Fusion NODE ORDER Finally Explained! - DaVinci Resolve 19 Tutorial

in this video we're talking all about nodes INF fusion and how the heck do you figure out what node to put next what order do they go in all the stuff that can be really confusing about Fusion I'm going to explain in plain English and if you want to follow along and make this kind of little handsome animation with me well you can do so by clicking this link right there or the top Link in the description let's get started I have a bunch of nodes laid out here for this little animation our little kitty cat just maxing relaxing in the pool oh man look at that handsome boy by the way I have my layout here for Fusion set up a little differently if you want to get yours looking like this you can go up to workspace and go down to layout presets and this one is called midf flow vertical that makes it so that your nodes are in the middle and your viewers are on the left your inspector's on the right and it's kind of just a nice little layout yeah gives us a little bit of room there don't you think okay cool by the way this is the fusion page in Da Vinci resolve I just have this button bar hidden by going up to workspace and unchecking show page navigation okay you're all caught up so a question that I get a lot is how the heck do I know what node to put next there are hundreds and hundreds of nodes in fusion and how do I figure out what order to put the nodes in which one I should add first because it seems like when I add one node and then I add another one it mess messes things up or it used to work and now it doesn't and it just gets really frustrating and believe me I understand even something like this that is a relatively simple node tree can be pretty intimidating if you're not really familiar with Fusion if you're not into the nodes but we're going to break this down and by the end of this video I think you'll be able to understand this so this is a practical example of you know making a little animation here and there are several things going on just as an overview probably our main element here is a PNG of our cat this comes with the media files if you download those the other major elements are a blue background and a shot of some clouds in the sky and all of these go together in various ways to make our little animation of our of our little man so just to take this out of fusion so that we can understand this and bring this into my little workboard here we have three main elements we have background we have some clouds for our reflection in the water and we have our cat and when you're making something infusion it's important to really kind of plan out what you want to do because that's going to determine the kind of nodes that you use so for instance if we have our cat and we're going to put him over this background that's going to take basically two steps we're going to have to put him over the background and then we're going to have to scale him down to be the right size okay and so what that really takes is two separate nodes in Fusion one node for putting him over the background the other one for changing the scale when you put something over something else in Fusion that's going to take a merge when we scale something that's going to be a transform node and for each of these Source images we're going to need to bring it into Fusion somehow for our PNG that's going to be a media in node that just loads a picture into fusion and for our blue background we're going to use a background node so so far we have four nodes how do we know what order to put these in how does that how does that make any sense well anytime that you building nodes with Fusion you're building a flowchart so it's just a series of steps so just like if we were to write this out step one would be you know make a background bring in cat picture scale cat pick down put cat pick over background okay so these are kind of like our steps 1 two 3 and four and each of these would have a node right so we'd have our background node we'd have our media in we'd have our transform and we'd have our merge and a lot of the time depending on what you're doing you could literally put these in order right so you have a background then a media in transform and emerge from left to right but where this gets a little bit confusing is if you have multiple Source pictures uh like a background or a media in or a loader or a fast noise or a generator of some kind text any of those things that's like the starting point okay so bringing in a cat picture and making a background those are each starting points and so you can't have a starting point and then another starting point those have to come in separately and so what we do is we'd have a media in and our background these are going to be like separate little pipes with our media Inn this is our cat picture let's just bring this down so that it's a little bit more interesting here we're going to run one of these through a transform to scale it down which one of them are we going to scale down we're going to scale down the cat right so in order goes bring in the media and then scale it down then what are we going to do after it's scaled down we're going to put it over the background for this merge node there are two main inputs the yellow and the green and there's also the blue but that's for a mask so the yellow input we want to put the background into the yellow input because the background is going to be the first layer the background of the composition where you're putting stuff together the cat is going to go in the foreground which is the green input if that seems like a lot to remember it's really only the merge that you have to know these things on um or that it's helpful to know these things on and so what we could do is take our media in and put that into the green input of the merge like this but what would that do that would put our cat over the background but it wouldn't scale him at all because we're not telling him to scale down so what we need to do is put him through a transform first ploop we're going to put him through that transform and then we're going to take that transform and put that into the merge and so step one bring in our cat step two scale him down step three put him over this background okay now this is kind of where it gets a little confusing because why did we put this transform after the media in why didn't we put this anywhere else well the transform is an example of an effect this is a whole category of nodes in the fusion page there are a bunch of different effects so a color correction would be an effect a blur would be an effect anything that changes how a picture looks basically and so if we're going to change how this looks we're going to run it through this effect and this is really key I'm not putting an effect on top of something I'm not applying it to something I'm not putting an effect on top of my image or viewing it under an effect or anything like that the way that you say it really really helps really understand why we do it this way you run images through effects say it with me you run images through effects and when we have this image running through this effect this is going to change the image so we're going to scale this down and and then we're going to put it over the merge if you look at this there's really only one way you could set this up if you remember that this media in this is a image this background generates an image and for an effect to work you have to run an image through it we can't do something like this where we just have an effect over a image because an effect doesn't exist unless you put an image through it it just doesn't even turn it on in Fusion so we have to plug an image into the effect run it through the effect and then that creates a new image that we put over our background image okay it changes how it looks and then we put it over with the merge so now here are our nodes we have our blue background we have our cat media in we have our merge and our media out and so we have the cat huge on screen he's over that background but he's huge and so in order to make him smaller we have to grab a transform and we're going to run this cat through the transform and in the transform controls we're going to size that down okay if you brand new to Fusion I would really recommend doing this exact thing literally this make a blue background get the cat picture that you can download for free and put the cat picture over the blue background then run it through a transform and see what it does that's how we're adjusting the image before we put it over the background and if you mess with this you'll notice that you can't do this a different way if I hold shift and drag this transform out if I plug this transform into here it it doesn't do anything right if I put the cat over the blue background and then merge this transform over it doesn't do anything it doesn't change it right if I have my transform or a blur or anything and I put that into the foreground of the merge it doesn't show anything it doesn't change it at all if I take this cat picture and I take like a blur which again is an effect and you have to run an image through an effect if I put a blur if I put a blur on top using a merge of this cat picture I can go crazy with this blur size and it's never going to change anything because I have to run that cat picture through that blur in order to change it so now if I plug this into the blur and view the blur we can see we have a blurry cat picture right okay you'll also notice that if I don't plug something into the yellow input of the merge nothing shows up over here because you need a background for the merge or it doesn't know what to do with its life okay so we take the blue background and put it into the background input of the merge which is the yellow input let's get rid of this blur we take the cat picture and put it into the foreground of the merge that makes a big cat picture over the blue background and if I hold shift and drag this transform back onto here and take the scale down then we're scaling the image before we put it over the background now if this just feels like I'm absolutely beating this to death it's for a reason when people jump into Fusion I see uh a lot of the time they're like the kid that signs up for the karate class that's like yeah teach me how to whoop some butt right and their teacher says you know you're not ready you need to know the fundamentals right the kid takes two lessons then goes out and gets his butt whooped out in the street because he doesn't know the fundamentals I've helped thousands of people understand what Fusion does and without fail people move on to fancier stuff before they know the fundamentals and that's why Fusion seems so complicated and why it seems like it's so frustrating is because you're not taking the time to understand how it works once you understand how it works there's a little light bulb that goes off and you go oh obviously I should build things this way because this is how it works but if you move on too fast then you get confused easily and you don't know why an effect isn't working or what node you should do next because you don't understand how the nodes go together and how the thinking happens here that's kind of the point that's what I'm trying to beat into your mind right now so that's the thing we've really covered a couple of different nodes so far we we have images which is like immediate in or a background same thing is like a text or a fast noise those all just make various images so text makes an image of text right background makes a background media in brings in media and creates an image infusion with that media so those are images then we have transform which is an effect so you always run an image through an effect then we have merges which put images over images that's the only time you ever use a merge is if you want to put an image over another image it can be an image that is changed with an effect but it can't just be an effect okay it has to be either an image itself or an image that is running through effects it can't just be an effect the other major kind of node would be a mask now you'll notice there's these blue inputs on every node here what that does is that allows you to connect something with transparent to control the transparency of that node now this is confusing a little bit because it doesn't actually cut out the image necessarily it limits the job of the node whatever node you connect it to to only happen inside of that transparency right every node has essentially one job this cat media in is to bring in the cat picture that's its job this transform node is to transform what ever you run through it the blue background is to draw a background the merge is to put the foreground image over the background image of whatever you connect to it right and so when you draw a mask which you can use these masks up here kind of in the middle of our bar I can take an ellipse mask and I can plug this into my cat media in and that's going to limit drawing that cat to that Circle if I were to plug this into the transform and bring that up that's going to limit that scale that I'm doing to only happen within that Circle and so this is kind of a weird thing where we're only scaling it inside of the circle if I were to plug this into the merge it's only going to put that foreground over the background inside of the circle it's only going to do the merges job inside of the circle if I plug this into the blue background it's only going to draw the blue background inside of the circle and so a big question I get is where do I put the mask where do I put a mask I know I need to mask something where do I put it you have to think about what you're trying to do what you're trying to limit okay if you're just trying to cut something out there's a couple ways to do that you could do that in the media itself where you're actually limiting where it's being drawn which is essentially cutting it out right or you could do it in aemerge if you're bringing that image into the foreground you can limit where that's being drawn over the background in that merge or you can use something like a mat control which is an effect and you can plug this mask into the garbage mat and invert it then you can cut out any image you put into this yellow input of the mat control and that's a way to cut things out and those are really kind of the main three ways that you would cut something out every other node if you apply this to the node it's just going to limit what that node is doing to be inside of that mask we're only drawing this image scaled inside of that Circle right so we're limiting it to that mask this right here I've been a dad for almost 10 years and uh I've had many of those experiences where I tell my kids hey don't stand up on top of the table don't tip your chair back you're going to fall and get hurt I'll tell them beforehand and say you should pay attention to this this will happen if you don't and a lot of the time they have to make those mistakes themselves and learn for themselves I find this to be the same case with Fusion before you go crazy and jump in and start making really complex stuff in Fusion play with this play with this take a background take an image see what happens when you connect a mask to the image and move it around see what happens when you run the image through a transform and when you merge it over a background play around with this okay you have absolutely everything you need to be able to understand Fusion it just takes practice this setup right here is enough to teach you pretty much how Fusion works because check this out once you understand all of that there's a bunch of other stuff here right but look at this once you know you know once you've seen so this background this is just drawing a background now we're bringing in some media this is Media n two what are we bringing in we're bringing in some clouds and once you're familiar with how images and effects and merges and masks work you can essentially read this node graph in order so we have our media in and then we're going through a brightness and contrast and I'll just bring each of these up as we look at it so here's our media in then we're running it through our brightness and contrast I'll just drag this over that's making this black and white then we're going through a transform what that does is it's moving this back and forth It's animating it then we're going through another Effect called Ripples and that just makes this little Ripple pattern here this animated Ripple then we're going through another Effect called a corner positioner and what that does is it allows you to stretch the corners to different places on the screen to make it look like it's in perspective and so we're just stretching this out so that that looks looks like it's kind of set down on its side and all of that is being put over this background with a merge and if we go into the merge we can see this apply mode is screen I'll take this blend up a little bit and so what we're doing is we're putting those clouds over the background and so now we have this kind of water texture all right that's how we build this just step by step these clouds are just the reflection and so we're making them black and white we're moving them around we're adding some ripples we're doing some Corner positioning and we're just putting that over the background okay and so you might be asking why in this order why how do I know to put all of these things in this order the short answer is you build it as you go in fact you don't even have to add these one after another in the same sequence you can add step two after Step n it once you realize that you need it right so for instance we can take this stuff off here and now we're just putting the media in over our background and all it is is just the clouds over the background then you might realize you know what this is changing the color of that background just ever so slightly and so I'm going to desaturate that with a brightness and contrast node so here's the difference it's just very subtle on this one but so this is desaturating it and then what else do we need to do I want these to float by right so we can take a transform I'm just holding shift and dragging this back in and that transform just moves this left and right with key frames okay if you don't know what key frames are leave a comment down below and we'll talk about that but it's just a way to animate things and then okay if this is going to be a reflection on water we need some kind of water ripple thing so I didn't even know this existed before I made this comp but what I did is I hit shift space bar and I typed Ripple and guess what there's a tool called Ripples and it does exactly what you think it would do it makes Ripples and so again this is an effect and so we're running these animated clouds through that Ripple now we put that Ripple after the transform because we're not moving the water we're just moving the reflection and then having the water do it so if I were to take Ripples and put this before our transform look what happens as we transform this it moves the ripples also so the actual ripple effect itself is moving and we don't want the water to be moving we just want the reflection to be moving across the water and then the water stays still and so what we're doing is we're making an animated image that looks like this and then we're pretending that that is being put over water those clouds kind of slip over this ripple effect we're eventually going to have our cat on the water and we're looking at him more in perspective not just from top down right and so we need to kind of warp this a little bit to make it seem like we're looking you know out and down towards this water instead of just straight down so one thing we can do is use the corner positioner and I just brought the front Corners closer to us and widen them out which in perspective looks like it's kind of sitting on a plane like that right so now we have this right here and we're putting it over our background and now we get the water effect all right so that's the order and why we had to do it in that order now could we do the brightness and contrast and the transform we could probably change those around it probably wouldn't matter that much in fact we could probably do the brightness and contrast after everything else if we wanted to it's generally a better idea to do your color correction right after you bring in a image you just have less problems that way um because when you're color correcting an effect there can be little glitches and stuff and so it's just easier it's a good practice to do your color correction just do that right after you bring in your media and then the rest of these things these kind of have to happen in this order right anytime that you connect one node to another one it's like you're saying and then do this right so bring in some media and then color correct it and then move it back and forth and then put some ripples on it and then take this whole image and skew it so that it looks like it's sitting on the the surface and then take that image and put it over our background and now we have what we have right so there's more to this comp that I made but this video is long enough and I feel like we've covered plenty but we do have some added animation here some of these kind of cartoon Ripples and everything that we've added if you want to learn more about this if you want me to do another video on the rest of this let me know in the comments and we can go over how we animated this and everything and I'll kind of show you some of the basics of animation hey I hope this is really useful for you I hope this kind of unlocks your brain a little bit if you want to get super deep into this and really get your mind understanding Fusion inside and out we have a course called Fusion Zero to Hero you can find that at Ground control. film I'll also leave a link in the description so when you're ready to jump into Fusion in a super hardcore way even if you're a beginner when you're ready I want to teach you with that course here's more about it right there make sure to download the files and kind of do do the homework that I that I said to do earlier if you want to learn Fusion okay hey thank you so much for for hanging with me if you like this kind of video let me know maybe I could do some more of that but I got to know that you watched all the way to the end and you think that it's a good idea to do some more of these videos

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 14,360

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, Fusion NODE ORDER Finally Explained! - DaVinci Resolve 19 Tutorial, nodes, what are nodes in davinci resolve

Id: lACOumYuX5k

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024