DaVinci Resolve Fusion for Beginners | Introduction to Visual Effects

if you are new to davinci resolve and perhaps just vfx and compositing generally then i totally understand why the fusion page may seem a little bit daunting that's totally cool i understand as i say i was there myself at one point and we all have to start somewhere it is a huge program but in this video we're going to be covering some of the basics for you looking at the interface looking at some of the tools and some of the ways that you can use them to power up your video editing and do more interesting things so fusion actually has a relatively simple interface it's made up of a couple of viewers this central area here which has got your render range your transport controls your toolbar your node editor tree and then your inspector just like the rest of davinci resolve you can also turn on and off certain areas of the interface so you can turn off nodes you can turn off your inspector you can turn them all back on again and let's just turn those on to begin with you've also got the media pool which is familiar to you if you've been working in the edit page you also have the effects library which again relatively familiar to you as well the clips which actually functions a little bit like clips in the color page obviously there's nothing in my timeline at the minute so there's nothing showing and again we've got a spline editor we've got the keyframe editors this is how we start to fine-tune our animations and things like that also the metadata tells us a little bit about the clips that we're working with and obviously the inspector you've probably seen before but it's where we change parameters for particular nodes and clips so in the node editor we have a big blank canvas essentially and this is where we're going to put all of the different tools that we are going to be using inside of fusion now the easiest way to get into fusion when you're working is tending to go from the edit page into fusion so let's just look at this i have a clip in my media pool that i'm just going to bring in and i'm going to drop down this is a 4k clip of london and i've just dropped that into my timeline which is a 1080p timeline you can see here 1080p timeline so that's showing up inside of my edit page and i'm scrubbing through nicely let's say i wanted to play with this clip infusion there's the easiest way to now get into fusion is just make sure the playhead is parked over the clip and then hit the fusion tab and immediately we will be taken into fusion if you wanted another way of doing it you can also right click and then go up to open infusion page and you'll get the same thing what you'll notice is that we have our little node editor area now populated with two nodes a media in node and a media out node this is the very simplest breakdown inside of the fusion page because you have to bring media in and then you have to send it out and there's a flow between the two from this little white output to this little yellow input and tends to be that the case that triangle controls here denote an input and the square one is an output so that's very easy to see and we are noticing that we've got a media in and then a media out and then everything that we need to do to this clip sits in the middle via different tools and different nodes and they all have to match into this flow in like a flowchart style that's the very basics of it and again if we come back out to the edit page you'll see that it's always all frame accurate so if i scrub to the end of my clip here and then jump into fusion that's exactly the clip that we'll start on that's a good time to point out this render range in the middle here you can see that we run it from all the way down here all the way to the end of our clip and it's marked in frames rather than seconds so that's quite important thing just to notice equally we've got this toolbar underneath and this is where we're housing some of the most common nodes and tools and effects and things that we want want to do to this particular clip for example let's have a little bit of a closer look on the left hand side here we have our basic generators the text is going to be a particularly interesting one as is the background we have some basic color correction effects here we have our compositing and our transforms in this section here we then have our masks our particles and our 3d work as well so anything we want to do in 3d space then we've got some tools over here that's for another video though let's just look how we can simply do something to this image and affect it in a particular way first thing we might want to do is we might want to color correct this image so let's get the color correction tool and we can simply drag that down and let it go now by default you'll notice that it hasn't done anything it's not connected to anything we can also see we've got different inputs on this node in comparison to the media out and media in nodes which again have different inputs again so this node has a little bit more flexibility than maybe these ones do and then likewise whether we're using the text node or maybe the paint node or the blur transform merge whatever these different nodes are they all have different inputs depending on the things that you can do to them and you notice that when i select the color corrector and come up here i have a whole bunch of parameters that i can now affect in that color corrector node so for example i can start pushing things towards green only i can't because nothing's actually happening and again that's because things aren't connected in this flow that we talked about earlier so what i need to do is bring this color corrector down into this flow and to do that is actually a couple of ways that we can do it so first of all let me just remove my color corrector for the time being so first thing i can do if i want to add a color corrector after the media in node simply select the media in node you can see it's highlighted in orange press the color corrector and that will automatically add the color corrector node in the flow after the media in and again similarly if i wanted to add a blur after the color corrector let's get the blur tool make sure the color corrector is selected press the blur and it's now added so i've now got a color correction and a blur and they're all in the pipeline if however i wanted to maybe remove the blur for now one of the great ways of doing this very quickly without having to disconnect our flow which is done by simply clicking on the right half of the arrow between the connections like so rather than doing that the easier way to do it is to simply hold the shift key down and then left click and drag out and then that's now removed it but not disconnected this flow equally i can do the same and bring it back by pressing shift and bringing it back and letting go so that's very simply we've brought everything in in fact we're going to move the blur for now and we're going to work on this color corrector so let's select the color corrector and let's push things towards green and you can see that we're now affecting the clip as we thought we might have done before we can again change saturation levels we can do a whole range of things that affect the way the color corrector is affecting the clip that's feeding into it and that's a key thing the color corrector is affecting the media in because it's affecting what's coming into it so we've got a background input and this is why it's affecting what's coming in to this particular node so let's just reset that by coming in here coming up to the top and i can turn it on and off and i can also just reset it so let's reset that for the time being we've got a color correction there and i was thinking that this particular shot looked a little bit on the warm side perhaps so i might just try and cool it off slightly so let's use the color corrector to do that so let's just push things a little bit more towards the cooler colors that we want to and there we go we've just made a very quick change in the color temperature so we wanted to maybe just cool things off a little bit and now it's time to bring the blur in so let's bring the blur in as well so again what we did earlier we're going to do shift and drag and drop it on and it joins the flow equally what i can also do is i can let's just change that again let me take the output and drag the output onto the output of the color corrector let go and what this has done is it's now created a merge node and the merge node also lives on the toolbar here the merge node is really important because the merge node allows us to combine two images together in a background and foreground manner this is really useful when you're bringing things on top of another so you're compositing one layer onto another in this case we don't want to do this we actually do want to have the blur part of the flow so let's bring that in like we did before using the shift key to do so i'll come back to the merger in just a second so now we have a blur and what you'll notice is if i turn the blur off you'll notice the blur is not affecting the clip now it is affecting the clip and i can also change the level of blur that we have by simply coming up to my inspector and again changing my blur and choosing a few different ways the blend very much like an opacity or like the blend in the color page you can use to change the level of that blur that you might want so you can change that to make it slightly less blurry if you want like a sort of soft focus effect that's where that comes in equally this little dot resets things as well individual parameters so we've got a basic blur on there and we're going to maybe just increase that blur a little bit so it blurs everything sort of as we want it perfect so we're then blurring the image so you can see how we've actually softened it off and color corrected it and how we've also now blurred it as well and it's all part of that flow when i come back to the edit page you can see that we're ready to go we've got a nice blurred effect but let's say this was part of a title sequence and as we said earlier we might want to bring some text in over the top well let's try and do that in the node toolbar we have the text plus tool and we can drag that onto the canvas again now notice that the text plus is exactly the same if i come into my edit page go to effects library come down to titles and the text plus node this is exactly the same as the way we see it infusion is the text plus node and the inspector shows you that it's exactly the same type of node and tool so that's a really useful way and actually you can sometimes create your text inside of the edit page and then bring that into fusion for fine tuning if you'd like to but for now we're working on a one in one composite so we want this all to work in this one clip rather than having multiple layers of things stacked up so let's go back into fusion and we're going to bring this into the flow because at the moment we can't see it this is also a good time to point out these two different viewers you'll notice that there's nothing in viewer one and there's something in viewer two and the reason is if you notice underneath the node there's a little icon here that displays which viewer we are monitoring this particular node in so currently the media out node which is obviously the master compositing level of node is being viewed because it's got a little white dot in the right hand side it's being viewed in viewer two and none of the other nodes are being monitored individually we're only seeing some of these things because we're seeing them inside of the media out let's take this text tool and we type in our title but again nothing's showing so let me press the keyboard shortcut 1 on the keyboard to bring it up in my viewer on the left so you can see how the icon has changed now to show me what is being displayed in viewer 1 and what is being displayed in viewer 2. this is really helpful because we can now work on our text independently of our composition if we need to and we can do some sizing and things like that so let's just change our particular let's go with a sort of an old-fashioned look drag it up a bit make it bigger and we can see we've got our title but again at the moment it's not part of our composition if i come across and look at the edit page you'll see it's not there so come to fusion and i'm quite happy that i like my text now which is great and now what i need to do is incorporate it into the composition well to do that we can do a couple of things because we are compositing text over the top and we're not including it into the image pipeline here we need to use that merge node that we mentioned earlier now there's a number of different ways that we can do this but by far and away the fastest way of doing it is to simply take the input drag it down onto the output of the node that we want it to follow letting go and it will automatically create a merge and you notice up pops our title that's a very quick way another way of doing it is to simply do the shift and drag option we looked at earlier let go and it will automatically create us a merge i don't particularly like this method because it puts my text node all the way over here and now i've got to reposition it just to keep things looking in order so we have text one piping in to the merge and you'll notice that we've got the text coming into this green foreground and the background is being affected because it's coming into this yellow background input on the merge so that's really very handy indeed because now we can work on the foreground independently and we can work on the background as well the merge node by default has its own list of parameters here that we can do to change things particularly you'll be interested in potentially the sizing and the center position of this particular node and you'll notice when i do that what it does is it actually moves the entire composite of this particular bit of text and i can double click on the label to set it back again if i change the size i'm changing the sizing and that looks like it's not doing anything particularly but if i was to move my text node and say select my text node and then move the text down you'll notice i can do this by the on-screen controls let's say i move that down to this position and now i take the merge node and change the sizing you'll notice that it affects the size based on the overall 3840 2160 4k frame that i was working in let me just reset that for now one of the benefits of the merge node is also if we want to do any compositing effects like the apply mode for say screen or for overlay we can start getting some of those very common photoshop style effects inside of davinci resolve fusion let me just set that back for now so we've now got a very basic understanding of how the media flows through from the media in to the media out and enables us to add certain effects to the pipeline and also to bring in other images and composite them over the top and merge them all together now that is a very simplistic way of looking at things and before we finish i just want to show you one more final thing which is masks and how we would use these masks to again affect certain areas of the image in fact let's just reposition my text making sure the text is selected and you'll notice that before i did it over here in this viewer but because this is selected i can actually affect a parameter in either viewer so there we go so i've repositioned my text just to the top and what i want to do now is to change the masking area of this particular text with a mask tool so we're going to use a shape so in this case i'm going to put a rectangle in and this rectangle then feeds into the mask input on the text and you'll notice now how what it's done is it's confining the text to just be inside of that rectangle and now what i can do is if i select my rectangle i want to show it in viewer one by pressing the one key there's my rectangle if i move it up you can also see the outline of it in the viewer on the left as well there we go but now i've just gone and repositioned my rectangle here so now all we're seeing is we'll only see the london text when it is inside this and if i would change the position of the rectangle you'll notice how my text disappears so this is a great way of having the text reveal nicely onto the screen if you wanted to because as with everything we can animate the position of this rectangle using keyframes which again if you're familiar with the keyframes in the edit page keyframes work very similarly inside of fusion and normally what we would do in this instance is we would move to the point in the clip where we want the title to be showing on screen in this position we'd mark a keyframe so we're at rectangle i'm going to just change the center position by marking a keyframe i'm going to get back to the beginning and i'm going to just change the position of this by moving it up to here and now we've got an animated box that reveals our text as we go through now this is just going to take a second to render you'll notice this green render range just rendering and caching everything to the memory this is useful particularly if you've got something that's particularly heavy it will just quickly do that for you as it plays back not dissimilar to the ram preview in after effects and now we've got a look at how this is going to look if i hit play now there we go and it's going to animate slowly over time and that might be the effect we're going for who knows i'm not to say what you're going to do because that literally the world is your oyster inside of you and there's so much that you can do let me jump back out to the edit page and show you that everything is now working as it should as we expected it to and we've got again our reveal of our title london is playing equally if we wanted to change that blur so that it doesn't stop blurring immediately so perhaps after the first 40 frames we're going to get that blur to change its animation so for here we're going to get again a keyframe added we're going to move back to the start we're going to change the blur so it's not blurry and now when we come back to the edit page you'll notice that the image is going to slowly blur as the title starts to appear but there we are guys in its simplest form that is that and in other videos i'll be looking at some other elements of the fusion page and how we can use it for even more complicated things such as green screen removal or for painting over things in the frame that you don't want rotoscoping more advanced title creation animation things like that we'll be getting into our splines and our keyframes so do stick around for that if this video has been helpful hit the like button do let me know that this was useful any questions that you have pop into the comments because i do try and answer any questions that i'm able to and if you're new around here and you haven't subscribed yet get subscribing please it'd be lovely to see you as part of the community also you'll be able to then turn on the notification bell so that you don't miss any videos as and when we upload them thanks very much indeed guys there'll be some other suggestions of other videos you might like popping up on the screen in just a sec but for now thank you very much for watching and i'll see you in the very next video take care

Channel: Alex Cameron - Depiqd

Views: 581

Keywords: davinci resolve trainer, davinci resolve tutorials, davinci resolve tips, davinci resolve for beginners, davinci resolve fusion, davinci resolve fusion tutorial, davinci resolve fusion for beginners, davinci resolve, davinci resolve 17, fusion vfx tutorial, resolve fusion tutorial, resolve fusion titles, resolve 17, davinci resolve training, davinci resolve free, davinci resolve studio, introduction for beginners, fusion beginners introduction, resolve fusion intro

Id: MiYalE5xtwc

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021