FUSION: THE ULTIMATE BEGINNERS GUIDE - DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial

[Music] what's up guys i'm casey ferris i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube make sure to subscribe for more of that this video is going to teach you how to use fusion even if you've tried to learn fusion a hundred times we've designed this especially to be good bad at talking and good at learning fusion all right so let's start out with what fusion is fusion is a part of davinci resolve that is focused on compositing now when we talk about compositing we're talking about basically putting different elements together in a composite that could be something like graphics 3d making things like explosions and special effects and all kinds of stuff it's really just a tool to make things more awesome right so if you want something awesome to happen chances are it's probably going to happen in fusion here are a couple examples of what we're going to be doing today here's a video of a car driving but this part right here is actually composited in fusion now it's not the nicest comp in the world but you get the idea that you can put different parts together to build scenes this is another example of a composite this is a night shot where they turn on a light here in this house but the original shot looks like this we shot in the day so some of this is color correction but there's also some fog that we added there's a lot of fancy things that are happening there here's another example of a composite this is a simple screen replacement because this footage was actually shot like this with a green screen and what we've done is put a fake screen on top of it and track the motion so that it lines up and everything here's another example of a 3d floating word that's tracked along with the footage just a few different examples of awesome things that you could do in a compositing app so if the question is why in the world would i want to use fusion well you probably don't have to worry about it too much unless you want to do fancy things like this or make titles do animations that kind of stuff if that's what you're looking for fusion is the bomb so let's take a look at breaking down how this stuff actually works i'm in the edit page right now just so we can play things back but let's take a look at the comp in the fusion page and learn a bit more about kind of how things are laid out if i want to open a shot from my timeline into the fusion page all i have to do is be over it with my playhead and then down toward the lower part of the screen just click on fusion and that's going to open up this shot in the fusion page now if you hit this page and it looks really intimidating don't worry because that's exactly why we're doing this training it's my goal to make sure that not only do you feel comfortable in this interface and have a general idea of what all these little boxes mean but actually have some practical wisdom to be able to create your own composites so let's dive into the interface here in the upper part of the screen you'll see two viewers the left viewer and the right viewer now these look kind of like the viewers here in the edit page because there's two viewers right next to each other right but in the edit page the viewer on the right is always what you're going to see in your final project and the viewer on the left you can kind of pick different things from your media pool open up different source clips and everything and kind of look at the parts of your project in fusion this right viewer isn't always what people are going to see with your project these actually both act a lot more like the source viewer you can pick different parts of your composite and view them either on the left viewer or the right viewer right now this happens to be what we are going to see when we render the movie but that's because i have this selected more on that in a little bit but for now if you just know that you can pick different parts of your composite and preview them in the left or right hand viewers either one and you can kind of choose which parts of your composite to look at over here on the right hand side of our interface we have the inspector if the inspector is not here make sure to go and click on this inspector button right here to open and close that panel but this works just like the inspector in the other pages anything that you have selected you can adjust the properties here in the inspector so if i want to adjust my color correction all of that happens here in the inspector so let's get into some more of the native greedy you know down here we have the nodes the nodes are the building blocks for absolutely everything that happens in fusion so we're going to spend a ton of time learning what these do learning what they are when to use a certain node and when not to use a certain node how they're connected and what they all mean because this is something that can be really intimidating especially when you've never worked with anything that's kind of like nodes before generally when you have a composite like this if you've ever worked with an image editing program that has layers you think about building each element kind of on top of one another in layers we might have our original footage in a layer and then on top of that we would have our parking lot layer right but the thing that kind of throws people off is there aren't really layers inside of fusion you think about like in the edit page if we want to put an image on top of something else we just drag it up here on the second layer right and that's kind of how things work and this makes a lot of sense because i mean that's how goodness software has worked for a long time and then if we want to adjust anything about the layer we can select the layer go to the inspector and you know mess with it and if you've done any playing around with again any kind of image editing program or even just stuff here in the edit page that would make a lot of sense to you here's the good news even though we don't have specific layers inside of the fusion page the way that we create composites actually works exactly the same we're still basically putting things over other things and adjusting their properties the only difference is that we don't have an interface that looks like this where we have one layer physically on top of another layer in some kind of timeline so if you're wishing that we had layers and that things were just a lot more simple you're actually in a good place here because you probably have some kind of concept of how compositing works so if we're going to put these two things together we're not going to build them with layers we're going to build them with nodes and like i said we're going to spend a ton of time getting used to these but from a 10 000 foot view nodes are just a flowchart of what you want the program to do it's like a set of instructions like a blueprint so instead of building the layers yourself you're pretty much telling fusion how to put images together if this isn't quite clear yet we're going to dive in right now to make things even less intimidating we're going to start with an analog example this is a node and a node is very simple all it is is telling fusion or whatever app you're using to do something one thing you can think of this as just like one step in a process an example could be open a photo could be add some text could be change the colors of something but it's just one step in the process and a composite infusion is just linking up multiple nodes to do something else so we're going to start by doing something and then connect it to this other one and we're going to do another thing this is really all that nodes are and building things in fusion is just about linking these single tasks up in a certain way so let's practice this with something a little bit more fun namely toast if we were going to make some toast to do that we would follow a couple different steps and you can think of it just like a how-to the first thing you do is get a piece of bread then we toast it in the toaster then we give it to somebody to eat namely me if every node just does something then how do we make toast with nodes first node get bread definitely have to do that what's the next node toast it then put it on the dinner plate let's get these babies linked up so we can follow these nodes just like a recipe right get the bread okay we got it and in this node we toast it and then we put it on the dinner plate so even though this seems really simple this is actually all that nodes are it's just linking up the different steps to do what you want and the end result is hopefully tasty so let's take a look at this concept more practically inside of fusion here we have our haunted house shot and i have my playhead over it here in the edit page then i'll just click on fusion that'll bring this clip up inside of the fusion page and here we have our recipe our instructions and just like we've talked about with the toast we have media in and media out all this is doing is taking this clip from the timeline doing nothing and then putting it back in the timeline so if we were to go back to our edit page we'll see we have a fusion comp here but there's nothing going on it looks exactly the same because we haven't done anything so this is our grab a slice of bread this is put it on the dinner plate now let's actually do something with this again all of the stuff that we're going to do happens in between our media in and media out because we have to grab our piece of bread then toast it and then put it on the plate now let's toast the bread okay let's do something some of the more common somethings that we can do are up here in this toolbar these are just nodes that we can create by grabbing them and dragging them into our graph here so this little teardrop is a blur node i can just grab that and drag that in and this is an instruction telling fusion to do one thing and that is blur whatever image is connected to this node so what we have to do is actually connect an image to it so we can take this media in and we can disconnect it from media out the way we can do that is just click on this connector here where it turns blue and it will disconnect then we can grab the output which is this little gray square and drag it onto our blur and let go that'll connect it to the yellow input all this is is just whatever image is attached to this little connector that's what's going to get blurred then we take the output of the blur and do the same thing with media out let it go and now whatever image this blur makes we connect it to this input and that's what is going to be sent back into our timeline this is the same thing as grab the bread toast it and put it on the plate so let's take a look at our comp we don't see a whole lot happening if we zoom in we can probably see this is a little bit blurry but the reason why it's not really blurry is because we have to adjust the properties of the blur so just like everything else in resolve if you select something you can adjust the properties here in the inspector so if i select our blur node and go up to the inspector we have the properties here for how much to blur it what it's supposed to look like and all that stuff now we can boost up this blur size and we're getting a blurry result this right here is the basics of nodes if you can get your head around this you're gonna be okay all we're doing is grabbing an image blurring it and then putting it back into the timeline because anything that's attached to media out is going to be sent back into our edit so if we go to the edit page now we have this blurry image this is a really basic effect inside of fusion something to note you have to have stuff connected to media out or it won't work if i disconnect this we'll see we don't have an image here and if we went to the edit page we don't have an image getting rendered to the timeline the only way this will show up in the timeline is if we have something connected to media out so going back to our toast example here getting bread is really like media in and the dinner plate is really like media out because remember media in is just grab something from the timeline pretend the plate is the timeline we grab the piece of media from the timeline in the middle we do something with it so this could be color correction this could be blur this could be an effect of any kind but it gets toasted here in the middle and then our instructions say to put it back into the timeline so the end result of this comp is toast of course for this example we have the multiple plates but it's really more like this it's get the piece of media from the timeline toast it and then put it back on the timeline so now we have a basic effect going on but let's say we want to put something over this blurry image this would normally be something where you would put a layer above this let's say you want to put text over this blurry image you would put a text layer over it right well in fusion again because we don't have layers what we're going to have to do is build an instruction just like we have this node giving an instruction to blur the image we got to have a node that tells fusion to put something over something else and that node is called a merge node so now let's talk about a really important part of compositing infusion and that is a merge node a merge node is a node that does one thing and the one thing it does is put something over something else this is where i feel like a lot of people get hung up because it is a little bit confusing because we have several different parts to this but the basics of it are really really simple so in our toast example we have media in we're grabbing our piece of bread then we're toasting it and then we're rendering it out to the timeline let's say we want to put some delicious jelly on top you can think of a merge node as a butter knife this butter knife at least in this example has one job to get something and put it on top of our toast it's our merge node so let's make some room here i'll move this over the first thing we do is put the merge node in a certain place the place we put it is dependent on when we want something to go over something else right so we've taken our bread off the plate and here is where we toast it and now this is where we want to put our jelly on top so how do we get the jelly well this media in node remember this grabs our bread right this grabs something off of the timeline we can use the same type of node to just load in anything into fusion basically in fusion this could be a picture this could be a graphic element it could be footage it's just anything that you want to bring in and do something with is a media in node when you open up a clip from the timeline it automatically makes one and brings in that clip but this is just one kind of node so if we make a media in node to get some jelly and here's what we got grape jelly that's how we bring this into this whole compositing world and now that we have the jelly we can do something with it just like the rest of our nodes if we wanted to just render the jelly we could certainly just hook up our media out node and if we view our media out on this monitor we can see we're just rendering jelly because all we've done is bring in some jelly and then render it to the timeline and all of this stuff because it's not connected to media out won't render we won't see any of it just whatever's connected to media out but let's link this back up how it was right now we're actually just rendering this piece of toast because this jelly is in the node graph but it's not connected to anything remember we need to connect it to stuff for it to work if we want to put the jelly on top of this toast then we have to connect this to the merge node because the merge node remember is like the knife it goes and gets something and then it puts it on top of something else so let's hook this up like we're supposed to let's grab this jelly and we're going to connect this to the green input of our merge node so a merge node has two different inputs the normal one that just selects by default is the yellow input that's just the like the input on all of the nodes so when we connect our toast it's here in the yellow input which is our background by default when we connect this media in the jelly to our merge what we're telling it to do is put jelly on top of our toast jelly something like that and because this is connected to the media out this is exactly what would be rendered so anytime that you want to put something on top of something else you have to use a merge node because remember a node has one job this guy's job is to say hey put something on top of something else but the other thing that's cool with the merge node is the merge node controls not only what goes on top of something else but how it is treated like i said if our merge node is like our knife our knife tells our jelly exactly how to act on top of our toast right whether it's spread out nice and thin or stacked on thick the knife controls how it works so if you want two things to interact in a certain way chances are you're going to be worrying about your merge node easiest way to get to a merge node is right here in the toolbar right next to blur merge you can grab this and drag that into our comp now again this merge node this is where stuff gets a little bit more hairy because we don't just have this yellow input we actually have a green input too and we have these blue inputs which we'll talk about in a minute but a merged node remember has one job and its job is to put something over something else so we have to tell this merge node what we want on the bottom in the background and what we want on top in the foreground so just like we connect things to a blur we can connect things to this merge node and have it put things over other things so let's start with our background i'm going to move this blur over a little bit and disconnect our connection here between our blur and our media out let's put the merge right here in between and i'll connect my blur into my merge and my merge into my media out what this is going to do is make basically the same thing and this is the nice thing with nodes you can actually go through and just think about what they might be doing so we're grabbing some media with media in we're blurring it and then we're merging well apparently nothing over this blur and then we're rendering it out and it looks just like you would expect a blurry image with nothing else over it so now let's pick something to put over this blurry image easy thing to pick would be text over here in the left side of our toolbar we have this t you can grab this t and drag it into the graph and let's put this like right here right above our merge node this node has one job it creates text what text it creates and what it looks like in everything is determined by our settings here in the inspector so let's say we just want to write some text and we can change the font and everything if we want to but i'll just leave it for now and now nothing's happening yay that's because we haven't connected this text into our comp at all it's just kind of hanging out by itself and anytime that you have a node hanging out by itself it's not really doing anything so again we got to take the output of this node but this time we're going to connect it into the foreground of our merge that's this green input just like this and now we got something going on here in our viewer we have our text over our blurry background this is just about the simplest form of a composite that you could make we're putting text over our image after we blur that first image right and then we're rendering all of that to the timeline let's switch over to the edit page and make sure it's coming through it sure is the merge node is like the very first step that kind of starts to get overwhelming i've found because one there's another input there's a lot of settings to mess with here in the inspector and it also seems kind of confusing why you would use a certain node for a certain thing i promise you in a couple minutes we're going to get into what each node is what type of node it is and kind of when to hook it up a certain way before we jump into all the other kinds of nodes i want to show you another basic building block for our composites and that is a mask now let's talk about masks and because i only have one piece of toast we're going to use a piece of bread that means we're going to get rid of our toast thing this will also just simplify our nodes a little bit so if we were to follow this we would grab our bread and we would put jelly on top of our bread and then we would render it out but let's talk about masks let's say we add a circle mask a mask has one job just like every other node the mask's job is basically to say but only do it here okay so for a circle mask it might say only do something within this circle that i'm going to place so you can mask just about any node and it comes in on a blue input the easiest way to do a mask in my opinion is to mask a merge because you can say okay put the jelly on top of my bread but only do it here so let's attach our mask and if we were to follow this it would say grab a piece of bread check grab some jelly check and put the jelly on top of the bread but only within the circle that i tell you so let's say it's like right here now the merge is going to know to only put the jelly inside of that circle it's downright impossible to get a nice circle but you get the idea so now we're telling it to grab bread grab jelly and merge it over only within that circle and then when we render it's going to look like that i think this is the easiest way to think about a mask because mask is basically only do something where i say and that something is whatever the node is doing that it's attached to for instance if we were going to mask our blur node we could just select an area on our screen that we only want to blur so let's do that here in our toolbar towards the middle we have these little shapes and if we grab this ellipse we can drag that down and this will make an ellipse mask and we'll see it kind of pops up here on our viewer as a circle but nothing's really happening it just kind of draws a circle again the reason for that is because this mask isn't connected to anything just like the text didn't show up when it wasn't connected to anything the ellipse isn't going to mask anything because it's not connected so let's connect it with the output just like we would normally but this time we're going to put it into a blue input on any of these nodes let's select the blur and now look what happens it's limiting where this blur node blurs things it's just doing the blur inside of the circle if we move the circle around it's only going to blur things inside of that mask let's go back to our toast so now we have the mask limiting where the blur happens on screen and you'll notice that it doesn't cut out the transparency of the image like the image isn't just cut out into a circle this was something that i really had a hard time with when i was learning fusion i would want to let's say just have an image appear inside of a circle and i thought that at any point i could just mask something and it would clip it to that circle and that's not really the case because the only thing that the mask affects is the node that it's attached to and depending on which kind of node you attach it to it has different effects so when we connect this to the blur it limits where that blur happens but if we disconnect this and then connect it to our merge like this it affects where the merge happens that means that it controls where the foreground goes because the merge is all about placing that element above our background so i think it's really helpful to think of a mask as just do it here here in our merge what we're telling it to do is merge the text over our blurry image but just do it here just do it inside of this ellipse and if you think about your composites like this like each one of these nodes is telling fusion to do something specific then you can kind of link this up almost like a sentence right if we want to only have the blur happen inside of circle we connect the ellipse to the blur if we only want stuff to be merged over each other inside of the circle we connect it to the merge let's say we only want to see this footage inside of the circle well we think about where are we getting this footage this footage is coming from the media in node think about it like saying okay grab some footage but if we take the ellipse then we're just saying grab some footage but only inside of this circle when we connect that then it limits that footage to just inside of the circle this is the thing that i feel like a lot of videos maybe don't talk about because if you can understand those nodes in this way then anything's really possible anything that you want to actually create all you have to do is think about all right where is the problem and what do i want to happen right this is great but i only want it blurry in the middle you go okay well i only want it blurry in the middle so where do i want the blur what's making the blur okay the blur node is making the blur let's tell the blur to only be in one place inside of this circle and we can connect it like that take some time and play around with a simple comp like this because this will teach you a lot connect it to all the different things and see what it does for instance if we connect this ellipse to the mask of our text it does just about the same thing as it does in the merge node it looks basically the same no matter if we connect it to the merge node or the text but they are doing different things think about this if we connect this ellipse to the merge we're saying only merge this text right here we're saying only merge this text over the blurry image inside of this ellipse if we connect the ellipse to the text we're saying only create the text inside of this ellipse and then merge that over the blurry image here's why this matters if we were to select our merge node because remember a merge node controls everything about how something goes over something else and we were to go into the inspector for our merge node and adjust the rotation and the size we'll see that it's taking this text that's already limited by the ellipse and then putting it over the blurry image at a certain size and rotation so that made that text and limited it with the ellipse but then it rotated it and moved it around and so if we were to move this merge around we'll see that that text is limited right there with the ellipse no matter where we move it or what we do here with the merge node if we were to connect this ellipse as a mask for our merge then the mask is separate from the text so it's not masking the text before we merge it it's just controlling where we merge the text so if we were to move this merge around just like before we move it around that merge only happens under that circle so if we size it up and everything it happens under that mask this is really good for compositing things when you want to make sure that something is masked based on where it is on screen rather than the actual like element for instance let's delete our blur if we wanted to do something like have this text come out from behind this tree we could make a mask that's roughly on the edge of this tree then grab our merge and move our text so that it kind of goes behind the tree like that whereas if we had this set up a different way with our mask on our text not only does it kind of size weird and kind of act strangely but it also won't work at all when we try and move that foreground layer in our merge so that's why you would mask different things let's take a second and talk about these viewers because like we said earlier either of these viewers can look at any part of our composite if we actually look down here in this media out node you'll see these two little dots this right dot is white that means that whatever's happening in this node is being viewed on the right-hand view so up here this is our media out node and again this is the default but it doesn't necessarily have to be we could select our text and hit 2 on the keyboard and we can just view our text on the right hand view it's really up to you and because we have two viewers we can actually view the same thing in both viewers by hitting one on the keyboard or we can just view different parts of our composite depending on whichever node we have selected and which one we set to one or two what i usually like to do is keep my media out on the second viewer because you know kind of used to that from the edit page and then look at different parts of the composite in the first viewer so it's great because i can select this text and hit one on the keyboard and view my text before it gets composited or masked or anything else that happens in the comp i could also view my media in with one and look at it before it gets blurred and has stuff all over it this is really great for like isolating problems if something looks strange you can just kind of go through your nodes and be like all right where does it start to look weird very very helpful so back to our toast example either of these viewers can show any of these at any time right now we have media in set to the left viewer so we just have that normal piece of bread and then media outset to the right viewer and we have the toasted piece of bread we could also switch these and now we have our media in and the right viewer and our media out in the left viewer it doesn't matter which viewer you use you're basically just picking it so you can hit one or two on the keyboard with media out selected with if you hit one it'll show up here with media in selected if you hit two it'll show up here these don't have to be the media in or media out nodes this can be anything so let's say we want to preview our toast here and our media out and the right one they're both the same image because we're feeding this image into this one and this one doesn't really do anything except for put it back into the timeline another thing with fusion that i feel like people get caught up on are all the different kinds of nodes the good news is you don't need to learn what every single node does in order to work in fusion because there are really only just a few different kinds of nodes of course we have our media in and our media out nodes this is open something any kind of media and this is render it to the timeline let's call these like our media nodes we also have a merge node which we've learned about we have mask nodes so our media in our jelly would also be a media in node then we have an effect node which just does something to whatever you're connecting to it this is a node that really needs some kind of media it can't really exist by itself it has to have something to play with so this would toast your jelly which is a horrible idea never do that but i guess you could another kind of node is a generator node what this does is basically makes something out of nothing it generates something so this could be text this could be in this case a green greenish yellow scribble this is our scribble generator this could be a solid color it's basically something that fusion can create out of nothing and it's really acts a lot like a media node right you can pretty much connect a generator to anything that you would normally connect a media node to so if you want to have a scribble in the background and we have another generator here we have our text generator we can put that over our scribble and then render it out and this is how we would make something that is text over a scribble and then render it to the timeline and these other nodes work basically the same no matter what you connect to this first part you put text over our bread to put text over the jelly and this is really kind of one of those nice things about nodes is you can switch out a node really easily and all the other nodes will still work if it's the same kind of node so let's take a look at some examples of each type of node again media in and media out those are kind of special nodes to grab a clip from the timeline and put it back but this media end node this brings footage into fusion and there's a few different nodes that act kind of like that one is just if you drag like a picture into your node graph this will make media in two and this isn't grabbing it from the timeline this is just loading media from your media pool but these act the exact same way inside of fusion it's just coming from a different place another node that acts very similar would be a background node so this far left icon here what this does is just generate a solid background so i'll hit one on the keyboard so we can see it here and we can change the color that kind of thing whatever we want even though it's generating something it actually just treats this like footage like if you were to go out and shoot a bright green screen with your camera and bring it in it would act basically the same way with this node inside of fusion and funny enough a text node acts a similar way too right we can make some text and it's generating that text and when i say that it acts a certain way i mean that you can hook it up in a certain way so you can hook any of these up to a blur right and it can run through all of these nodes the exact same way you can mask these all the exact same way if i put a mask on here it's going to make circle same thing for media 2. same thing for our background same thing for our text although you can't see the circle it's there believe me so as far as how you hook things up and kind of how they're used here in the node graph anything that brings in media or generates things is kind of treated in a similar way to keep us a little bit more organized here i'm going to select these and i'll show you a neat little trick if you hit shift spacebar it brings up this really cool menu and what this is is a menu of all the different nodes that you can add into fusion so it's just a really quick way to add exactly what you want or to search for something that you might be looking for so if you're ever like hmm what kind of blurs are available you can type blur and it'll show you all the different kind of blurs that are available in fusion super helpful but i'm going to type und this is going to bring up something called an underlay this is a really special thing it's not really a node it just kind of helps us be organized and because i have all of these nodes selected when i add this underlay it's going to make this little field under our nodes and this is just a nice way to be able to move nodes together as a group and you can double click off of it hold down alt and click on this just to select the underlay and you can hit f2 to rename it so we'll call this media and generators so these kind of nodes this is like one sort of category of node and now that we know that little trick we can either keep grabbing nodes from up here if they're easy or we can just click in the blank space and hit shift space bar and type whatever we want so let's say we want to bring up an effect like color corrector there we go i'll hit return that'll bring in a color corrector node this is the exact same thing actually is grabbing this icon here and dragging it in but once you use fusion more and more you'll probably do the shift spacebar thing if you want to move fast this color corrector node and this blur are both effect nodes a lot like our toasted node right this is like grab some bread all these are grab some bread and all these are toasted right so different kind of effects like we have curves even things like a tracker these all are hooked up in a similar way just like all of these media and generators you can all hook up kind of the same way they can all take a mask these are all kind of the same as each other they hook up the same way kind of have similar places in the flowchart here so let's label these these are effect nodes and with an effect node they pretty much go in between a media or generator and something else sometimes i hear people getting really confused about okay how do i decide what needs a merge node what node can be hooked up to what and everything because i feel like i'm just guessing well there is a rhyme and reason to it and think about this the only thing that you would toast is something that you would grab like bread right so something that you'd grab like bread goes into the toaster so these things directly affect a piece of media or a generator right so we're either blurring something and like i said these all kind of work the same way so let's zoom out here either blurring something and again we can blur any of this kind of media that we attach it all works the same way although you can't really see a blur on a solid you can blur text because these all kind of act the same way right any of this can be color corrected let's change our colors to something horrible oh yeah purple right all of that acts the same way so an effect generally goes after a piece of media or a generator and it will always affect those things in a similar way so those are effects you can kind of think of it as like okay you grab something and you change it a little bit and then we get to our merge node now the merge node is kind of its own thing there are different kinds of merge nodes inside of fusion which we probably won't get into in this training but they actually all work the same way as well so if you understand one you can pretty much just guess and understand the other one but a merged node wants to take something and put something over something else and you can really attach just about anything to the foreground in the background of the merge node but what it's really looking for is a piece of media or a generator now you might say well you have an effect node attached to the merge yes but the effect is attached to a piece of media so what we're really doing is attaching this piece of media to the merge we're just kind of messing with it a little bit first does that make sense and so we could certainly just skip the blur right and i'll just attach this directly to the merge and now we have our comp and it works the same way right and even though it looks like this is attached it's not we're just attaching the media to the merge so really all we're doing is just blurring this before we merge it but what we're merging is this media so the merge node is looking for two pieces of media or generators to merge over one another here's what'll happen and get you in trouble sometimes let's say you'll have a blur for whatever reason on your text and you have that attached to your merge right this is totally okay to do if you want to have blurry text over your merge for some reason just blur that right the merge node doesn't really care but look what happens when we detach our text well our merge isn't really doing anything anymore we're just merging this blur effect over our text which again i think this gets us in trouble so let's let's take the blur completely off our background for a second because sometimes like you think of you just want to put an effect over something if you're like me you think man okay i really like this image but i want it to be blurry so i'm going to put a blur effect on it and if you think about how you say that if you put a blur effect on it sometimes you can think that oh you want to put it on top of it right and so if i put something on top of something else i use the merge the problem with that is that the merge doesn't work that way so i can take this blur and i can just blur it to kingdom come right and it's not going to blur our image that's because emerges job is not to apply an effect to something else is to put a media or generator over a different media or generator so this isn't going to work because we don't have any media or generator attached to our foreground if we want to blur our background layer we don't put a effect over it we run it through an effect so this text if we run that through the blur then we're just not even going to see the text because the blur is so crazy so let's bring that back down there we go something like that something tasteful this is why we're spending a lot of time on this is because if you don't quite understand this concept you're going to be messing around and not really get the results that you want so a piece of media or a generator goes through an effect and the only time that you use a merge node is if you're going to put a piece of media or a generator over a different piece of media or generator alright so let's put an underlay under this merge is really its own thing these we've already gone over there are also a couple of other different nodes that we're probably not going to get really deep into in the training and they have to do with the 3d nodes and really what you need to know is there are 3d generators basically so like text 3d and shape 3d and image plane 3d these are basically like the 3d version of a media or generator and then we have a 3d version of merge which works the same way as a regular merge the only difference is that because we're in 3d space we don't have just a background and a foreground we're basically just adding these to a 3d scene and we can add things like cameras we can add all this kind of stuff to a 3d scene that's what this merge 3d is lights and for any of this to show up we have to have this one which is a renderer 3d this is kind of like a media out but it happens just for the 3d stuff so this basically is a really complicated generator so this turns into media basically a media or generator node same thing this can be ran through an effect it can be put in a merge it can be treated just like a piece of 2d media again if that doesn't quite make sense it's sort of out of the scope of what we're doing here there's a similar workflow for particles so there's a particle emitter particle merge and particle render it's almost the exact same thing so you have to kind of set it up like this and then this render becomes a piece of 2d media or a 2d generator one last thing to go over here when you merge something over something else all of this everything that's attached to this merge kind of like with the 3d render thing this basically becomes a new image a new piece of media a new generator right so this merge in some ways kind of acts the same way as a media and generator so it's kind of like the same thing because even though you can add a background and a foreground and merge things over what this eventually makes is an image right all of these make an image that you do things with rather than just change something about an image like the effect nodes do so you can actually take a merge and merge it over other things so another thing people get hung up on is okay if i can only put two layers on a merge i only have my foreground and my background how do i add multiple layers of things well the answer is you stack merges so we have all of this happening i'm going to take my blur off we have all of this but let's say we want to add something over it right in our original example i added some fog which we can do with the generator here this is fast noise this is a really really cool generator and what it does is it basically just makes clouds and with my node selected here i can adjust the detail and stuff of this but it makes clouds and again because it's a generator it's making an image it's not doing a effect to an image it's making this image of clouds and now we can merge this node over everything else we've done so far so we have our text over our background and we can put this whole thing into the background and put it into the media out and it looks the same but now we have another spot here for the foreground and we can attach this fast noise to the foreground and now we have our fog as our foreground and everything else we've done so far as the background this is kind of the essential way to build things up and if it seems complicated you're like man i just want to put a bunch of layers over one another man like what what's with all the merge nodes well if you think about it you're really kind of doing this anyway when it comes to layers right let's go back to the edit page for a second any time that you stack multiple things you're making a couple of different decisions right so let's say we have our car parking lot and we put that over this layer right and i'll just make this smaller so we have our background layer and our foreground layer well if we add another layer here let's say this jet we put that over everything else zoom this out a little bit something like that it's not really any different because we're still putting one layer over these other two layers even though these are all separate and they're all kind of just stacked neatly here we're still doing the same thing we're putting a foreground over our background and then these become the background and then we're putting our foreground over our background it's stacking it in exactly the same way the difference in fusion is that we're just lining it out in a flow chart rather than stacking them up so now that we've learned a lot about the different kinds of nodes if you look at one of these node flow charts it should actually start to make sense to you it's almost like learning a different language right if you can recognize the different types of nodes and kind of realize what they're doing then you can really start to understand what's happening here in our comp and the really cool part about having this you know somewhat complicated flowchart here is that every single thing that we do is actually lined out here on the flowchart so there's nothing really hidden about what's happening in our comp we can just kind of at one glance look and see what's happening where is in layers if we were to go let's say to the edit page again and let's say i put some effects on this like blur and contrast pop invert color we have all of this stuff happening to our images and when we look at our stack of layers well we just have three layers and it says there's effects happening but we don't really know what they are until we open them up and dig in and go up here to the inspector go to the effects and look what's happening for each layer which for something simple isn't that big of a deal but once you get even just a little more complicated it really starts to get muddy because you're like alright what was i doing to each little layer again and when you run into problems like man why can't i see a certain element it's because you have some effect on on one of your layers and you can't really tell at a glance where it is so what you do is you end up going through each of the layers and trying to figure out what the heck you did to mess something up well in fusion i mean it's not like you can't get lost but everything's lined out there we know exactly what's happening by what nodes are here and what nodes are attached to other nodes right now just at a glance without even looking at our screen like let's just take this off well now we have some kind of media and it's blurred and there's some text on top of it and there's some fast noise which is like clouds that's on top of that so what we would expect is some kind of video or picture that may be a little bit blurry with some text on top of it and some fog on top of both of those and when we hit 2 on the keyboard yep that's exactly what we have so a great way to learn is to look at these node graphs for shots that other people have done so let's do some of that right now so here in our edit page we have several different comps here so let's start with this shot i'll just click on fusion to open it up and now just like learning a new language you should be able to pick out at least some parts of these because that's the thing even though this is complicated and there's a lot more going on here it has the same basic building blocks and when you start to break it down it's not so overwhelming so let's start here on the left i'm just going to select a node and hit 1 on the keyboard to give us part of it so this is our original footage give us a little more room here it says the car driving down the road and then we have our merge node so something is being put over our original footage well let's go up to the beginning of this graph so the background let's hit one on the keyboard for a background okay so this is a background node but the background is clear we have a clear background and there are reasons for making a clear background that we might get into in a little bit and that's being merged under something and we have our media in two let's take a look at what that is so here we have our picture and what are we doing to this picture well it's getting ran through a color corrector so what that does is just kind of match the color between these two shots and then we're putting it over a clear background with a mask we have a mask on this merge and so remember what we're saying is okay put this picture over the background but only do it right here so this merge outputs an image that looks like this that's getting put into another merge which as the background and on top of that background what we're doing is adding this shadow and it's kind of a hack job it's not the best thing but it works and so then how would you make a shadow well you could take a background node and mask it so this is kind of just a dark blue background and it has a mask on it it's attached right to the background and then that is being merged over our image with a transfer mode remember emerge adjusts how something acts when it goes over something else so if we select the merge here we'll see this blend property this is like the opacity right this is the transparency of that layer so if we boost this up we can see we have a really strong dark shadow if we if we take it down it's a lot lighter right so i figured that it's most realistic i don't know about 73 or so we also have a transfer mode here multiply if this was if this were normal it would just look really unnatural in blue so that's set to multiply and that just changes how the pixels blend together when they're put over each other then we're running this whole merge everything that's happening here in our left viewer we're running that through an effect this effect is called planar transform and really what it is is we've tracked the motion of our shot and this effect tells this merge to move around in the same way that our shot moves around and so it matches the motion so that's why when we play this back this foreground layer moves along with our background layer it's because we tracked it so if we were to take this out it doesn't move along with our footage which looks weird and it's a dead giveaway so all of this is being merged over our background here in this merge node so even something that looks complicated like this the key is to start to understand all the little pieces and you build them as you go looking at something like this might feel overwhelming but when you're building it it makes sense as you go so let's try building something let's try this shot right here this is a screen replace and let's take a look at the fusion comp and here's what we're looking at we have our two pieces of media a couple effects and this node called a planar tracker so let's get rid of all these middle nodes and build this one at a time so here we have our original footage it's just a guy looking at a monitor with a green screen and tracking markers on it which is going to make our life a little bit easier so we start out with a shot and say okay what do we want to happen what's the goal well we want this to actually have a screen on it and have something interesting a lot of the time you might do this like for a website that you're advertising or whatever so we need our media that's going to go on this monitor in the media pool up here we can grab our media so i'm just going to grab this mountain shot here and drag it down into our nodes so now what we have is our media in one which is attached to our media out this is just grabbing that footage from the timeline and then rendering it then we have our media in two and this is if i hit one on the keyboard our mountains footage yeah cool right noise normally if we want to put this footage over our original footage what we do is make a merge node so i can drag a merge node out here and connect that to the background and connect the media into the foreground and now we have this footage in the foreground and with our merge node selected we can move this around right and control it but if we size this down let's say and put this over our monitor there's a couple of different problems one is that it doesn't really line up in perspective with our monitor it looks really janky and two the shot is moving and so it doesn't move along with the shot so we're going to have to fix both of those problems and this is what i mean when i say you can just build this as you go think about what you want to do and then we'll just figure out how to make that happen so we could use a merge node but we'd have to add some other effects to this what we're actually going to do right now is get rid of our merge node and the first thing we're going to do is deal with the motion of this footage because it is moving and then whatever we put on this monitor is going to have to move with it so we can use a node called planar tracker if you select media in one and hit shift spacebar p-l-a-n that'll bring up planar tracker there's planar tracker and planar transform i want to select planar tracker and i'll hit add and that's going to automatically add the planar tracker as an effect in between our media in and our media out right now nothing's happening in our footage that's because all this does is track stuff so what we're going to want to do is tell it where to track so with our node selected we can go up to our viewer i'll hold down control and i can roll with my scroll wheel and what we're going to do is just select pretty nicely this green screen we're just drawing a shape around here just clicking on the screen and adding little points just like a pen tool and then let's go to the end and close that by clicking on that first point so now we've just drawn a shape around our screen and over here in our inspector i'm going to do a couple things right here where it says reference time i'm going to click on set what that means is that it's going to start tracking from right here where i drew this because again this moves around in time and it doesn't want to just start whenever it wants to start whenever i started tracking it which honestly wasn't i wasn't very careful and i just kind of picked a random time so that's fine now we can click on go and go right back to where we drew this all of this stuff is stuff you can mess around with but by default it'll work pretty well for what we're doing this right hand button track to end let's click on that what that's going to do is look at the motion that's inside of our shape and it's going to track our shape along with the motion so it's tracked the last half of the shot let's go back to frame 32 and let's track it backwards to do the first half of the shot so now if things worked our little shape should move along with our green screen and anywhere that we click the shape should be pretty darn close to where it's supposed to be cool so part of our work for tracking is done but now down in our nodes this is really interesting because this planar tracker this is kind of a special effect it can be used as an effect in between things but it can also basically turn into a merge node because when you track something you generally want something to follow the motion of whatever you tracked and so this is kind of just built into this if i take the output of my media in and i drag that into my green input right here that's going to be our foreground basically it's labeled as corner pin one so basically we're saying all right kind of like a merge node put this media into over media in one with some tracking information applied let's go back up here and here under operation mode i'm going to switch this from track to corner pin corner pin is basically what you want to do for screen replacement or for sign replacement or anything that's just like a rectangle that you need to change and now it puts our footage here over our original footage and it just kind of throws it in the middle that's because it just doesn't really know where to put the corners so we have to tell it where to put the corners so let's put them roughly where they're supposed to go and then hold down control and we'll zoom in and make sure we are right on what i'll do is just overlap this green you don't really need to key out the green for something like this unless somebody's hand or face or something goes in front of the screen you can just put an image right on top i can click and drag with my scroll wheel to kind of move around like this but basically you just want to make sure that all of your corners are somewhat reasonable and you don't see any green kind of spilling out on the sides there's our image over our monitor and if we scrub through it should pretty much stick to our monitor and look nice no matter where we are in the clip so there's our really basic composite we have our new screen on top of this monitor and it moves along with the motion of our clip now if you're doing the composite it's really important to realize that if you put an image over another image they probably aren't going to look great together just automatically so what you'll often have to do is color correct one of your images to match the other one so this is what we're going to do here anytime that you see a monitor in real life you don't really see these really deep blacks these like really nice dark tones it's kind of washed out a little bit because that's just how screens look on camera and same thing with the brightest parts like it's not going to be that bright just because the light behind a monitor isn't really that bright and so what we want to do is change this so that the colors look realistic in our environment here so again in our nodes thinking about how we would make this happen this media in2 is the footage that we're putting over our monitor so before we merge it over other stuff with our tracker here we want to color correct it we want to change its colors so from our toolbar we can grab a color corrector effect and check this out i can take this and just drag it on top of this line and when the line turns blue that'll actually connect it where it's supposed to be so that's kind of a cool time saving thing and if we select our color corrector and go up here to our inspector we can adjust all the colors for just this little screen here for this example what i'm really concerned with are making the darks a little brighter and the brights a little darker and that happens in the gain and the lift the lift is the darkest parts and so we'll boost this up and there are ways to make sure this is right on but for this tutorial we're just going to kind of guess and push this up a little bit and then push the gain down a little bit so that this just isn't so bright and now we can zoom out and ask ourselves okay does this feel right does it feel reasonable that the monitor would look like that in real life well maybe maybe we'll change it just a little bit make it a little darker but that's the basic idea is that you can color correct one element because this media in is the only thing that runs through this color corrector if we wanted to color correct everything we would put the color corrector over here after everything and now this would affect everything that's attached to it just like that right but that's the advantage of having a color corrector node inside of the fusion page granted it's not as awesome as stuff in the color page but you can color correct and fix these little compositing problems before you get to the overall look so let's take a look at our shot the other thing that's kind of a dead giveaway is that this image looks really sharp like man it looks great this is like the best monitor in the history of mankind the monitor is somehow sharper than the footage we shot this clip on so what we need to do is just add a little bit of a blur to this footage so that it looks like this footage is actually on the monitor another problem we have here is look at this little triangle thing this is really common with the color corrector node here's how we fix that select our color corrector up here under options there's this little tick box pre-divide post multiply click on that and those kind of problems go away anytime you're having a problem with more stuff being color corrected than you want or something is wrong with like the transparency of something this is almost always the answer pre-divide post multiply click on that and that gets rid of that weirdness so what we're doing is adding a blur and you can add the blur before or after the color corrector probably doesn't matter a whole lot i'm just going to grab the blur again and just drag this down on top of this line to where it turns blue and now we're running our media through our color corrector and then blurring it and then putting it over our original footage with our tracking information so let's click on blur go up here and we're going to blur it i don't know maybe just just a little bit just a couple there we go something like that and then it looks a little bit more realistic here's the difference you can always preview things by clicking this little switch off and on here's it without the blur and here it is with it it just adds a little bit of diffusion to this so that it just isn't crazy same thing for our color corrector here's before and here's after you'll see a lot of like tv shows and stuff make this mistake they'll replace the screen and just leave it like this and that's why it looks super fake right but if you turn down that contrast a little bit that really helps sell the effect so this is our really basic composite here again taking our footage color correcting it giving a little blur and applying it over our other footage with some tracking information and if you understand this you can honestly do anything because it's really just building composites as you go let's take a look at one more thing before we wrap up here's this one 3d floating words pretty crazy composite right well now that we know a lot about fusion if we click into fusion here let's see what's going on look at this look at this craziness well again let's break this down we have our media in and our media out let's pick out other things that we know here's a blur this is just an effect we have a couple of merge things we know what those are so the merge goes over here let's say and like we said this renderer 3d this is basically just a piece of media or a generator right so if we hit one on the keyboard this is what that image looks like it's just our 3d word on transparent all this stuff is stuff that exists in 3d like here's some 3d text with some lights on it and that's all just pumped into our 3d renderer again if you don't understand all of this it's it's really okay if you're interested in the 3d thing i have a couple of tutorials on that they do have a lot of tutorials on youtube about just making 3d stuff but it's kind of its own world but for basic compositing i mean we're really just making an image here that's what this renderer does in fact to even make this less scary we can grab this and hit ctrl g and that will make just a group okay and so i'll rename this f2 and we'll call this 3d render you can think about it as just like a video or an image that we brought in like with a media in node and now this doesn't look so intimidating right so we have our media in which is just our original footage and we're putting something over it what we're putting over it is our 3d render okay so we're putting our 3d render over our original footage with this merge node but we have a mask attached to the merge node so we're basically saying okay put this 3d render over this footage but only right here so where are we saying only right here let's hit one on the keyboard and now we have this mask that's just saying all right just put it where the white part is just put it in this rectangle this soft rectangle mask and this mask is animated let's take a second and just talk about that this rectangle mask if i go over here to the inspector there's a piece that's animated called the center the reason i know that's animated is because we have these two little arrows right here next to this diamond this diamond is basically where your animation lives right so if i were to click one of these arrows it would go over to my next keyframe a keyframe is basically just telling something to be a certain number at a certain time so at frame four we want our rectangle to be right here at frame 20 we want our rectangle to be here at frame 23 we want it to be here and then at the end of the comp it needs to be right here and so what fusion will do is take those keyframes and it will animate this number in between the two keyframes and so it will move stuff basically and this works the same pretty much throughout resolve if you want to animate something you click on this little keyframe diamond and tell it what number you want at what time move to a different time and tell it what number you want at that time and it will move in between them that's how you animate basically everything and so this rectangle mask is being animated to move across our footage and why is that why would we do that well this 3d word is actually being put on top of our footage right but if this really exists in 3d space in the hallway then when we dolly past this wall the wall would really be in front of the word and so we need to kind of trick the viewer into thinking that the word is behind the wall right and so that's why we add this soft mask and we just mask the word at the exact same time that our wall reveals the rest of the shot that's kind of the idea there and after a while it doesn't matter because the wall's not in front of anything anymore but this mask really makes this feel like it's in the space if we didn't have the mask attached look what happens we have our word on top of this black part and it just it's very strange that's not really accomplishing what we want so let's attach this rectangle mask to the merge here's another thing about nodes that's really cool you may notice this is attached to two different things nodes aren't limited to only being attached to one thing you can reuse them as many times as you want and so this same rectangle mask that we're using to mask our words we can mask other stuff with because we've already done all this work we don't want to make it again we can just use the same mask to mask other stuff so what are we masking well we're masking this other merge so what we're doing let's look here in our left viewer so what we're doing is we're taking something and we're putting it over this comp right here what are we grabbing we're grabbing this same 3d render which we can see because this is also being used over here but we're blurring it now what are we doing in this blur let's take a look we've added a blur effect in between our 3d render and our merge and this blur just blurs this on the x-axis so it kind of blurs it horizontally and then a little bit vertically but why would we do that well that's because this merge right here is making a reflection that's making this reflection down here in the floor how did we get this to turn upside down well in our merge node if we select the merge node and go up here and i have this flipped so normally this would be right side up i just flipped it turned it upside down and moved it down a little bit onto our floor and turned the blend down a lot so this is normally how much it would be you turned it down to be tasteful right just kind of subtle we also change the apply mode to soft light all of this stuff controls how this image interacts with the background so now we have our blurry word getting flipped and turning the transparency down and being put over our background and again we're using the same mask to limit it so that it goes behind the wall that's a really cool thing about nodes is being able to reuse not only this mask but also the original render and so you can do stuff like this really easily and then all of that is being rendered out to the timeline which of course if we go to the edit page there it is those are a lot of the basics about how to composite how to work with nodes inside of fusion i want to give you just a couple more tips before we go let's go back to our haunted house shot the very first tip is that if you want to merge something over something else you can always make a merge node like we've been doing grabbing it here and attaching it linking everything up but you can also hold down shift and take nodes out or put nodes back in to a connection so that's really helpful if you were to grab a merge node and you just had it setting here hold down shift and drag it in between and that will attach it so that's a little bit faster another way that you can move fast with nodes is if you have a node selected and you hit shift spacebar remember we have our fancy menu here if you type mrg that'll bring up merge and you hit enter it will automatically add that node after the node that you had selected so that's a quick way to add a merge same thing like that but what's even faster is if you have a couple pieces of media right you have your fast noise which is a generator you have your media in which is media you can take this output and drag it over the little output square of any other node and check out what happens boom it makes a merge note because it knows like hey if you're dragging something over something else you're probably going to want to merge it right it's almost the same thing as dragging a layer on top of another layer right so that's super helpful if you want to move quick and through all of this if it feels like man this is just a really complex way to do some simple stuff well there are a lot of simple tricks like this to move a little bit faster right and once you know what you're doing and you kind of learn each little part then you can kind of link all of those things that you know together in more complex ways one last tip is that you don't have to do absolutely everything in the fusion page if there is a better tool for whatever effect you're doing use it so for instance we could build that whole haunted house nighttime shot here in the fusion page there are ways to do that you could put a color corrector on like this and you could darken things up a little bit you can make it kind of blue you could kind of do that here but if we're going for basically an overall look it's not a bad idea to do something like go into the color page and use the color tools to make this look which is what i did we have our nighttime color grade and even this little window turning on is a effect from the color page that's the cool part about resolve is you can move in between the pages and really do an effect kind of partially in the fusion page partially in the color page partially in the edit page and it's totally okay to do that because if the result looks good that's what matters so there you go i hope it was helpful for you and maybe you understand just a little weensy bit more about fusion or at least are hungry for toast i know i am if you want some more practice with fusion actually walk through how to make a bunch of different graphics in this training right here check it out and you can be a motion graphics master inside of fusion pretty cool even goes through 3d stuff those kind of things you

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 362,342

Keywords: FUSION: THE ULTIMATE BEGINNERS GUIDE -DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial, Beginners guide to fusion, how to use fusion in resolve 17, fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci resolve 17 tutorial for beginners, ultimate beginners guide, learn fusion resolve, basics of davinci resolve 17, fusion basics, learn resolve 17, fusion tutorial davinci resolve, fusion tutorial resolve

Id: MDpR2xluwvI

Length: 73min 23sec (4403 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020