DaVinci Resolve 17 FUSION PAGE - Introduction for Beginners

all right let's talk about the fusion page big things are coming for this channel and in order for you to take full advantage of them as well as all my other videos i decided it was time to create a more general introduction to the fusion page so that's what we're gonna do let's get started first we're gonna cover a few different ways to get into the fusion page the most common you might run into is when you have a clip on your timeline and you just click this button to open the fusion page and automatically that will open the page and give you a media in node and a media out node this media in will be the clip that you added to the timeline and the media out is what is necessary to send whatever you do on the fusion page back to that edit page option two is to go into your effects library go to effects and drag the fusion composition onto your timeline and then you can extend that to whatever duration you want and then just like if that was a piece of footage make sure your cursor is over and click this button to open the fusion page this will only give you a media out node and then you can build whatever you want in the node 3 before that to send back to the edit page the third option you'll probably run into the lease and that is when you have a completely blank timeline if you then click this button to open the edit page it'll open you will have no nodes but if you add any node like a simple background node you'll add that node but it'll also create a media out and if you go back to your edit page you will see that it will have created a fusion composition for you so for us to get started i'm going to drag this fusion composition extend it to right around 20 seconds and then open the fusion page but now that we're in fusion let's take a quick tour and see what we have access to if you created your fusion composition with the same method i did you will have this single media out and this exists in this node viewer here this is where you will construct and organize the node tree that will build the effect you want here you can move around any node and you can also use navigation controls like your middle mouse button to drag the entire window around or your middle and left mouse button to zoom in and out and you can toggle this window on or off by this nodes button up here off on next to that nodes control you have clips if you are on your edit page and you have multiple video clips or fusion compositions then when you are in the fusion page you can open up clips and see a representation of what is on your timeline in the edit page and if you wanted to stop working in this fusion composition and jump to this gameplay clip you could just click on it and it would create a fusion composition out of that video clip with the media in and media out and again you can shrink this way by clicking this clips button next to that we have the effects library if you click that the first thing you should see is tools these are all of the possible nodes that you can drag into the node viewer to build your effect your node tree you could search through this list every time to see what you want to add but as you'll see later we have a few different ways to access these tools and then also in the effects library you have open effects templates edit templates and luts open effects and edit templates are primarily useful on the edit page although you can control them and customize them in the fusion page and the templates in the effects library are very exciting i have an entire video all about these it's a collection of tons of pre-built effects that you can drag onto your node viewer and see how they were built some of them are really useful there's a really simple particle system that's already built up to be a simple snow i just used that on a video a few days ago but really i think these are most valuable as learning tools i've learned so much by just going through these dragging them onto my node viewer and then following the node path seeing how they were constructed one of my favorites is in motion graphics radar 2. if we drag that into our node viewer and zoom out you'll see that this is a little complex but if we take the output of this final brightness and contrast node pull it to our media out then it'll pull up in our viewer and you'll see that we have this really cool pretty simple radar effect and by poking around for just a few seconds you can start to see how this was built we'll start with this simple background node and we'll see that that is getting affected by this brightness and contrast node then this other brightness and contrast node that makes it this square and then a transform that zooms out to create this pattern before this coordinate space node that bends it into this circle pattern and as we jump ahead we see how all these effects are just being layered on top of each other one after another until you get this really cool radar effect this could honestly be an entire video in itself just walking through how this included template was built if you'd like to see something like that leave a comment i might do it but the last thing in the effect library is luts these are for color correction and they're all about color science and very cool but technical things that aren't really my area of expertise and while they exist in the fusion page really this is the domain of the color page i would direct you to many smarter and more color focused creators to learn about luts but moving on from the effects library besides that we have the media pool this is a shared media pool between fusion and the edit page so i had these two gameplay clips i was working on but i can also drag them into my node viewer separately and you'll see that they will exist as separate media in nodes so if you want to add any video or still image to your fusion composition add it to your media pool and then you can just drag it and it will create a media in node for you but with these two new clips in our node viewer we can close the media pool and this is a great opportunity to talk about our two viewers by default we have a viewer one here and a viewer two here so if i selected this first media in node press the one key it would pull it up in this window if i selected the second media in node press the two key it would pull it up in this second node and while we're seeing these here because they're not connected to our media out if i went back to the edit page you wouldn't see either of them we'll be coming back to some of the functionality of these separate viewers soon but for now one and two pulls up any node in the first or second viewer but we'll get back to our tour and jump over to the controls we have on this side of the screen first is the inspector if we click that we'll see we'll open up this window and any node we have selected will be pulled up in the inspector and any parameters or settings we can change we will have access to there to demonstrate i'm going to create this first media in and i'm going to navigate to this quick select toolbar and click this button to add a transform node it will automatically link those two and if i were to select that transform node and go to my inspector you'd see i would have all these classic transform options and to step back for a second and demonstrate our viewers i'm going to select this transform node and click two to pull that up in the second viewer so right now they look the same but you'll see that the media in node is in viewer one and the transform node is on viewer two so with this transform node selected in the inspector i'm gonna pull down the size and you'll see that in viewer 2 our image is shrinking down but our image in viewer 1 is not changing at all this is very important to understand in fusion when you're building these complicated node trees nodes flowing one into another as you get further and further down the chain each node is affecting all the nodes in the signal flow before it and you can preview that node tree at any point in the chain this gives you a lot of control and is really helpful for tracking down exactly how your effects are building on top of one another but as you start to build effect make sure you are always previewing the right node to view what changes you are adding to your clips so with that i'm just going to delete this transform node and we're going to move from the inspector to metadata i'll click that and then i will close the inspector window and here you have the metadata or just all the information stored about the clip in the clip it's codec frame rate resolution and all of those details you probably won't need this very often but when you do need it this is where you will find it it's very important to know and finally beside metadata we have keyframes and spline we're going to skip those for now but we're going to be coming back to them because they are both very powerful and then the last major thing we're going to touch on the ui is this center bar we have our main options for playing forward backwards and stopping this toggle option for looping clips and then underneath it we have this toolbar of commonly used nodes davinci resolve 17 added the ability to customize this bar and save multiple different layouts i recommend that for you if you feel that you have a specific set of effects that you will be constantly doing and you just need quick access to the same notes but i feel like i get along pretty well with this default toolbar the rough sections these are split up to are generators including things like your background node and text some simple effects like color correction and blur compositing and transform effects masking effects some of the introductory particle effects and then your 3d tools like i said when we were in the effects library you could pull tools from there you could select these options or you could use a third method that is my favorite and definitely the fastest so to demonstrate i'm going to delete these two midi and we had and i'm going to press shift space and that will pull up this search window to select a tool so i'm going to clear that and just type background and you'll see that that will narrow it down and just give us the single background node i'll click enter and that will add a background node to our scene soon we're going to build out a very basic sort of motion graphics effect it's not going to look good but we're going to learn a lot but before we do that i need to touch on something very important about the fusion page and that is that fusion is both resolution and frame rate independent first let's talk about resolution the resolution of your fusion composition is driven by what comes first in the node tree let me demonstrate if i open the media pool pull on this gameplay clip and pull it up in the viewer if i zoom out you'll see that the resolution of that clip is 1920 by 1080. and if i create a new background node hold it up in viewer one you'll see that because of the settings we set up on the edit page this is 1280x7 but for any background node we can select that open the inspector move over to image and then here we have control over that aspect ratio so if i was to change this to say a vertical aspect ratio by 1080 by 1920 something like you might put on tick tock youtube shorts or instagram reels if i preview that that's still in preview one so i'll zoom out and you'll see that resolution if i were to add a merge node to this background node connect this gameplay clip into this green input the input 2 and pull that to our media out give you the media out you'll see that the resolution going back to our timeline is 1080 by 1920 but you'll notice that the gameplay clip is now pushed over the edges of our composition and you can't see the sides so to fix that you would need to add something like a transform node after our media in and pull down the size so you could see the entire thing it can get a little confusing but it's best to remember that the first note in your node chain will set the resolution for everything that comes after it and that plays into one of my big tips for building a node tree and that is to start with a transparent background node whatever you plan on building in your scene it's always a best practice to add a simple background node you can preview that if you wanted this to actually be 1280x720 come in and pull down the alpha layer and then you'll see this graphic symbolizing that it is transparent you can see through it and then if i were to create a merge out of this we'll add that second background node pipe that merge from the first to the second and then you'll see that's the media out now 1280 by 720 this image is scaled down a bit and everything else that happens in the node tree is reflected in that change but at the beginning we have this simple transparent background node this is helpful for setting the resolution you want to work in but it also has a couple of side benefits if i come to this second background node this black background you'll see that in the inspector we have this global in and out if i were to navigate to like frame 150 and i started pulling up this global in you'll see that after i get past 150 it completely disappears and it pops out of the second viewer but we still have that viewer watch what happens if i go to this first background node and do the same thing i'll preview that so you see in this first window but now if i pull this up past 150 it will disappear from this first window but also our second viewer will disappear as well and that's because this node is first in the signal chain nothing after it in the chain can exist if that node does not exist at that frame so always the best practice have a single transparent node first in your signal chain and make sure your global in and out are set for the entire time you're going to be working and now to touch on frame rate as i said fusion is frame rate independent although a better way to say it might be that fusion only runs on frames not time you'll see here in our fusion timeline that we don't have one second two second we only have the number of frames and really the lesson here is that you just have to know what frame rate you're working in on the edit page and compensate if your frame rate is 60 frames per second and you want a particular keyframed animation to take a second then you have to tell it to take 60 frames normally this won't be too much of an issue although you might run into it if you start using third-party transitions or effects because the odds are pretty good that if those were designed to work in 60 frames a second if you use them on a 24 frames per second timeline the entire effect will take much longer than intended it'll look like it's moving almost in slow motion because it was meant to play back at 60 frames a second a little technical but something you need to keep in the back your mind okay time to build something and like i said before it's gonna look bad but we're gonna learn a lot let's see i know there's actually a lot going on here and i'm gonna walk through all of it and we will learn a lot and you can take everything you are about to learn and make something that actually looks good and is actually useful to you so how i'm going to do that is i'm going to open this fusion composition we have here and you'll see the simple node tree i set up to get this effect and just to keep this reference for all of us i'm going to keep this node tree here and actually rebuild the copy of it right beneath so you can follow along as we go and the first thing i'm going to do is click this media out i'm going to hold shift so it disconnects and then i'm going to drag it down here beneath and then we're going to start building and one thing i actually didn't do in this sample but i'm going to do now is our best practice starting with a single transparent background node so i'm going to click this button to add a background node in our inspector pull down this alpha control and move this to the beginning and i'll pull that up in viewer one in this media out i will make sure it's visible in viewer 2. and to help viewing as we build this i'm actually going to take the output of this background this gray square and connect it to the input of media 1 this yellow triangle in here you will see this line they're connected we have a node tree so now if we add anything in between these two nodes it will automatically add that to this line in the middle of our node tree so that we don't have to manually connect those lines to put it all together so with this background two selected i'm going to create a merge node and you'll see that this merge node has three of these triangles coming into it and then this square coming out the square is the output right now that's going to the media out we'll have this yellow input this green input and this blue input we'll touch on the blue inputs very soon but for merge nodes it's important to note that the yellow input is always the background and the green input is always the foreground to demonstrate very quickly i'm going to pull in those two video clips we had earlier create a merge node and just connect them either which way and if i preview that merge node you'll see that right now this gameplay clip from path of exile is the only one we see and that is because it is this media in two and that is coming into the green foreground input and this call of duty is now on the gamepl and in this example it is now on top and merge nodes can only ever combine one foreground and one background so you'll likely be using lots of them in complex scenes but coming into the foreground of our merge note here we're going to create a new background node and here i will make it a nice sort of bright blue and i will add that into the foreground of this merge node pull up our media out back on our viewer so now we have this entire blue screen and i said i was going to get back to the blue input here it is if you see blue triangles that is always for masking almost every effect or generator can have a mask applied to it this background node is a generator so if we have it selected and come up here to this rectangle mask preset we'll click that and it will automatically add a rectangle mask and we'll see that reflected in our viewer here we have these tactile controls where you can just grab the edges to stretch it out and this is still just a mask but masks interact in interesting ways you'll see that they exist earlier in the background node in the chain settings but if i preview the background note by itself even though the background originally took up the entire frame because it is being affected by a mask you still only see it where the mask exists so i'm just going to make this a little blockier and that is good for now and like i said maths can affect generators like this background node but they can also affect effects so coming out of this merge we are going to add a transform node and just like i did earlier i could move this around by changing these setting coordinates but i'm going to click this button to reset those and i am going to add a mask to the transform node i'll add another rectangle mask but i'll make this skinnier and a bit wider so what this is doing it is telling the transform node only to apply the transform where the mass exists so if i go to that same control from earlier the setting i'm going to change it on the x parameter so before they shifted the entire rectangle back and forth but now if i change this you'll see that it is only affecting the part of the triangle where that mask exists where it covers so i'm just going to shift this over to the side here now we have this much more complex shape although we never sketched out this exact shape we just gave it a rectangle and told hey this part of the rectangle shift over here so coming out of this transform you're going to add another merge and then we are going to press this button to create a text plus node and we are going to pipe that into the foreground of this merge and then with that selected in the inspector we can type whatever we want and these text nodes are pretty powerful and they include layout and transform options so now this text can move around and even be keyframed in lots of other things without needing a transform node of its own and coming out of this merge we will create another transform node and like i said before when you're building these node trees each new node affects everything before it so even though we've had multiple masks and even a transform earlier on if i go into this transform and shift this y value on center it is moving the entire thing as a block up and down as i shift and now we're gonna start to play with some really interesting really powerful things with keyframing i'm gonna set this up now but we're gonna circle back to it in more detail soon i'm gonna go to frame 0 pull this y down a little bit click this diamond to set a keyframe then i'm going to slide forward a bit and pull that up so it's now at the top of our screen if we scrub in our timeline you'll see that it's at the bottom and then it slides right up to the top and just sits there we will come back to this animation soon by coming out of this transform we are going to add the color corrector effect and we are going to shift this hue value you can either do that with this slider bar here or you can just click and hold on this number value and shift it and i'm going to shift this just a little like pinkish pinkish red deal and then we are going to add a mask to that so just like the transform effect the mask limited the effect of the effect we're going to do the exact same thing with this color corrector so with this color corrector selected i'm going to click this rectangle mask again you'll see it automatically connects and just like before i'm going to make a much thinner bar this time stretch it all the way out to the edge and we're gonna add a little bit of animation here as well i'm gonna come back to frame one and on this rectangle i'm gonna set a keyframe on angle and i'm gonna slide forward a fair bit and on this angle i'm gonna set that to 360. it won't look like anything changed now but for those of you math wizards out there you know that now over the course of this keyframe this bar is going to rotate one complete time 360 degrees but just like the animation on the background once it hits that last keyframe it stops but we'll address that soon next we are going to add a brightness and contrast node we're going to have our color corrector node selected click shift space and type in brightness and brightness and contrast should be the only node that shows up we're going to click enter to add that and it will automatically be joined into our node tree and we're going to add a mask to this as well but first i'm going to come in pull up this gain a little bit everything gets quite a bit brighter and with the brightness and contrast node selected i'm going to click this button to add a rectangle mask and you'll see instantly that limits the effect of that but i'm going to bring it in this way pull it up and on this note i'm going to come down to soft edge and if i pull that up you'll see that it starts to soften or feather the edges of this effect and just like before i'm gonna come back to frame zero but this time i'm gonna pull it over to this side of the screen set a keyframe on center grab forward a fair bit and then pull this x coordinate just over to the other side of the screen until it's just off screen okay so now we have the nodes in place and we have the beginning of some animation we have three different kinds of animation going on but all of them they start at frame zero and they complete sort of a one cycle and then they just end but to spice these up we are going to come back to that spline viewer and keyframe viewer from before i didn't forget first i'm going to open this keyframes viewer and if you need to you can press this button to zoom to fit here you have a representation of every node in your scene and because we've actually duplicated this scene now we actually have two of them so i'm going to create this original set of nodes and just delete that since we're only working on the ones we've just created but here in the keyframe viewer i'm going to close the inspector to give us more space you'll see a layer for each node in the scene and if you look you'll see that there are three layers where you can see an outline of a line moving across the layer and those are the nodes where we have keyframes if i come to this transform node transform 5 and click this arrow to open up you'll see that on this displace we have these two vertical lines which represent our keyframes right now it just takes this duration for and remember this is controlling the entire scene going up and down but we have these two nodes when it gets to the end they stop moving but if we were to take this first keyframe and stretch it all the way out you would see that it would now take much longer for that action to complete we're actually gonna keep that pretty low and this keyframe viewer is also where a lot of timing work can be done especially if you're pulling in gameplay or live footage and you want to reposition your clip in time it can be a little obtuse how to figure it out in fusion if i shift the layer in space you'll see that it is moving those keyframes with it and if this were actual footage it would be shifting that footage in time but for now i want this animation to start at the beginning so i will select both of those keyframes dragging over them and pull them back to the beginning leave that i'm gonna increase the speed on these animations down here a bit as well so now these three animations they go through and then they just stop but next we're gonna check out the spline viewer this is one of my favorite parts of fusion when i was learning fusion and trying to figure it out coming from after effects the moment a few things clicked in the spline viewer i knew that i could create just about anything so i'm going to click this to close the keyframes here open the spline viewer and unlike the keyframe viewer here by default you should only see the nodes that have already been keyframed and again we can click this button to zoom to fit and here you see a visual representation of the keyframes we've made but another useful tool is to come to these dots up here click those and click show only selected tool it'll look like everything disappears but now if we come to that first transform node click this button zoom to fit again using those same zooming controls if we click around to these nodes you'll see that it will only show us the spline viewer for the node that we have selected if you're getting into complicated scenes this can keep things very clean and help you stay organized but this transform node which is shifting this entire block from the bottom to the top here's what you can do with the power of the spline viewer i'm going to zoom out again and i'm going to drag a box to select both of these keyframes and i'm going to come down to this bar down here mouse over this icon and click that to set ping pong and then if i zoom out you'll start to see what it's planning on doing here and you'll see this as i scale in time now it does this original motion bottom to the top but once it hits the top it starts moving back down to the bottom and it will just keep ping-ponging back and forth as long as our timeline lasts and we've set up this motion with only two keyframes you don't need to go and set a keyframe at the top then the bottom at the top and the bottom this powerful tool exists right in the spline viewer but now that we've set up this ping pong motion we can still edit the original keyframes if i were to take this second keyframe and drag it out in time you'll see that each subsequent ping pong would take longer but this also lets us add some easing if i select both of these keyframes and i click f it'll add a little bit of easing and f is for flatten it will flatten the easing curve so now visually this just looks a little wavy but what this is doing in motion if we preview you'll see that it is going to the top and as it gets to the top it slows down and then slowly picks up speed as it starts to move away where before it was just like on the old dvd menus where it was bouncing around the corner and had all those hard edges here as it reaches the top it slows down and then gets going again and any changes we made in easing will appear in this ping pong as well if we grab this handle and stretch it out you'll see that we'll get some really funky motion where it'll sit at the top for quite a bit longer but we can undo that that doesn't look as great ping pong is super cool but there are more things we can do and we're going to show those off using our other animated masks next is this rectangle on our color corrector mask this is the bar that is turning this blue shade more of this pink if we zoom to fit and then scale out a bit you'll see that these are our two keyframes it rotates once and stops so now we are going to select those two keyframes and instead of ping pong we're going to come to this option which is set relative we'll click that and then this dotted line you'll see now it takes that axis it takes that angle and just continues it on in perpetuity so now that rotation motion we had once we get to that last keyframe it won't stop it'll just keep continuing to rotate and then finally we're going to select the rectangle mask on this brightness and contrast and we want this to continue as well and we're going to select both of these nodes and instead of ping pong instead of set relative we're going to come down and select this set loop option we'll click that and if we zoom in you'll see what's really happening here in these dotted lines is that it is continuing this first motion and instead of ping-ponging or instead of just continuing on off the screen once it hits the last keyframe it is going to instantly jump back to the position of the first keyframe so this sort of scanny bar thing we've got going on it scans across and then it instantly jumps back so it can scan again and again any easing or changing the time of this would be reflected perfectly in each additional copy and because we have this all connected to our media out if we go over to our fusion page we should see what we've been building and another important note especially if you're not having smooth playback on the edit page is to come up to playback fusion catch memory this might be off for you and if you set it to either on or auto then whenever you have a fusion composition you should get this caching bar above it it should be red by default and slowly it'll turn to blue as the effect caches and then it'll play back smoothly and now that that blue bar is complete we can go back to frame 0 and play and we'll play this little loop we created where all the motion continues and it bounces back and forth the bar is always spinning this motion will just keep continuing forever you could have made the fusion composition as long as you wanted i know we've covered a lot but that is the basics with what we've gone over today you can create some amazing things and we've only touched on a handful of nodes there are upwards of 200 different ways to effect and modify and add and all sorts of things to your creations and if you want to learn more about all of those nodes stick around thanks i'll see you next time

Channel: Patrick Stirling

Views: 7,304

Keywords: davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve fusion page, davinci resolve 17 fusion page, resolve fusion introduction, fusion page for beginners, davinci resolve 17 fusion, davinci resolve 17 fusion tutorial

Id: Kfe_vmnXhuE

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020