id: 6KjAPgleUP0

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023