DRFX: EVERYTHING You Need to Know

d r f x if you've grabbed any third-party titles effects transitions for DaVinci Resolve in over the last year odds are the process was made much easier because of drfx files in this video I'm going to talk about what they are why they're so cool um their use cases and I'm going to walk through how you can create your own to organize or share or even sell your own presets for DaVinci Resolve now as I talked about in a previous video a lot of the really cool Fusion macros and presets even that you use on the edit page individual resolve are really just text documents everything in the fusion page can be saved as plain text and if you package that up you can create a DOT setting file that then tells resolve to rebuild that composition and then that is what you have access to here on the edit page drfx files Go Way Beyond that let me demonstrate here I have a blank timeline and I just have a still um of DaVinci Resolve here but here in my finder you see I pulled up and here I have a drfx file this is the installer for one of my new products 3D Screen Pro and if you were to purchase this product you would get this DRX file and all you or anyone has to do when they have one of these is just double click and as long as you are in resolve 17.2 or newer it'll give you this pop-up do you want to install you can click install maybe give it a second or two to think about it but then now because I just installed it if I come to effects Sterling Supply Company in my effects Library I have a new sub folder here Master 3D screen I can look at that and all these presets were just imported and I will now have access to these in any future project I make and I can just take one of these and if I just drag that onto this clip I can play through and wow I have this really amazing 3d effect that's available now but hey that's not what this video is about but the reason we are able to have 25 different presets now loaded into resolve in a few seconds is because of drfx files but it's already time for our first little quick bonus tip if you would rather read a plain text document instead of watching this video I have good news if you come up to help documentation developer just click that it will open a window in your inspector with a few different folders here if you click Fusion templates and then read me hey you will have this really Nifty text document that outlines different Fusion effects and how you can get them into the ad page including drfx files all of the cool stuff we're going to talk about in this video is also here if you want to reference or search through in different ways it's super helpful there are still a few things I have to reference every once in a while in here a good place to know and also uh worth knowing generally where this documentation is if you want to poke around with any other more advanced stuff like scripting this document also talks about the anim curves modifier but that that is its own video also but that video hey is actually coming I've said it's coming for a while it's coming but back to drfx files themselves else check this out this is really cool if I have this drfx that I just installed um if I click that I can go in and actually change this suffix now on Windows and Mac you might have to do this a few different ways even on Windows I had to go in and change the settings so all my files it always shows the suffix in the name but that will be up to the individual user but because I can see this dot drfx I can go in and if I actually clear out that drfx and just type in zip I will click away it'll give me a little warning because hey I'm doing something weird if I click OK it changes that to just a zip file and if I open that zip file and extract that to that same location I can go in and see yeah now it has a normal folder I can click in that and I just have an edit folder an effects folder and then that Sterling supply company subfolder and then another subfolder that we saw for 3D Screen Pro I finally opened that and hey we have all of those presets and not just those presets but you can see alongside of those we also have the custom thumbnail we got access to in the edit page so if you ever want to crack open a drfx just change that suffix you're good to go but we also just touched on a lot of super important stuff there especially if you want to make your own drfx file to share or sell you sort of need to start reverse engineering from here and there's a few really important things you need to keep in mind you'll notice that alongside when I still had that drfx file I had this main edit folder when I'm packaging up an effect to share or sell I always start with just a plain folder that's just called edit this is essential just edit no Extra Spaces or numbers because the location where resolve will drop this drfx is in a very specific place in the folder structure so you just need a plane folder called edit and then inside that I have effects but here you can also have different options you can have a folder for effects generators titles and Transitions and if we look back in resolve under underneath these toolbox we have those same options transitions titles generators and effects so you can have a drfx file with all four of those folders here with presets in each of those and if you just install that one drfx it will drop all of those presets in the appropriate folder so resolve recognizes them and uses them in the correct way yes presets sometimes have to be built a little differently for how you want to use them but if you drag a preset that is meant to be in effect into the generators folder it won't work but from here stuff starts getting pretty exciting because inside effects I have a different folder Sterling supply company and as we saw here when I open up FX along with some others I've bought here we also have Sterling Supply Company especially if you are making lots of presets or if you're making your own but just want a further organization instead of dropping everything in this root effects folder which you can see I apologize stuff like test projects and stuff in here it can get messy really quickly but if you drop it in a subfolder that cleans things up so nicely and you can see here for my products I even have an additional folder so 3D Screen Pro you have all these that we just dropped in so back in our folder structure showing Supply Company 3D Screen Pro and then you have all of these effects now let's talk about these custom thumbnails not only is this super cool uh for some things it's going to be almost essential if we look back at 3D Screen Pro for an example you see all these custom thumbnails do a really good job of communicating specifically what that effect does the certain angle of the clip on in an image plane and then the camera movement so you can get an idea you can always scrub over like I am here or you can just get a quick idea from the thumbnail and then drop it on and you're good to go and if you want a custom thumbnail all you need to know is that you need to have a PNG file with the exact same name as each individual effects dot setting file so here you have 3D screen one 3D screen one but there are two different kinds of files so resolve recognizes them and then pulls them in now these thumbnails are very small and resolve will scale down but especially if you're sharing these files and especially especially if you have lots of different presets there's no reason to have these be larger than they need to be I have this saved in my little utility to resize pictures but they recommend a resolution of 104 pixels by 58 pixels and that is super important to keep in mind because if you are then creating these thumbnails you don't want to go too detailed you don't want a lot of like fine information or text you see I keep these very bold big bold arrows and that works pretty well and if you do have text usually I keep it only to a word or two and really scale that up in frame so that when it gets down to that low low resolution it works great if I just go back to my this main Sterling Supply Company folder and scroll down you see some of my more free presets yeah I just have mostly one big chunky uh piece of text and then I have this circle from Proto in the background to sort of recognize them all as my effects there's one more pretty giant super useful feature of drfx but I I want to do a little bit of an aside to talk about where these drfx files go and if necessary how to remove them I installed this 3D Screen Pro drfx earlier but if we hop over to the fusion page a lot of people might not know this in general but if I come to effects I have templates and if I open edit you have those same four folders and you can browse any of the presets from those for instance if I come to generators open that up go to Sterling supply company and I scroll down I can just drag in a Proto another of my free presets and here this is an end page effect but I can drag it right to my node viewer in Fusion open it up get crazy with it dive in change anything you want modifier learn from it it's here but if I come back to just edit and I come up to these three dots I can go to show folder now we'll open up a browser window and hey we have the same four folders earlier but in our main search bar here if I just go back one folder to templates you see we have a folder for use on the edit page or the fusion page but now underneath we have a lot of drfx files and these are all of the drfx files that are loaded in my version of resolve when you open or launch a drfx file all it's really doing is copying that entire drfx file to this location and then resolve is able to look inside because it's just a zip file read all those presets look at those thumbnails and more so in our example if I didn't want this 3D Screen Pro anymore I could take that just delete it go back to resolve I would likely have to restart resolve but then this preset would be entirely wiped from my system actually let's check because it looked like it did a little thing open up it's a strong Supply Company yeah 3D Screen Pro is now gone but hey I could always hop back in this instance I would have to go back and change that zip to drfx yes double click that again It'll ask me hey do you want to install it again it won't say again but hey install that and we're back up and running open it back up boom 3D Screen Pro all right so now we have the last major feature of drfx files and it is very very cool but it might get a little bit more technical than we've got so far I'm gonna try to demonstrate smoothly here I've rigged up a simple animation in After Effects where we have a resolve logo that slides on screen holds and then animates back out now this is animated with anim curves but again that's not what this video is about we have brought this logo into our scene with a loader node this is not a logo that was in our media pool and we dragged in that would function a little differently we're using a loader node so uh in that loader node I am pointing to the specific location on my hard drive where that file exists so as this stands right now if I were to package this up even package it in a drfx and send it to someone else uh if they were to use this file uh this is pointing to my hard drive where this file is it wouldn't work for them it would go offline it'd be a mess now what I'm about to do next you could do in a few different orders I'm going to do it in a way that I think makes sense I'm going to go into this loader node and as you see I have the final file name here resolve logo.png and everything before that I'm actually going to delete and I'm going to type in setting with a capital S colon and when I click off that will go red you see that actually goes offline but I am doing this at the very end of my scene right before I package it up right so now I'm going to select these four nodes right click make a macro I can just name this like resolve logo I'm not going to add any custom controls I don't need those but I'm coming to file save as or save as group and I'm going to navigate to a specific folder I've set up I will click save and then I can close and now if I go to that folder you see we have that resolve logo setting but then hey I also have that resolve logo PNG this is not where that loader was originally looking to I have a fresh copy of it here and this is important at least for now there's a small issue maybe a bug that I've been running into I didn't run into it for a long time it sort of kicked up around 18 coming out so I hope it gets taken care of I'm gonna walk through it if it's something you run into this is how you'll get around it so I created that setting file right I'm going to hop into a fresh Fusion composition and if I drag that setting file in that resolve logo will still be offline but there's nothing wrong here we just need to sort of like shake it a little bit if I just go into that file name I'm going to go delete that last G on PNG and then type that back in that'll give us this little prompt you want to reset these options click yes then that will bring in that logo but importantly it is looking to the logo that is stored directly next to the setting file wherever that setting file goes so now I believe we should be able to I'm going to close this group copy this whole back and I'm actually going to go to that setting file open that in this little text window select all of that paste in that fixed copy and then nav I test that drag that in boom that little fix is ironed out so now if we open that up and check this is not looking to a specific point on my hard drive but rather a relative point it's saying okay look where the dot setting file for the whole preset is stored and in that folder look for this logo so if we were to package this up in a drfx file and send it anywhere else in the world if resolve open that drfx got to this specific effect in that drfx it would look at where the setting file is located inside the trfx and beside that would be this logo this is the main system that I showed off when I released a previous preset using over a hundred different website and social media logos and a pop-up animated lower third but you can use this in so many different ways you can include fbx messages for entire 3D scenes or even uh Luts for color grading if you have a logo or a specific graphic if you're creating like a YouTube pop-up animation you want the YouTube logo included you can just have a file for that instead of trying to recreate a graphic using like masks or something native infusion it can save a lot of time for sure and it opens up so much more that you can do with presets that you intend to share wow and at least as it stands right now that is the deal with drfx files I hope this was helpful I hope you create your own drfx and fusion effects in general and share them all over the place it's an amazing little ecosystem that's being built it's very cool jump in get involved thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Patrick Stirling

Views: 7,154

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Id: mD6QW2jVB7Q

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022