DaVinci Resolve - The Fusion Crash Course [Perfect for Beginners!]

this is the ultimate crash course for the fusion page in resolve 18.5 we're going to take a look at everything from the interface to nodes and basic compositing techniques and we're going to have a lot of fun along the way my name is Casey I help content creators make amazing things in the fusion page of DaVinci Resolve and I have a free video course available there's a link in the description below it's called the fusion Survival Guide it takes you through some of the most essential tips for actually making things in Fusion so make sure to check that out let's get into the crash course shall we so first things first what the heck is fusion fusion is a compositing app which basically means that you can put images together you can put 3D models together with images and you know put in fog and smoke and lens flares and different skies and do all kinds of visual effects like that it's also an amazing way to make Motion Graphics and animated intros and call outs and tracking things and cloning things out replacing signs and billboards doing green screen particles you can combine element moments together you can work in 3D and I mean it gets as crazy as you want you can export your own templates and share them I mean it's just there's no limit on what you can do in Fusion it's perfect for visual effects things like green screen you know making realistic looking effects but it's also awesome for graphics and animations and things like that and the coolest part is that it's built right into the interface of DaVinci Resolve 18.5 and so if you don't know if you edit with resolve anytime you have a clip on your timeline you can just click on the fusion page down here and that will bring that clip into fusion and you can do all kinds of effects and animations and that kind of thing without having to export it or convert it you don't have to render it or anything like that you're just automatically in this super amazing powerful workspace where you can do all kinds of amazing stuff and then when you're ready to put it back into your edit you just switch to the edit page and there it is it's beautiful it's exactly how it should be as far as a workflow in 2023 if you've ever used a compositing app like you know after effects or photoshop it does similar stuff but it's built right into resolve and the workflow is just chef's kiss man so let's just pick this shot from our timeline here in the edit page and I'll go down and click Fusion like this and that'll bring up the fusion page and now if you've never used Fusion before you're probably like oh gosh what is this interface what is what is any of this why is any of this let me bring up both of these viewers and let's talk about it well probably the first thing you'd notice is these two viewers here these are where you can view your clip you can scrub back and forth on the timeline here in the middle you have the yellow in and out here on the edges so that's how you scrub back and forth on your clip and you might be wondering why are there two views of the same thing well it's sort of like the idea of why you'd have two viewers in the edit page right in the edit page we have our timeline viewer on the right which is what the person who watches our movie is going to see and then we have the source viewer on the left where we can double click on a clip and kind of bring it up from our media pool and just kind of preview it it's the same same kind of idea in Fusion except for either of these viewers can be the finished result or it can be just part of our composition this is going to make a little bit more sense here in a few minutes down below we have our transport controls and then we have our toolbar we'll get into that in just a second and below that we have our nodes if you see the idea of nodes and these kind of flowchart looking things down here and you start to nope out and you go I don't I don't want to deal with any of that that's too complicated why are we doing this just give me a couple minutes to show you how it works because it's not really too complicated but it is a little bit of a different way of working so let's jump in and talk about it by default if you open a clip from the timeline like we did you'll have two nodes immediate in and a media out and they're connected with this yellow line each node is one of these little boxes and each node has one specific job for the most part and depending on what node you're using it can have a different job altogether this node's job the media in node it's job is to take a clip from our timeline and bring it into Fusion the second node's job the media out is to take whatever we plug into it and bring it back into the edit timeline okay so right now all we're doing is we're taking a clip from our timeline we're doing nothing with it and then we're putting it back into the edit timeline so if we switch over to edit guess what nothing has really changed cool awesome tool huh but if we put something in between this this is where the magic happens so if we were to go over here and grab like a blur node I can grab this and drop this in between these two nodes on this line and now this is connected in between the nodes so we're running this image through this blur and now if we go over to the inspector which works just like the inspector does in the edit page and we push up the blur size a little bit that's going to blur our image so it's just like you would apply an effect in the edit page or something like that it's just contained inside of a little box that you run things through and you kind of make a little flowchart so we have this blurry image and why is this side not blurry and this side blurry well the reason is because we can select any node and view what it's doing in either of these viewers this right hand viewer is viewing our media out one I can tell because well for one it says media out one above the viewer but also these two little dots here under this node the right one is white that means that this is loaded in the right viewer the media in we have the two dots and the left one is white which means that it's in the left viewer we can also see it says media in one right here and so we can look at our image before it goes through our blur on the left and we can look at the result of it on the right and so this is really convenient because we can look at any part of our composition any node in our whole tree even if we have 900 nodes we could look at any node on the left viewer or the right viewer if we wanted to but I like to keep the left viewer as kind of previewing specific nodes and I usually put the right viewer for media out because again it's kind of like the edit page where we have the finished result here on the right and we can look at the pieces and individual clips and stuff on the left kind of the same thing here in Fusion so now you might have noticed when I switched over to the edit page we have a blurry image on our timeline that's because it's taking this original clip sending it into Fusion running it through this flowchart which includes this blur and then putting it back on the edit page so we can affect these clips in real time that are living on our timeline okay so here's another example we have this beach picture switch over to fusion and I can take one of these icons from the toolbar and just drag this down and make a new node and we'll just color correct this purple this isn't typically something you would just do in Fusion just do a color corrector but we can really easily see that we're affecting this image we're starting with our unaffected image then we're turning it purple and that's what we're putting out on the timeline pretty awesome stuff so I can switch back to fusion and take off our color corrector switch back to the edit page and it's different so big whoop we can blur things and we can turn things purple here in the edit page if we wanted to with effects why do we need to go into Fusion Well Fusion can do some fancier stuff so I'll just take off this blur and maybe we want to do something like cut this lady out and put something behind her that is a perfect job for Fusion there are a few different ways we could do this if this were just a still frame or if this was a much simpler kind of object we could definitely grab a mask and just connect this mask to our image and I can just turn it off with this little switch so I can see what I'm doing and then I could trace her out with a mask like this and that's going to isolate her and I could put things behind her and that kind of thing and again if I switch back over to the edit page we have just her isolated right but when she moves that's going to be a problem and there's going to be a whole lot of work to animate this mask we could totally do that but in the studio version of resolve that's the paid version of resolve that's 300 we have an effect called Magic mask if I go up to my upper left and click on effects I have a list of all of the tools that are available in fusion and there are a lot if I search here I can say magic and grab magic mask and I can drag this down into my flow here and that's going to make a node and I can pipe the output of this node that's the little white square into the magic mask I'll just drop it on top of it and I can hit one on the keyboard to see what the magic mask is doing and then I could just you know do something like draw a little shape around her and that will automatically cut her out using AI could mess with some settings do a little bit of refinement here and we could track this back and forth and it will do a pretty good job of cutting her out which if I want to I could just run this into my media out so this is what we'll see I can put that on the edit page and now she's isolated there's obviously some problems and stuff with it but it took five seconds so but then we could do this and kind of put it over itself as a new layer and we could do that with a merge node so a merge node is a node that puts an image over another image and we can take the output of our media in drop that on our merge and the output of our magic mask and drop it on the merge and take the output of that and put that into media out and now we have this layer our magic mask being put right over our original footage which doesn't really look like anything right now but we could take something like some text and merge that in like this and now we have a pretty cool effect where she's being put over those letters and this specific node is only available in the paid version of resolve but this is the kind of thing that the fusion page can do these fancy things and again when we're ready to put this back in the edit we just switch to the edit page and there it is morning very awesome such a neat effect with so little effort fusion page can also do green screen so we can go from you know green screen like this to a pretty realistic looking comp we could do my favorite thing which is like putting a spaceship into a shot we can do things like clone out parts of shots like you would in Photoshop but on a video and it's all done done with these nodes so let's take a step back and just explore how nodes work I'm going to make a little room on our interface by going up to workspace and turning off show page navigation that's just going to give us a little more real estate because I want to get crazy down here so this composite of this spaceship that's outside of the car window and the lady looking out the window at the spaceship this is all put together with this little flowchart and again each node has a specific job and I'll just hold down shift and kind of drag these out and we can kind of talk about them in a little bit here again anytime that we grab a shot from the timeline it has a media in and a media out and you might see all of these nodes and go gosh how am I supposed to know all of these nodes and what all of them do here's the good news there's really only like five different kinds of nodes five different categories and then you know there's a bunch of nodes in each category but you really only need to understand what kind of category a node is to really do like 90 of what you would want to do in Fusion the first category would be like a source or an element or a noun or an image you could probably call this a bunch of different things but media in is one of those nodes it's just a image that you kind of start with a starting point if you were to go into your media pool and grab an image like a PNG and drag this down into the node graph that would also make another media in and I can hit one on the keyboard to bring this up in the left viewer I can also just click and drag a node into the left viewer to bring it up but yeah these kind of nodes do the same thing they're just loading an image right another kind of node that's similar is a generator node so up here on this toolbar if we grab this far left icon which is called a background and drag this in this if I hit one on the keyboard I can bring this up we have a black screen this generates a solid color so by default it's black but you know we could make it orange or pink whatever we want but really each node has one job this job of the background node is to make a solid color background another note that's kind of like that would be the text plus node I'll hit one on the keyboard we don't see anything but if we go over to the inspector I type some text this node's job is to make some text so anytime you want to make text infusion you pretty much use the text plus node like this and it makes an image with this generated text so all of these nodes do similar things they're either bringing in or creating an image okay so these are image nodes I'll do a fancy thing here in Fusion if I hit shift spacebar that'll bring up my select tool panel and this is a nice way to just be able to search for any node you want and I'll type UND that's going to bring up an underlay if I hit add that makes a little box around our nodes which we can label and we can kind of move them as a group that kind of thing but I'm going to double click off of that hold down alt and click on this box and I can hit F2 to rename it and we'll call this image nodes so these are image nodes I can right click and set the color for that so we'll just call these like teal right so that's one kind of node the next kind of node would be an effect an effect is something like a blur or a color correction or something that kind of changes an image right so these are Source images but an effect changes an image like a blur or a color correction or brightness and contrast curves that kind of thing all of these nodes change images and so if we run an image through something like a blur it blurs it if we run it through a color corrector it colors it if we run it through brightness and contrast it brightness and contrasts it run it through curves it curves it okay so those are the effect nodes and you always run an image through an effect it's really helpful to kind of think about it that way that an image always runs through an effect you don't put an effect on top you don't add an effect to it any kind of effect node you run an image through it now a similar node to a effect node would be a transform node here kind of in the middle we have this little icon with the two little arrows this is a transform node if we grab this and drag that down and put that in between our media in and media out this image runs through the transform just like an effect but what this transform does is it can scale it rotate it change its position that kind of thing and what's really neat about that is that you can build things in a modular way you can think about this like as a flowchart right first I want this image then I want to scale and rotate it and move it and then you know you could have another transform if you want to and you know size it up and that kind of thing and so you're taking it rotating it and scaling it and then you're scaling it some more and then you're putting it out to the timeline and then you can turn off any of these nodes in any order you want to see the result of it with or without the nodes if you're familiar with the color page it's a very similar way of working it's very modular so you kind of build things in steps and at any time you can rearrange them turn them off for on ADD or take away things to get a different result so that's kind of its own kind of note as a transform node we'll just make an underlay here to keep things consistent there we go transform node the next type of node would be a merge node so right under our transport controls here to the right of this second divider we have this little icon this is a merge node I can grab this and drag this down and this node has one job and its job is to put an image over an image so you start by kind of running an image through it like an effect but then you put another image on top and so maybe I'll have an image like media N2 this Flying Saucer I can take the output of that that's the little gray square and drop that on my merge after I've ran my background through it like this and now I have one image over another now if you're like me when I was first getting into Fusion about this point you'd be like why in the world does it take so much effort to put an image over another image where are the layers why can't you just drag an image on top of another image why all this why do I have to hook things up put a merge node in here and take this output and put this into the input and all that why do I have to mess with that and I understand that sentiment before this I was big into compositing with After Effects back in the day I've used Photoshop quite a bit in fact even in the edit page you could take a clip like this and drag a UFO on top of it and it's not that hard it takes like two seconds to put a layer over another layer even in the edit page so why is it so complicated in infusion if Fusion is so powerful what the heck man well the idea here is that you have lots and lots of control so not only are you putting an image over another image but you can tell it in the workflow here exactly where to do it and you can even use the same image and put it over itself a bunch of different times and so you can essentially kind of duplicate things just by making new merge nodes and using the same image which is very very powerful the other thing is that if you bring an image into your flow and you want to merge it over something else you can actually just take the output of this node and drag it onto the output of whatever you want to merge it over like this I can just drop it on this white square and then boom it makes that merge node you don't have to mess with stuff so it's actually just about as fast as dragging a layer on top of another layer so it's really not as bad as it seems like it might be and after a while once you get working with nodes you'll realize how nice it is to work this way and to have this control over exactly how the image pipeline goes together one thing to mention at this point is all of these nodes have these little triangles and a little white or a gray Square what are these things what's that about well the white or gray square is the output of the node so this is going to connect to whatever comes next so anytime you grab the output of a node you're piping the image that it makes into the next node wherever that is okay for the inputs there are different colors and the colors are very very very very very important usually the main input for a node is yellow and the the secondary input is green and you can kind of figure out what the colors mean just by mousing over them there's a little pop-up so this is merge one background so for the merge the yellow is the background and the green is the foreground and so whatever image I have connected to the green that's going to be on top it doesn't really matter which direction anything goes I can put these nodes wherever they want it's all about the color that it's connected to and so you have to be really careful which colored input you put into the node that you're using because it can do different things for a lot of effect nodes they only have a couple inputs the yellow which is the main input and then the blue which is the effect mask speaking of masks let's talk about a mask a mask is just a way to limit what a node does to an area of the screen for instance this merge node it has one job its job is to put this Flying Saucer over the background if I want to only tell this to do that at a certain place I can grab something like I don't know an ellipse mask and take the output of that ellipse mask and put that in Into the Blue input of the merge and now it's only going to merge that image over inside of that mask right and so that's really cool again because you have lots and lots of control over exactly what your node is doing and where it's doing it so putting a mask on a node is basically just saying hey node whatever you're doing just do it right here inside of the mask and that works for any kind of note so merge node only merges inside of the Mask a media in node only loads the media inside of that mask if we put this on an effect node it's only going to do that effect inside of the Mask lots and lots of control so those are kind of the fourth and fifth kinds of nodes we have our merge node and our masks and there's a few different kinds of masks depending on what you're after but these are really the five like major kinds of notes there are a few other ones but these are the main categories that you need to know about and what's cool is you can kind of think about how you would put a image together using these categories for instance if we have our green screen we're going to want a background of some kind so I'll grab this office background from our media pool and just drag that in and we have two image nodes here our media in one which is our green screen I'll just hit F2 to rename that and our media N2 which is our office background bring that up on the left viewer and now we can think about what we want to do we want to put this green screen clip over this background so we can do that by just disconnecting our green screen from our media out taking our office background into our media out and so now this is our clip and we can take our green screen and put it over by dragging the output over the output like that that'll make a merge node again the foreground is connected to the green the background is connected to the yellow and let's say we want to get rid of the green we can run this through an effect I'll just hit shift spacebar and type here and there are a bunch of different keyers here we're going to use something called the Delta here that's kind of the main green screen here inside of fusion and I'll just grab our background here get rid of our background green screen is like its own huge world but basically you can go through and adjust your settings and refine your selection to where you get a really nice selection of your subject and I can hit two on the keyboard and bring this up and now we have our green screen gone and we have our subject here over our background and then again we just think of this this in steps we want to get rid of the background and now we want to make him smaller so we can use a transform node I'll just grab this and drag this down in between our keyer and our merge and we can just scale them down put him over here and maybe we don't like this framing maybe we want to put this in a 16 by 9 crop we can do that a lot of different ways one way we could do that is just add a crop node like this and for our size 1920 by 1080 we could transform our background transform our foreground and kind of resize things maybe we want our background a little bigger maybe we want to flip it move our foreground guy around a little bit too to get this looking just how we want and now the colors don't match he's too low contrast and so we can color correct our foreground anywhere we want in this chain I'd recommend right after the key here we could do something like grab our brightness and contrast and drop that in anytime you're color correcting something in Fusion you want to make sure you predivide and post multiply so I'll click on that and here we can color correct this just by pushing up the contrast a little bit of saturate station pushing up the gain maybe take the gamma down a little bit and now we have a much better match with our background and you see how we're kind of building this in steps we have a green screen and then we key it then we do our color correction then we transform it then we put it over our merge and then we merge it over our background which is also transformed and then we crop it and then we put it out to the timeline so we're kind of making our own little flowchart here that we can easily read and find all the steps for what we've made and at any point we could take one of these and turn it off or turn it on rearrange it do all of those things and see all the little Parts it's all laid out here in a map and it's a really really nice way to work maybe we decide our background is too sharp so maybe after our transform we can put a blur we'll take this blur and just push it up a little bit just to give a little softness to our background here's before and here's after makes it look a little bit more realistic and we just build this in little Parts very cool we've been looking at some visual effects stuff in Fusion but we can also do a lot of Motion Graphics and things like that for instance we have this little subscribe animation where a cursor comes in and clicks that subscribe button just like that and this is made in pieces we start with a red rectangle and we're using that same shape and kind of changing its color changing its position and then putting it under itself then we're color correcting that gray and animating that color correction where it starts red and then we're turning it gray we're putting this over a background that we generated then we're putting text on top of that and we're putting our animated cursor over that speaking of Animation you can animate pretty much anything in Fusion all you have to do is go to a frame where you want to set a value let's just animate a transform you can select this and go to the inspector and you can click on one of these diamonds to add a keyframe and this works just like it does in other pages of resolve so maybe we'll just keyframe the angle and when this is orange we're on a keyframe that's just telling Fusion that at whatever frame we're at which is frame 20 we want angle to be zero then we can move to a different frame like I don't know frame 25 and we can change that angle and now that's going to animate in between those two keyframes so here at frame 20 we're at zero and then it turns at frame 25. and that's pretty much how everything is animated inside of fusion there's a way to look at what you have animated in the spline panel in the keyframes panel the spline panel is a graph of your animation and you can pick the keyframes and kind of adjust how they animate in between each other whether you want them to animate quickly or slowly or slow down and stop or stop really suddenly you have a lot of control here and in the keyframes panel you can adjust the timing of your different elements and you can also trim any node to only happen at a certain time so here we have our brightness and contrast which turns things gray and that's starting at frame 23 and so rather than keyframing that color correction we're just turning on that node at frame 23. so we turn on that color correction node and it turns it black and white there are so many tools inside of fusion so many cool things that you're able to do and we're just barely scratching scratching the surface there's a whole 3D workspace where you can move things around in 3D and use 3D cameras and everything like that I mean it's just wild and if you're a content creator looking to learn Fusion groundcontrol.film is the place you want to be we have all kinds of training on Fusion that'll take you from not really knowing much of anything about compositing to being able to create whatever you want to create we have a free mini course called the fusion Survival Guide that'll teach you my top tips for working with nodes we have a course on Pro compositing and visual effects infusion and we have new Fusion educational content coming out all the time but for now definitely check out the mini course there's a link in the description and hopefully by now you understand enough about nodes to kind of jump in and get out of your comfort zone a little bit Fusion is so much fun because it really allows you to do anything you can use this free tool that's built in DaVinci Resolve to make some awesome movie Magic you know what I'm saying so cool so I know that's a lot to take in Fusion is a very very powerful app I also have a ton of other videos on Fusion here on this channel and yeah I hope this helps inspire you to make something awesome and be creative and you know do the movie Magic because that's what it's about man so much fun and I had fun being here and you could have you had fun too and so we're basically we're basically best friends now

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 158,896

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, davinci resolve tutorial 2023, davinci resolve 18.5 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 18.5 update, davinci resolve 18.5 tutorial, casey faris fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, how to use fusion, how to use fusion in davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic fusion tutorial

Id: IxPaoQsjO50

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023