DaVinci Resolve 17 Fusion Training - Introduction to Fusion

hi my name is tony and today we're going to be looking at using fusion inside of davinci resolve now the purpose of today's video is to give you a good understanding of how to use fusion take a look at the interface and do some simple compositing and set some keyframes so that way you can be on your way to creating composites and visual effects inside of resolve all right with that in mind let's take a look okay i'm in the resolve project manager now i'm going to right click and select restore project archive we want to go to the quickstart.dra just select that folder and press open and don't forget all these lessons are available for you on the blackmagic design.com website so i highly recommend you take a look download and start to get your way onto the lessons plans here okay so now that we've loaded our quick start guide let's go ahead and double click on it and load it up now we're in our edit page and we want to be able to go into fusion so place your playhead over the clip in your timeline that we want to work on and just go down to the bottom of the interface and click on the fusion tab and just like that we're inside of our motion graphics and visual effects software resolve has automatically brought in the clip from the edit timeline brought it in as the media in node for us and place it in the node editor so let's just take a moment to look at the inspector before we get involved too much in the nodes at the top here we have the interface toolbar now this is a great way to open and close panels that we might need based on the type of workflow we're doing the cool thing is that you can actually customize each of these panels clicking and resizing them as needed and for what we're doing today we're going to go ahead and just clean this up and reset our workspace by going to the top here and clicking on workspace and then going to reset ui layout and that's going to bring us back to a standard layout and for the most part it's going to be satisfactory for the type of work we're doing today but i do want you to go back to the workspace and just take a look right above the reset ui layout there's layout presets now what you can do is you can actually save your own custom layouts which is great because as you're doing different types of workflows you're going to want to have different panels open and available to you so the fact that you can do that is really going to help your workflow okay so below the interface toolbar we have our viewers we have a viewer on the left viewer number one and we have a viewer on the right viewer number two what's interesting about these viewers is that they're independent and what i mean by that is if you're coming from a traditional nle you're going to have two types of viewers you're going to have your viewer on the left which is your source viewer like in the edit page you're going to be able to click on a clip and load it to preview and on the viewer on the right is usually traditionally your program monitor right that's the final output of your timeline but in fusion each viewer is independent so essentially you can actually load your source or program in either one of the monitors each viewer is going to have a toolbar you can do things like change the size look at different channel selectors and then below that you're going to have our timeline ruler this is where you will have all your playback controls you can scrub the clip across time and place it on the exact frame that you want you might have noticed that there's these little yellow bars this is our auto render range so when you hit the space bar you can actually just preview just a section of the clip that you want to now you're not changing the in and out points it's just allowing you to basically ram preview or cache preview just that portion of the clip a quick tip is you can actually hold down the command key or control on a pc and then just click and drag and create your own render range i'm going to go ahead and just reset that right click on the render range and click auto render range okay so below that we've got our node toolbar and this is going to have the most commonly used nodes that you might use inside of fusion available for us at any given moment it's broken up into different categories so we've got here image based nodes and then followed by some color correction nodes then we have some compositing and transformation nodes mask nodes particle nodes and 3d nodes now i just want to talk about the word node and what it can mean we can use the word node to describe a media clip a source clip in this case the media in node is represented as the clip from the timeline so it's an actual piece of medium but it can also mean a tool like a transformation a resizing or a rotation as well as an effect like maybe a blur or a lighting effect so that word we can use interchangeably between all those different types of medias the next section that we're going to look at is the node editor and that's this big section down here this is where we're going to be doing all of our creating all of our building we're going to be bringing in notes connecting them together to create our visual effect or our composite and as you're doing so you're going to start to be able to add a lot of nodes and you're going to want to be able to move around and navigate so how would we go about doing that well if you have a three button mouse i strongly suggest that we have a three button mouse you can use the middle mouse button and then just click and move around up or down left or right you can also hold down your command key and use the scroll wheel or control key on a pc and as you can see we can zoom in and out of our node editor now as i zoom in and out you might see this little box up here this is the auto navigator box and that's just going to help you as we're building large node tree structures it's going to help you to be able to navigate across your whole node tree just like that and as you zoom out once you fully zoom out it'll automatically go away okay the same thing can work inside of the viewers as well you can use your middle mouse button to move your viewer around also zoom in using the scroll wheel and your command key or control key on a pc and a quick tip is if you want to reset your viewer while you're in your viewer you can press command f and that's going to auto fit our image based on the bounds of our viewer or control f on a pc and lastly we have our inspector over here on the right and if you're familiar with the edit page or the other pages in resolve the inspector functions pretty much the same way as you select a clip say in the edit page it will load that clips properties in the inspector and the same thing is true here as we click on each node it's going to load that node's properties in the inspector for us and doing things traditionally like setting keyframes or adjusting parameters will feel very familiar if you're coming from the edit page okay now that we've looked at the interface we got a good understanding of what each zone can potentially do let's talk about nodes so what do we have here right now we've got two nodes we've got a media in node and that's the node that's coming from the edit page again if we click on the edit page we can see that's the node that we that's the clip that we want to work on click back to the fusion page this node media in is sending its signal its rgb signal over to the media out note the media out node is what sends our image that we've worked on back to resolve so anything that we want to do to change or affect our clip needs to happen in between these two nodes now how do we know if a node is connected or or where it's going well if we look at the media in node it has this little square this white square that is our output so every node will pretty much have a white square that will be able to output our image and we connect it to a yellow triangle that's our input image and if we look at it it kind of looks like it's an arrow so that's telling us the flow it's telling us the direction that it's going we're going out from the media end node in to the media out node the next thing we might want to know is how do we know what we're viewing in the monitors in our viewers well if we take a look at this viewer on the right right above it you'll see it says media out one that's letting us know that that node is loaded in this viewer now if we go down to the media out node we can see right here at the bottom there's these two dots these are our viewer dots the one on the right is highlighted letting us know that it's loading itself or sending itself to viewer two so if we wanted to we can view the media endnote in viewer one select the node and then just go ahead and press the one key and just like that we've loaded that node in that viewer again we can verify that by looking at the top of the viewer it says media in one and if we go back to the node in the node editor we can see that now the left side the left dot is highlighted so it's telling us it's sending its signal it's transmitting it to the viewer number one okay so that's just a quick look at how nodes work the basics in and out of each node so the first thing that i want to do is just be organized and rename my nodes so let's do that by right clicking on the media in node and going to rename that's going to bring up our rename tool i'm just going to name this actress all right i want to add just a simple color corrector so to do that let's go up to our node toolbar in our color correction section if you leave your mouse over each icon it'll give you a name label so you can find which node that you're looking for when you find the color corrector note just click and drag it right into our node editor now i'm hovering it over that image pipeline that we talked about earlier and you might notice that now as i hover it over there it's changed from yellow to yellow and blue when it does that you can go ahead and release your mouse so now we've connected our first node a color corrector node i can verify that by just clicking and moving it up and down we can see that it is connected if we zoom in again coming from an actress node the output from this white square going into the yellow input the yellow image input of our color corrector node the color corrector node is going out from this white square into the yellow input of the media out node let's select our color corrector node let's go over to the inspector and i'm just going to make a big color corrector we're not we're not going to actually use this just so you can see what's going on here specifically in our viewers so when i made that change right away the viewer on the right you can see is completely changed we can see the effects of what we just did and that's because we're looking at the media out node the final node in our pipeline so it's going to see everything that happens before it now on the viewer on the left viewer number one we don't see any changes and that's because don't forget we're looking at our actress note and that's happening before the color corrector so keep that in mind as you're viewing things you might be making changes and not seeing it in one of your viewers so that would probably be the case is the node order and how you're selecting and viewing each of those notes in essence we are in a way previewing or soloing the actress clip or actors node in viewer one so that's why we don't see those changes okay let's go ahead and select our color corrector and in the inspector we don't want to use this so we're going to reset our node if we go to the top right you'll see a little circle with an arrow the reset button just go ahead and click on that and that's going to reset our whole node for us and we're just going to do a quick little color correction so in the range drop down menu i'm going to go down to shadows and i'm just going to kind of blue green the shadows and bring down the gamma and then i'm going to go back up there to the range drop down and click on mid-tones and do something very similar bring down the gamma as well and back to the range drop down go to highlights and i'm just going to bring up the highlights again we can always come back and make tweaks or adjustments as needed the next thing that i want to do is i want to add a vignette so to do that we're going to use two nodes we're going to use a brightness contrast node and we're going to use a mask so let's go back to our color correction section on our node toolbar find the brightness contrast again click and drag right over our image pipeline after our color corrector node when you see it change to blue and yellow go ahead and release your mouse we can see that's connected i'm moving my node around i can see that it's connected in the pipeline and let's make our changes and adjustments so in the inspector i'm going to bring down the gain i'm going to bring down the gamma as well great i also want to bring down the saturation a little bit but for whatever reason let's just pretend that i made a change to the saturation and i don't like it i want to be able to reset just that parameter you can do so if you've noticed every time we've made a change there's this little white reset button it appears every time you make an adjustment so just go ahead and click on that and that's going to reset just that parameter for us we don't want to reset the whole node and lose the changes that we've made we just want to reset that one parameter another quick way to do that is you can actually just double click on the name of that parameter and it will reset it as well okay i'm going to just bring down the saturation a little bit all right we've added our brightness contrast we've changed and affected our image it's not finished yet we have to add our mask we want to use a mask to control and isolate our brightness contrast node so find the mask nodes in our node toolbar and find the ellipse one i'm going to leave my mouse over there you can see the name pops up i'm just going to click and drag and bring that right into our node editor now i want to view this so i'm going to view it in viewer 1 pressing the number 1 key and now we're viewing that mask now we've added a mask into the node editor but nothing's happened and that's because it's not connected so just keep that in mind you can add as many nodes as you want into the node editor but you need to make sure that it's actually connected so that way it can affect the image pipeline so let's do that so far we have been connecting our nodes with one connection and that's this yellow triangle again our background image input now there's another input it's this blue triangle and that's our effects mask input and for the most part pretty much every node will have a blue mask input and we want to connect our circle mask or ellipse mask to this note so to do that let's drag and drop this output of our ellipse mask into the blue input of our brightness contrast mask and right away we can see the results in our viewer now it's the wrong way and that's fine we can go ahead and fix and adjust that so let's go to the inspector and find the invert checkbox and click on that that's going to invert our mask for us and the next thing we want to do is put this mask in its proper place move it in the proper place we need to so underneath the invert checkbox you're going to see these center controls x and y you can just click and drag inside of that text field and move your mask y-axis or the x-axis now a great way is to do it in context on your viewer if you hover your mouse over the center control point you can see that as i hover it it changes to white just click and drag and now you can do that right inside of your viewer i'm going to put it right there all right lastly we want to change the size of our mask so in the inspector we can use the size slider controls the width and the height and the same thing is true for our viewers we can use the on-screen controls directly in the viewer of our mask to change its size perfect lastly let's just add a little bit of feathering to our mask and go to the soft edge parameter and just crank it all the way to the to the top perfect so let's just take a look at what we've done i'm going to zoom out just a little bit we've added our our clip or our node from the edit page that's represented by our actress node next we've connected a color corrector clip to balance out our clip then we've added a brightness contrast and given it a mask to make a vignette and that's sending its signal to the media out note and if we go to the edit page i'm going to use shift f4 that's going to take us right back to the edit page we can see all the results of our effects right here for us and that's something that's actually really special the ability to just click a button and work at the speed of your creativity is a powerful way to work just like that we can come back look at our edit make sure it's working make sure the playback of the other clips around it are working as well so let's go back to our clip shift 5 will take us right back into fusion all right up to this point we've been affecting our image adding effects to it but now we're ready to do some compositing so we want to bring in some new clips and composite them on top of our actress clip so to do that let's go ahead and click on the media pull tab again at the top of our interface toolbar now this is the same media pool it's available in all the other pages in resolve so all the clips that you have available to you on the edit page or the cut page are all available right here let's find our hud animation when you do just click and drag bring it right into our note editor i'm going to close down the media pool all right the first thing we should do is uh rename our node and instead of right-clicking this time i'm going to hit f2 and that's going to bring up the rename tool dialog box and let's just rename this hud next i want to view it in viewer one so press the number one key and it's gonna load that node into viewer one now if you're familiar with any type of compositing application you'll recognize that we've got a checkered box background that's letting us know that this has an alpha channel we can verify that by going up to the channel selector tool and looking at our alpha channel and yes it does have an alpha channel and go back to the color all right now we want to take this layer if you will this node and composite it on top of our actress so how would we go about doing that well we're going to go about doing that using the merge node so in our composite and transform node toolbar find the merge node click and that's like we've done before drag it over our image pipeline after our brightness contrast when we see it changed to blue and yellow go ahead and release your mouse and now we've added a merge node let's take a little look at that we're familiar with our yellow triangle input that's our background image input we're familiar with our blue triangle input that's our effects mask input but now we have a green input and that's our foreground input and really think of it that way we want to have a foreground element right in this case our hud animation and we want to add it on top of or composited on top of our background which is our actress another way you can look at it is think of the yellow triangle as track one on the edit page and the green triangle as track two on the edit page so it's just stacking them one on top of the other so let's make our first composite take the output of our hud this little white square and connect it to the green triangle input of our merge node and when we do we can now see the effects of our composite we have our hud on top of our actress i'm going to zoom in or excuse me zoom out a little bit and move this over let's repeat that process again and add a different layer go back to the media pool find the glass jpeg image and then let's just drag that right in and close my media pool with that node selected press one load it in viewer one press f2 to rename it and just so you know as i'm looking at this in the viewer i see our image and it has a completely black background i'm assuming that it doesn't have an alpha channel i'm going to verify that just by clicking on our channel selector and yeah it doesn't have an alpha channel so just so you know once we composite that it's going to completely cover our uh our background image and that's fine we can fix it we can adjust it so let's make our composite again we're going to use a merge node click and drag our merge node drag it over our image pipeline when it changes to blue and yellow release take the output of our glass node connected to the green triangle input of our merge two and just like we talked about now we've composited that but again it's covering up our image that's fine with that merged node selected let's go into the inspector and under the apply mode you'll see there's a drop down box that's got all the available composite modes that you're familiar when you've been compositing so we're going to use and click on screen next i'm going to go to this blend parameter right here and that's essentially the opacity control so i'm just going to bring it down just ever so slightly we've brought our clip in from our timeline our actress layer we've added some color correction and we've done two composites with our hud and with our glass the one thing that i did notice earlier was that i thought that the hud layer had a little bit larger resolution so i'm going to just load it into viewer one and we can see that we definitely have more information here that's not showing up on our final composite and that's fine we can just use a transform node to rescale it down for us but that brings up an interesting question and that's node order again where we connect and place our nodes will have an impact on our final image so let's just take a look at what happens if we were to add a transform node at the very end of our node tree so go to go to the node toolbar and just find our transform node just click it and drag it again right over our image pipeline after our merge two and when we go to the inspector we're gonna adjust its size okay so that's not what we wanted uh this transformer is actually affecting everything that happened before it in this case it's sizing down our actress and our hud and our glass layer all together and that's that's not what we want so we need to think about what's the most efficient way to place our nodes to insert our nodes so that it's only affecting our hud well first of all let's go ahead and delete this transform node just make sure it's selected and press your delete key and i'm thinking that if we place our transform node right after our hud node that that's only going to affect our hud node so let's give that a try again go ahead and grab our transform node and then just bring it in and connect it to our hud pipeline okay so now it's connected let's go back to our inspector and in the size parameter let's resize it and of course so now it's affecting just the hud so keep that in mind as you're working as you're adding nodes where you place your nodes will have an impact on the final outcome in this case we only want to isolate and transform the hud so make sure that you place the node in the right spot all right i'm going to use the onscreen controls here and just move this hud over just a little bit perfect let's just go ahead and add some look effects nodes just to kind of dial in our hud layer so it starts to feel a little bit more like it's a part of the scene so to do that i'm going to go to the effects library now for the most part we've been adding our nodes from the node toolbar and again those are the commonly used tools that you're going to need access to right there in the toolbar but in the effects library it has all of the nodes available inside of fusion so they're broken up for you on different categories for 3d blurs you name it take a look at each of these different categories for you each of these different categories based on what you need for your composite we're going to be in the blur category and we're going to use the defocus node but before we add that i want to do it a little bit differently so i'm going to go over here and just make a little room by dragging these nodes up and with my transform node selected just go to the defocus in and just click on that node and watch what happens because we had our transform node selected when we clicked on the defocus node fusion said i think you want to add it automatically and i'll connect it for you and that's exactly what we want so just by having this node selected and then clicking on this icon in the effects library it'll just add it for you and connect it for you automatically in the defocus node in the inspector let's go to the bloom level and let's bring it down we don't want it to be too bright so we're just going to bring that down now not only do you have all of fusion's tools available for you but because we're inside of davinci resolve you also have access to the resolve effects that you can use in the edit page and the color page that are now available inside of fusion so let's open our open effects category and go down to the effects stylize now again remember i have my defocus node selected so i'm going to go over here and click on prism blur and when i do it's just going to automatically add it for me right below that is scan lines let's go ahead and just click on scan lines as well okay i'm going to close down the effects library again i'm going to alter my my ui and just rearrange some of these notes just to make it a little bit easier for us to look at we've added our defocus we've added a prism blur and we've added some scan lines with the scan lines selected i just want to bring up the line frequency here in the inspector under appearance you can see this line frequency i'm just going to bring it up to somewhere around 11 is fine but as we're doing that i'm noticing something and that is we applied our blur and we applied our prism blur after that we applied the scan lines and what's happening is that the scan lines are cutting through our blur effect and it's not feeling natural or real so this again make sure you're paying attention to your node connection order that's very very important so what we want to do is we want to take our scan lines node and remove it and put it before our blurred nodes so let's look at how we can do that now earlier when we had a node that we didn't want we selected it and deleted it now there's a faster way of doing that and that is if you hold down the shift key and then click and drag your node you can instantly remove it out of that pipeline keeping that pipeline intact but then moving that node out of it and we want to drag it before and connected before our defocus so i'm going to rearrange some of these nodes here again click and hold and drag on my scan lines and hold the shift key down and when i hover over it we can see it changes to half yellow half blue when it does release your mouse and now it's connected again so these little tidbits like this are great for being efficient as you work inside of fusion okay so now i'm looking at my output and i can see now the order is correct first we're applying our scan lines then we're applying our defocus and then after that we're applying our prism blur and that's exactly how it should look but now that we've done that i can see my glass node is looking very very sharp and it's not the same if the hud and the glass are supposed to be on the same plane you know we need to apply those same effects that we did earlier on the hud onto the glass there's a couple ways we can do that but one of the simplest ways we can is just selecting our defocus node and using command c for copy or control c if you're on a pc copy that select our glass node and then just paste it command v or control v to paste and we've made a copy a duplicate of that note and we've just pasted it into the pipeline for our glass node all the same settings all the same right there for us i'm gonna do the same thing for our prism blur command c copy select our defocus and then paste it right in so we haven't done any playback but we can play this back and see all of our effects in context as we're working shift 4 will take us back to the edit page we can see our progress of our effect on our clip and we can watch it back in context add some sound effects add some music there's a lot of power in being able to quickly move between each page and see your editing context and your visual effects in context all right let's go back to the fusion page shift 5. in context our actress is waking up and an emergency is happening and really there should be some sort of warning text or warning light that's flashing and that's what we want to create we want to be able to add a little text that's warning her saying something is wrong so let's look at how we could do that to do that first we need to add a text node so let's go over here to our image generation nodes and just click and drag and bring our text node into the node editor i'm going to press the number 1 key and load it in viewer 1 so we can see its results again nothing's happened because we haven't connected our nodes and we haven't written any text so let's go to the inspector and let's type in warning all right so the idea is i want to be able to connect my text node into my composite but essentially it's a part of the hud so i would like it to have all the same effects that we've applied to our hud to apply to the text node so again this is very important about node order where you place your nodes is very very important so let's just for uh the sake of looking at this add our text node merge our text node into our composite now before we've been grabbing our merge from our toolbar and bringing that down into our node editor but this time we're going to do it a little different way let's take the output of our text node and connect it to the output of our merge2 and when we did that fusion is saying well it looks like you want to composite you're taking the output of one note and you're placing it over the output of another node so i'm going to assume that you want me to composite these or merge them together so i'm going to add a merge node and connect everything for you and that's exactly what we want as we added this we've added this node this text node to the end of our node tree and it's nice crisp and sharp and it doesn't have those same effects that we have on our hud so we can copy and paste those nodes like we did for the glass layer but then it comes into the issue of having multiple duplicates of these different effects nodes and managing each one and as you change one making sure you do it to you to the other so there's a an efficient way there's a smart way to think about this and if we think about it we can actually place our text node in a way that it just inherits all those effects that we've already done so let's go ahead and delete our merge we don't need that anymore and let's take our text node and move it over here next to our hud layer i'm going to move this hud and transform node up and if we connect this node and insert it at this point it should just inherit all of those effects that we've done so let's give that a try take the output of our text node and then just drag it over the output of our transform node again fusion just created the merge for us and as we can see in our viewer and viewer 2 that now it's actually taken on the effects that we've added to the hud scan lines defocus and prism blur so thinking about where you place your nodes you can actually be smart and efficient about how you use your nodes if you're familiar with using layer-based applications this is the same thing as doing a pre-comp the benefit is you're not doing a compound clip or you're not losing access to all your layers everything is still right here available for you to quickly access and change let's just change this text node around a little bit select the text node and in the inspector let's go ahead and change our font to from bold to just regular and let's bring up our size a little bit i want to move this more closer to her to the hud and to her eyes all right now you might have noticed that there's all these different tabs up here and like i said earlier when you click on a node each node is going to have a different set amount of parameters and in this case the text node has a lot of different parameters for our purposes we want to be in the shadings tab so let's go down to the color and let's just change this to somewhat of a red now you might have noticed up here this select elements so you've got different shading elements up to eight and essentially that allows you to do things like drop shadows or glows or blurs or outlines so what we can do is we can select shading element number two that's going to give us a red outline now this name here this is a custom name we can change this to whatever we want like orange globe for example now nothing has happened because we need to activate it we need to enable it so click the enabled check box and now you can see like in viewer one i'm going to go ahead and zoom in on viewer one command scroll wheel to see that it's changes now you can see we've added this outline i'm going to use the color just for example we can see it being changed as we're changing the color and we can change the thickness go through and just adjust different parameters but for our purposes i'm just going to make it this semi-orange and red color okay let's go to the softness and let's increase the softness on the x and on the y maybe even give it a little bit of a glow perfect so we've added our text we've inserted it in between the hud and the effects for it now we've got this warning sign happening in front of our actress if we play back we can see well it's just static so we really would need it to be flashing on and off or coming on and off letting her know getting her attention so we're going to do that by using the merge node and if i just scrub the blend parameter again it's also the opacity parameter if i just scrub that back and forth you can see that's kind of the effect that we want to do so let's go ahead and look at how we can animate this in order to get it to flash on and off i'm going to hit the command left arrow and that's going to take me back to the beginning of my clip you can also hit command right arrow and that will take you to the end in this case we want to start our animation at the beginning of our clip so command left arrow to go to the beginning and if you're familiar with using the inspector on the edit page then it's very similar to here in the fusion page to the right of our parameter you might have seen these little white diamonds and that's our keyframe button now with our playhead in the right frame that we want to be on and with our blend parameter we can just click on that check box and that's gonna activate a keyframe we can see it's changed to orange now we know we've added a keyframe also you can tell on the node editor on the merge three that there's an icon for a keyframe that's letting us know that that node also has keyframes okay let's take down our blend all the way down to zero i want to move forward 10 frames so that way i can set my new keyframe now i'm going to do it a little bit different i'm going to go to the text text field here of our timeline ruler it's right here on the right side the bottom right below the timeline ruler just change this from 12 to 2. i'm going to manually type that in and when i hit enter that's just going to move my playhead forward 10 frames exactly we're going to frame 22. now in the blend parameter i'm just going to click and drag that back to 1 and as you can see it automatically gave us a keyframe because we had one set previously so when we made an adjustment it just set a keyframe right away for us let's do the same thing again let's move forward ten more frames i'm just going to change that and manually change it from 22 to 32. we just move forward again 10 frames and i'm going to drag this parameter of the blend right back down to zero so essentially we've animated our warning light to come on and off so let's take a look at that command left arrow takes us to the beginning hit the space bar and there we go it's pretty much just like we talked about i'm going to just drag this autorender range bar right over here just so we can play this back okay that's not bad that's getting us where we need to be but really it would be great if we had our warning sign come on more like a flash right just hard coming on instead of a soft transition from linear you know from zero to one and back down to zero so how would we go about just making those keyframes that we've set making them come on pop-on we can do that if we use the spline editor so up here in the interface toolbar you might see our spline editor go ahead and click on that i'm going to stop playback as well i'm going to put my play head right here in the time ruler on the center keyframe at frame 22 and if we take a look at the spline editor it's pretty much broken up into two sections we have a section on the left which is anything that's got a keyframe on it any type of node that's got a keyframe will be available to us right here on this side and on the right is our graph so what we do is we activate or turn on our effect in this case we animated the blend and when we click that checkbox now that keyframe of those splines are available for us to look at and manipulate right here in the spline graph editor and don't forget you can also do the same navigational tools that we used earlier to move around pressing the middle mouse button to move the spline editor holding down the command or the control key and using the scroll wheel to zoom in and out all work right here inside of the spline editor as i move the playhead around you can see that we're animating linearly from zero to one over time and then back to zero what we wanna do is we wanna be able to find a way to hold our keyframes so that way our image pops on and then turns off on and off and we can do that if we select all of these keyframes just drag a selection box right around these keyframes and at the bottom of this spline editor you might have noticed all these different icons these are spline editable icons that allow us to manipulate and change our splines and our keyframes for different values now the one thing that we want is we want the step in icon so once you put your mouse over the step in icon go ahead and click on that and you can see visually the change that has happened to that spline now it's no longer gradually moving over time to each keyframe it's now got a hard hold keyframe so it's going to pop on and off so let's take a look at that i'm going to hit my spacebar and we can see that's exactly what it's doing now warning is just popping on and popping off okay that's looking better the next thing that we need to do though is we need to essentially add keyframes to have this effect happen repeatedly over time until the end of the clip so we could copy and paste keyframes or just manually go through and animate like we did but again we want to work dynamically we want to be able to work in a way that allows us to use the least amount of keyframes but give us the most impact so we're going to do that again by selecting all of our keyframes like we did before and again at the bottom here let's find the set loop icon it's the icon with two little squiggly lines once you find that go ahead and click on that icon and right away you can see now we have this sort of dotted line pattern that's mimicking our keyframes our original three keyframes that we set and this is a great way to work and build animations just based off of three key frames so i'm going to open up my auto render range back this way so we can see the full effect and hit space bar so again just by making three key frames now we've animated that over the entire length of the clip doing that same process over and over again and to take it even a step further what we can do is we can actually select our keyframes and use this icon down here that's called shape box if we click it it's going to make a shape box around those keyframes that we can use to warp those keyframes or in our case we want to be able to compress the timing of our keyframe so just by dragging the shape box we can actually compress the timing but in doing so it's dynamically updating our loop and now it's animating on and off much faster so again thinking and in a way that we can animate dynamically so we can do complex things but in a simple way okay that is looking pretty good i'm going to close down my spline editor and zoom out a little bit just so we can see all of our node tree structure the last thing that i want to talk about is just furthering this idea of dynamic animation and could we take that further and we can it would be nice if maybe as this warning light is popping on and off on our actress that we could have a little bit of a light glow uh appearing on her face so we're gonna do that but we're gonna do that without adding any more keyframes than we already have so let's go back to the beginning of our note tree and i'm just going to move these two keyframes excuse me move these two nodes over just to create a little bit of space and let's zoom in a little bit essentially i'm going to create this lighting effect by using another color corrector node so with my color corrector node selected i don't want to use the toolbar i don't want to use the effects library i want to do this in a much faster way so and there is we can use shift spacebar and that's going to bring up our select tool dialog box as you get to know uh each and every of the notes that are available to you you can now just bring up this dialog box and type in its name and quickly be able to find access and add a node to your to your note tree very very quickly so in this case i'm just going to type in cc and that's going to find and select my color corrector node and when i hit enter just like that it's added it straight away after the node that i had selected and so one thing i want you to be aware of is as you're building your nodes we can add as many nodes as we need but in this case if i had to send this comp to someone else or maybe even myself come back later i might see color corrector 1 and color corrector 2 and maybe i forget which note is doing which so it's important that we take the time to label these notes in this case i'm going to select both of those nodes together and then like we've done before i'm going to hit f2 to bring up the rename tool it's brought up color corrector 1. i'm going to type in base underscore cc and when i hit enter it's going to bring up the rename tool again so because i had both of those nodes selected at once when i hit the rename tool it's going to automatically bring up the rename tool for me essentially renaming my nodes in bulk so let's go ahead and rename this red light underscore cc alright so let's select our red light color corrector node and let's go over to the inspector and just change it towards red and that's uh that can work for the most part we want to be able to isolate it again like we did before on the brightness contrast node so we're going to do that same procedure of adding an ellipse node and controlling our color corrector node but we're going to use the new way of adding a node and that is shift spacebar right away just typing in ellipse hitting enter and very very quickly you can see how now because we know our nodes we can add two tools and we can add nodes very very fast okay we've added our ellipse node gonna use the on-screen controls adjust the node into position where i think it should fit best right around there is good now normally i would just go ahead and soften the edge right away but i want to leave this as a hard edge for now just so we can see our effect and then once we're done we'll come back and soften that off okay so earlier i said we're going to animate this effect without adding any keyframes and we're going to do that by using what fusion calls modifiers now a modifier is a really cool way of being able to link two different parameters even across different nodes to drive animation dynamically so let's look at how we can do that in the inspector under the strength parameter essentially if i just click and drag in the text field i'm just rough animating this myself but that's the effect that we want and we want to do that same effect of turning our strength parameter on and off based on the same timing of our keyframes we set for our warning light so if we just right click on the strength parameter and we go down to modify with there's a lot of different options for us to use but in our case we want to use the probe modifier so let's click on the probe modifier well what happened we clicked on the probe modifier our effect went away and really nothing else happened well you can verify that we've added the probe modifier by seeing our check box here next to our color wheel has turned orange and also our node in the node editor now has a keyframe icon so we've no we know that we've added something if we go to our inspector at the very very top of the inspector you'll see that there's a tools tab and a modifiers tab now up to this point that modifiers tab has been grayed out because we didn't have any modifiers in there but now that we've added one we can click in that tab and see our modifier so let's go ahead and click on that tab and there you go we can see our probe modifier and essentially what is a probe modifier well a probe modifier is a way to inspect or probe another image and use that image data to drive the effects of another parameter so we've added a probe modifier now we need to tell it which node or which image to look at there's nothing to look at we can verify that by looking at the image to probe in this little text field it's empty so there's nothing there we have to tell that to tell that probe modifier hey i want you to look at the specific note so let's go over to our merge three this is where we have our animation for our text animation now let's just click and drag and keep dragging and going all the way into the probe modifier dialog box i know it might seem a little weird to be able to drag a note all the way from the node editor into the inspector but just go all the way and let go and you'll see it now it says merge three so now we're now we've connected our probe to emerge but again nothing is happening and that's because we have to now move our center control for our probe right we added a probe modifier the probe actually has a probe which is this center position and when we move this over our text we can see that now it gets activated now we can pull this image and i'm just going to use my viewer 1 and you can see here as i move this probe over the text now when we hit play the animation of our text layer is now driving the strength parameter of our color corrector so now this animation is happening in sync together just like that and again just using our original three key frames thinking dynamically and creating complex things in a simple way remember we talked about our ellipse mask we're going to go back right now and change that to a soft edge so select your ellipse mask and then go back to the inspector and then let's just soften this up cool i'm going to deselect everything in the node editor and you can see that we're playing our clip our text animation is coming on and off and uh our cool little lighting effect is in sync with an animation just like that let's just take a zoom out and look at everything that we've done we've added our actress from our edit page we've given ourselves some color correction of vignette we've gone through and actually composited two different layers our glass layer in our hud layer and lastly we added a cool little lighting effect using a modifier so as you can see here a lot of times we start to add a bunch of nodes as we're building and as we're creating and it's going to be good if you know that there's a couple ways that we can organize our node editor and keep things a little bit cleaner and easier to come back to later so let's take a look at that if i just select these nodes here which is all the nodes associated with my glass layer i'm just going to move them over a little bit and give a little room but if i select all of these i'm going to use our keyboard shortcut of shift spacebar bring up our select tool dialog box and i'm going to add what's called an underlay and just like that an underlay is a great way to group some notes together but we're not collapsing them we're not compound clipping them they're all still available for us to look at and work on but but the cool thing is that it actually is as if it was a group so we can move this underlay around and all of our nodes associated inside of that underlay will move with it so let's go ahead and rename it and give it its own color i'm going to deselect by clicking in the node editor and then option click on the underlay hit f2 and then let's just name this glass effects and then let's just right click right there on the name and go down to set color and give it a color of pink and let's move down our node tree here and just do the same process select these nodes all associated with the hud layer shift spacebar again type in underlay and i'm going to adjust the size parameter of our underlay deselect it by clicking out into the node editor and then just option clicking on the name hitting f2 and let's rename it hud underscore effects we can right click again on its name and go to set color and let's give it navy blue and i'm just going to highlight these two nodes bring them over shift spacebar type in underlay and to be honest i'm not even typing the full word if you notice i'm just typing u and n infusion is automatically trying to find the node that you're thinking of and giving you options so underlay is right there hit enter i'm going to adjust the size of this bringing it up deselecting it option click f2 and i'm just going to say source and we can change its color as well so right away we can start to visually see what's happening here we're grouping our nodes based on the type of effect that it's happening so if i were to pass this compound to another person they could quickly be able to look at my note structure and get a sense right away what's happening and where i've placed things but even a more important thing is if you know that we're zoomed in on let's say a couple notes here we're working we want to be able to move around we can use our auto navigation tool that pops up right here but we can also use our underlays as as bookmarks if you will so in this little three dot menu here of our node editor if you click on it you'll see that all of our underlays are now available for us as essentially bookmarks so we can just click on these and quickly jump to each one as needed pretty cool little way of staying organized as well as that we can right click anywhere in our node editor and there's a lot of different ways of organizing and setting up our nodes that you have the option to use so for example force source tile pictures that's just going to make all of our source images like for example our hud and our glass effects our text layers etc large tiles so it makes it easier so little things like this to help yourself stay organized and be able to navigate around in your node editor are very very helpful so definitely explore by right clicking and looking at ways to arrange your tools lining everything up to a grid etc okay don't forget shift 4 the power of just one keystroke going back and forth between editorial and motion graphics and visual effects right here in context of your edit i hope that you can see the power in being able to move quickly between each of these pages seeing your visual effects in context of your editor really is a powerful powerful feature that's going to help you work faster and actually be more creative so i really hope that what we've seen today makes sense and that you can actually start to build your own composites and visual effects don't forget to go to blackmagicdesign.com take a look at all the different training materials download the lessons plans and find ways that you can become certified in each of the pages for result if you have any questions don't forget to go to the blackmagic forums to find out any questions that you might have thanks for watching today take what you've learned and make it better you

Channel: Blackmagic Design

Views: 122,309

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Id: mJf1-Ilgis8

Length: 58min 24sec (3504 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022