Fusion Nodes Explained With Toast - DaVinci Resolve Fusion Guide for Beginners (2024)

do you want to learn Fusion do notes kind of freak you out does it seem a little bit too complicated do you kind of like toast and this as a video for you one of the things that's really intimidating about Fusion is you open up the interface and it looks like this so for your first lesson on nodes we're just going to just not even be in Fusion we're just going to be in the kitchen here where things are a little bit more chill and we're going to do a little activity check this out we got we got nodes here we got nodes for days loads of nodes so what the heck are nodes and why are we obsessed with it why a whole video dedicated to just one part of fusion it's because nodes are the main tool that you use to make composits that's putting images together making Graphics making visual effects explosions lightsabers animated graphics cartoons all that stuff that you would use Fusion for uses nodes and so if you don't know nodes you don't really know Fusion so let's talk about a node real quick a node is this little box and it has a couple of triangles which we'll talk about here in a minute and we have a little square now to make things we take the nodes and we link them together in kind of a flowchart so it might look something like this we have a couple of nodes here and we take the output of that node and we run it over to another node like that and so what we're really doing is we're making a series of steps so this is step one and then it goes all the way to this next note and this is step two it's like you're making a to-do list flowchart this will all make a little bit more sense here in a minute so a lot of your time in Fusion is going to be making these little flowcharts and every flowchart made out of nodes eventually gets connected to a very special node called a media out and this is just the result of all the fanciness that you did more on the media out in just a little bit so let's make this fun let's work with some food cuz I don't know about you but I love to cook and food metaphors just resonate with me you know what I'm saying we're going to start with a piece of bread so this is kind of like your untouched starting point and infusion that is a node called a media in this can be footage this can be a texture or an element something that you didn't necessarily make yourself but it's something that you're going to use in your recipe like an image that you're going to put stuff over or your original footage that you're going to change with visual effects so if we were to connect this media in to our media out and um you can think of media out when it comes to cooking and stuff you can think of that like a plate and if we were to take this media in and connect it to our media out we would just have a piece of bread so grabbing an image or a piece of footage from your system and just bringing it into Fusion that always comes in as a media in also if you're just over a clip in the edit page and you switch to the fusion page it's going to bring that clip in from the timeline as a media in so this is your starting point your untouched piece of media and then we're going to do some fancy step with it so this recipe would be pretty boring if all we did was just put bread on a plate that would not be great so to change our image we're going to use an effect so for our recipe we're going to use a toaster this is a perfect effect for our bread because it's going to take our bread from regular bread into toast and if you've never used a toaster before this is going to be extra valuable for you today cuz you get a little bonus tutorial what you do is you take the bread and you put it in the toaster and then out pops toast so what we're doing is we're affecting the bread with the toaster so for our effect we start with the bread and we end with the toast and so as the bread goes through the toaster it makes toast Yeah Toast I love to use the toaster analogy because this is exactly how effects work in Fusion so we're starting with bread we're putting it through the toaster and out comes the toast so we have our media in then as we connect this to the media out the result the toast gets put on the plate now here's something really important to remember about effects and this is this gets everybody you might be used to saying I'm going to put an effect on this I'm going to put a blur on top of it change the way that you're speaking because think about this our image always runs through through an effect just like our bread runs through the toaster we don't put the toaster on top of the bread you would not be making toast at that point doesn't work like that this is a super important concept as a wise man once said to change how a picture looks you got to run it through an effect now for our example we use the toaster as an effect but there are so many different kinds of effects you can think about an effect as anything that just changes an image so something like a a blur something like color correction even something like a transform that makes something bigger or smaller all of that is something that's happening to our image and then we run it through this effect node and then it comes out different at the end an effect can't live by itself like if we didn't have this media in the result of this toaster would be nothing because there's nothing to change there's no image to change this is just a to toter you can't eat a toaster or can you not safely I mean you might be able to but you shouldn't that's for sure so if you're going to use an effect you always have to put some kind of image into that effect whether it's a media in or a generator or even the result of another effect you can put a bunch of different effects in series but you have to have some kind of image whether it's your starting image or whether it's even just the result of an effect you have to have that to actually run through an effect or else you're not really telling Fusion to do anything so if you're not supposed to put an effect on top of something well how do we do something like put titles on top of a background or how do we combine two different images I feel like a lot of people are used to layers if you were going to do something like make a sandwich you would have your background your first layer and then you'd put some other layer on top like you know some peanut butter that'd be your second layer and then you could have your third layer like that here's the problem Fusion doesn't have layers so if you want to put a spaceship in the sky you would normally think of like the sky layer and then the spaceship on top of that how in the world are you supposed to do that if Fusion doesn't have any layers I thought Fusion could do anything here's how it works let's say we have our toast and we want to put some jelly on top of it we would use a special tool a butter knife and we use the knife to put some jelly on top of the toast there we go there's our handsome man so infusion this knife we could call a merge node every node infusion basically has one job the media in is to grab a piece of media an effect is to apply an effect to an image and a merge is to put two images together so this is really how you can combine images without using layers just like we used a knife to spread the jelly on top of the toast the merge takes an image in the yellow input that's going to be the background and an image in the green input which is going to be the foreground so if we were going to make a chart of what we have here we would start with our bread then we would run that through the toaster which would make toast going into the next node but this is a merge node and so let's connect some jelly it's going to give us toast with jelly on top that's what comes out of this merge and if we connect that to our media out we have bread that's been toasted with jelly on top now something interesting about a merge if I were to take this same chart and disconnect the foreground the jelly like that I would have toast but if I were to keep the jelly connected and disconnect the background to the merge I would have nothing because you have to have a background for the merge the merge loves backgrounds it's obsessed with it so this trips people up a lot you want to make sure that you always have your background attached to your merge and then you can put your foreground over it the yellow is always the background and the green is always the foreground remember that now so far we've only really talked about three different kinds of nodes images which include all kinds of media ends as well as things that you generate like a background effects which you run images through to change them and merges which put images together but there's one other another major kind of node that you need to know as a beginner in fusion and that's a mask so let's say I want to put my jelly on top of my bread but I only want to put it on at a certain place I could use something like a stencil to control where I can put the jelly and where I can't so right now in my little node graph here if I were to connect this to the media out I would have jelly on bread but back here on the merge when we put that jelly on let's actually just use a stencil and only put the jelly in kind of a circle shape 10 out of 10 jelly and so this mask controls where the jelly goes and then we have a nice little selection of where we want this merge to do its job and a mask works not only on merges but on any node with this blue input that's a mask input and so you can tell any node to only do its job inside of a shape inside of a physical part of the screen or the image so if we were doing color correction I could do something like turn everything black and white but just keep some color inside of here right kind of fancy and you can put a mask on just about any node infusion from images to effects and merges and it always controls what that specific node does now if I were to connect this mask to the mask input of the merge we're telling that merge to only do its job which is to put jelly on top of this toasted bread only do its job inside of this mask and the result if we connect this to our media out is we have a toasted piece of bread with our jelly on top in a circle shape so far we've learned about four different kinds of nodes images effects merges and masks and that makes up I mean most of the nodes that you're ever going to use in Fusion just about every kind of effect and Tool inside a fusion is some version of that there are other ones but they actually work in pretty similar ways so this is plenty to go on at first so now that we have all of our tools we can make a basic composite and the world is our burrito so we're ready to make some special toast I'm going to have the crew here suggest some ingredients to put on it and I mean that's the thing is we can we can make anything let's let's make a recipe for toast guys uh tell me tell me what we we're going to start with some bread right we got we got to start with some bread and then and then what Skittles Skittles yeah on top of the have you tried it okay so all right so we well we'll need a merge node cuz we're you're going to put the Skittles on top of the bread okay um Skittles okay yeah so we'll put the Skittles on top there's our merge okay then then what what do you what do you guys think how about some rainbow sprinkles we already have Skittles that are rainbow but um okay so we'll just do another merge cuz we're going to put we're take our bread we're put the Skittles on top of the bread take another merge okay so are you sure you want sprinkles yes okay put some sprinks on top okay I mean so far it's just sugar but yeah okay what's next how about a pint of yogurt a pint okay toast is dry okay well do you want it toasted or do you want the just bread toasted no toast okay yogurt on toast yogurt on toast so we got to run the bread through the toaster first okay put it through the toaster bread goes into the toaster and then we have Skittles on top of that sprinkles on top of that okay where should that be before should it be under the Skittles or on top of the Skittles under the Skittles under the Skittles okay so we're going to move all this down and we're going to put a pint of yogurt first on top of so it goes toast and then a whole pint of yogurt why have I done this why have I giving you creative freedom okay so bread toaster Pine of yogurt Skittles on top of that sprinkles on top of that I feel like we're done I feel like that's about all we need oh you know what would be good a chicken like a like a a chicken yeah like a whole chicken that sounds delicious yeah like a rotisserie chicken you guys you guys know that toast is like but do that first put the chicken on then the yogurts then the Skittles the Skittles and then the sprs yeah okay like just a whole chicken okay all right okay so we take the bread we put it through the toaster then we put a whole chicken a whole chicken on top of that um okay this is you guys call this toast this is a pretty good toast yeah yeah ship it okay cool all right guys so hey thank you so much for uh for being here with us today h as you can see you can make absolutely anything oh see see what here's the flow chart it's right see the toad no let's see it hook it up we don't need to hook it up to you can imagine what it be like give us toast give us toast give us toast show us the toast okay so you take this and you um take this and you uh just oh yeah nice that's some toast and I am hungry let's see great see what I have to work with here it's it's just um it's really something [Music] uh let let's take a look at the fusion interface and and see what this means on a practical level so here we are in the fusion page and I have a composition that I've just opened and this is uh what I would call more of an advanced composition infusion but I'm going to show you how these four kinds of nodes that we talked about with the toast it's pretty much all we're using so check this out just to give you an idea of what's Happening we're replacing this wooden cabinet with a CG cabinet that was rendered out of blender and adjusting the lighting and all kinds of detailed stuff first we're putting the render over itself then we're adding a little bit of special lighting to it we're replacing the blank screen with a screen with an actual readout we're adding some grain over it adding a little hot spot here to make it seem like there's a light and then adding a glow to that light and so we're adding all of this onto our original footage and here is our graph of nodes there are quite a few nodes here especially if you're beginning Fusion but check this out let's zoom in and just talk about each one of these nodes the very first one on the very left is our OG now I'm going to hit one on our keyboard to bring this node up in the left viewer INF fusion and that's just going to show us this node by itself and what's happening on the right this is our finished shot so first we're starting with our original footage this is a media in this is an image node and then we're going along here to a color space transform now this is an effect and this does some fancy trickery that adjusts the colors so that we can play with them a little bit easier in Fusion but it's just an effect then we run into emerge node which we learned about that and all of that's coming in in the background and on the foreground if we just go up here a little bit we start with an image that's this image right here this is an image file from blender and then that goes into a resize node and what that does is it just changes the resolution of that image and that's an effect right so we're running it through the effect now you'll notice that we're starting up top and then we're going down it doesn't matter if you go left to right top to bottom or whatever it matters which way these arrows are going so we have this output and that's going into this Arrow so that's the input the output again is coming out of here and what's cool is we can actually bring this into two different places we'll take this second place here in a minute but we're going from resize and we're going down to another effect the color corrector so we're doing some adjustment here with our color corrector and then we're blurring it just a little bit might be hard to see here but we're just taking a little bit of the edge off of this thing with a little blur again same thing it's running it through an effect and then the result of this effect looks like this because we have an image running through it and then we take that image and put it over our background image and they go together like that this next group of nodes is about the lighting and again we're just starting with an image this is a black and white image that we generated from blender and it's a map of which way the 3D faces are facing and so if a 3D face is facing more up it's colored white and as it goes farther away from pointing up it gets darker and so what we have is really just a map of the top parts of all of this 3D stuff which you know that's kind of Beyond Fusion but it's really cool because you can use something like this and again run it through a resize do some color correction on it and we're just kind of tinting this yellow again color corrector is an effect we're going through a brightness and contrast effect to kind of limit some of these colors make sure the black is just black and the white is white then we blur it a little bit and then we're putting it over what we had so far all this stuff with a merge and this merge if we go into the inspector we can change some settings things to change this from being a black and white image to just lightening the image with the brighter parts we did that by just taking down this Alpha gain right here and so this merge is taking this yellowish highlights and putting it on top of our original footage and as we turn the merge off and on it adjusts the lighting so this is really nice because we can kind of control how intense we want that top light to be and we could turn the blend down and kind of make some adjustments here and it's fun once you have something like this cuz you can really dial things into taste just using a slider so nice so far all we've really done is we've had images effects and merges right now let's talk about our screen I just took this image from unsplash this is just a computer screen right with some random code on it adjusted the colors a little bit added some contrast cropped this to be just this part of the screen and then I positioned this with a corner positioner which is just another effect and it's kind of just lining this up in perspective to be just right for our little screen here then we're taking our original footage here and we're putting that screen on top with an apply Mode called multiply which just takes the darkest parts of the image and kind of darkens things and it kind of leaves the brighter Parts alone and so now we have this screen that's being put on top but we only want that screen to be right here where the screen actually lives and not everywhere else and so we're using a mask I'll just undo the mask here we can see it's kind of everywhere until I put this mask back in and so we're limiting what this merge is doing the merge has one job which is to put that foreground over the background we're limiting where it does that with a shape so let's take a look at the mask I'll hit one on the keyboard to bring that up we're just drawing a little rectangle here and that's how actually being applied to an image that we brought in again from blender which just colorizes anything that makes light okay so we're just using this image that we generated from blender to isolate the parts that would glow right but I'm limiting this image with a mask to just the screen because that's all I really want to use Boop like that I'm resizing it again running it through an effect and then using this image to control the transparency of the foreground which controls where that screen goes so again this is complicated stuff right but again this is a mask this is an image this is an effect this is a merge image effect effect effect effect merge all the same thing and it all works the same there's little differences in you know what the sliders do for the different effects but the actual node structure is really really simple now check this out we have our resize here we're taking the result of this node which is just a resized image and we're taking this over here you can actually plug a node into multiple different places so yeah we're going down here to our color corrector and we're going to put our screen over and we're going to put this render over our original background but we're also going to take this render way over here and use it as a mask for an effect called film grain and what this effect does is it generates film grain but we're limiting this grain to only be on top of our 3D render like that so we're using the transparency of our 3D render as a mask to tell that effect where it should be strong and where it should be weak where it should be totally turned off and the result is we have this grain that we're generating just over our 3D render which is what we want because we want to match the grein on this wall to the grein on the 3D render I can take this green only thing off if we Zoom way in here you can probably see the difference can see that that it's just adding grain to the 3D render and not everywhere okay we're taking all of this and we're running it through an effect called hot spot that just adds kind of a little white circle there and then we're running all of that through a glow but we're only going to use this glow effect inside of a mask that lives right there so we're limiting that glow to only happen around that white spot and that's the result we only have that glow right there we're running the whole thing through another color space transform that's to make sure that our color space actually looks good and then we have our media out and then anything that we connect to that is what's going to be rendered so if we wanted to totally skip this and just do a black screen I could click on this connection to my media out disconnect it and then do something like go over here to the very left part of our toolbar and grab a background just grab this background node which again is a way to generate an image same thing and I can take the output of this and just plug it into our our media out and guess what we have a black screen we can bypass all of these nodes none of them are going to matter unless we connect them to the media out but we do want our bfx so we'll just plug that into the media out and that's what's going to be sent to the timeline we can just switch over to the edit page and there we have our final comp there in the timeline without any rendering or anything like that that's just where it lives so even a somewhat involved effect like you know combining different layers of 3D render ERS and everything like that and changing lighting and all that stuff it's just images effects merges and masks I hope this has been helpful for you if you want to learn Fusion if this has been fun and things are starting to click a perfect next step is to sign up for our Fusion Survival Guide that's our course that's designed to show you the essentials of fusion the big Concepts that took me forever to learn I'm just giving to you and right now that's available for free all you have to do is click this card right there there's also a link in the description description I heavily recommend checking that out because you're going to be on your way to making awesome stuff infusion in no time and if you don't know me my name is Casey and I teach people how to use Fusion that's that's my jam I have lots and lots of videos about fusion and eventure resolve we even got an in-depth beginner course called Fusion Zero to Hero that is just the bomb diggity so when you're ready to dive in head first then that is a great place to do it but for now check out the free Fusion survival guide and I just I think it's so cool that you watched all the way to the end of this video what was your favorite part was it the song that was my favorite [Music] part oh it's just a jam just a toast and jam you're welcome

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 40,735

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, toast, what is fusion in resolve, how do I use fusion, how does fusion work, Fusion in Resolve, DaVinci resolve Fusion

Id: PoinMs_YceQ

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024