Fusion VFX Workflow for Beginners

in this video we're going to learn all about the VFX workflow in resolve and fusion give you a nice overview of the general concepts and kind of how things work because I feel like people don't explain that sometimes are you just supposed to know and that's not good so here we have a film we've been editing and we have a couple parts that are supposed to have a gunshot we didn't have blank firing guns or anything like that so this whole gunshot thing is going to have to be a visual effect by visual effect we mean something that is done in post using movie Magic so how do we do that in result traditionally how this would be done is you'd put your edit together in your editing app of choice and you get your story all worked out and then these visual effects shots would be rendered out and brought into a compositing program like after effects or nuke whatever you have available and this clip would be composited we would add the muzzle flash and any kind of lighting any kind of fancy things that we want to add digitally and then we'd render this out as a new video and bring this back into our edit and replace this clip with that edit that's kind of generally how it it's done in resolve we do sort of the same thing but with a little less trouble we still have our edit pretty much done here and we have a couple of markers and notes added to our sequence and we have this clip kind of isolated here on the timeline but instead of rendering this out and bringing it into something like after effects in resolve we can just switch over to the fusion page and do our movie Magic there without any kind of rendering so I'm just going to have my playhead over the clip that I want to adjust and click into Fusion that will bring up the clip here in Fusion here we have it and if I bring up my keyframes palette just by clicking on this button here we can even see we have our little marker so this marker here is right where we want this gunshot to happen and there are a bunch of different ways to do an effect in Fusion but for something like a gunshot or an explosion or to add rain or some kind of digital thing that's supposed to look realistic a lot of the time what you'll do is use an element now what do I mean by element an element is a image or a video that we're going to kind of lay on top of what we have going on here and combine them together to make an effect for instance we have these muzzle flashes these are just digital paintings and I can bring this up here and it's just kind of this yellow cloud with a white interior looks vaguely like a muzzle flash and this is just a still frame there are a lot of sites where you can get elements to combine with your video things like fire explosions that kind of thing action VFX is great there are quite a few different other sites but they'll all generally give you some kind of isolated element on a black background or maybe a clear background and combining those with your footage infusion is pretty easy you just need to bring in the element all I did was just drag this in from our media pool and that'll make a media endnote and what we do is we merge this element over our original footage I can do this by creating a merge node I'll just select my media in which is our original footage and click on this merge and I can take the output of our media N3 which is our muzzle flash and pipe that into the foreground of our merge and now we have our flash over our original footage if this doesn't make sense to you I have a lot of videos on how Fusion Works how the nodes work this is kind of just supposed to be a general overview but the idea is we have our element over our original footage and that gets merged over it now we don't want this black background here and so oftentimes what we'll do is in this merge node we can go to the inspector where we can adjust all the properties of how something gets merged over something else and we can switch this apply mode to something like screen and that will get rid of the black pixels and it'll keep the bright pixels and now we're getting somewhere I can take this element and position it exactly where it needs to be put this right here at the end of the gun and now we have a basic muzzle flash this works basically the same way if you have a video element or a still like we're using here you'll just need to line it up in time which you can do in the keyframes like this open up the keyframes I can move my element back and forth and decide kind of when that happens in time so for this still image I could trim this and make this show up for just one frame which would totally work there's also ways to turn this off and on in the merge but for a simple muzzle flash like this we just need it to appear for one frame and then disappear here and that would work just fine then it's a matter of making sure that this element works with everything else in the shot so we might want to do something like grab some gun smoke which is another element and we can merge this over our original footage again in the keyframes we can move this back and forth to where the timing makes sense and position and scale our smoke element to be a puff of smoke that happens when the gun fires again we can trim this to start just right on that frame now we have not only the flash but we also have the smoke element coming in as well and with those two elements combined we actually have a pretty convincing little effect pretty neat something else that might happen for something like a muzzle flash would be to grab the slide of the gun and move that back in post so that we have kind of that blowback action we can do this by essentially duplicating our original footage and merging it over itself and adding a mask a mask controls the transparency of any node or effect and I can kind of make a little cutout of our slide for our gun here make sure to invert my mask and now I can move this slide independently of the rest of the footage so I could do something like push this slide back a little bit like this and maybe we'll add a little blur like a directional blur just to give it a little bit of movement and soften the edge there and now we have a little bit of movement on that slide and any of these effects and nodes we can animate using these little diamonds right here all I have to do is Click whatever control I want to animate which I'll animate the blend which is just the opacity of this merge right here I'll go one frame forward and turn it all the way off and it's totally on right there and then the frame after that will turn it totally off again so now now we have this perceived movement for this gun where it kind of blows that slide back and that really helps to sell this effect now we have this pretty cool looking gun movement from a fake gun combine that with something like a solid color which we can apply with a certain transparency mode maybe something like soft light and we can add some interactive lighting to our shot turn this to hard light and take this down a little bit you can add just a little bit of that light to really sell this effect again I can animate this on the blend for just that frame and now we have some lighting effects that we can dial into taste you build out your elements with the nodes inside of fusion and when you have the shot looking exactly the way you want you can switch back over to the edit page at any time and it's already in your edit so that's a basic overview of the visual effects workflow inside of fusion and resolve if you want to get a little bit deeper in this we have a beginner's course which is available right here we get super detailed in making effects for your videos inside of fusion and resolve which is a free program by the way so if you're interested check out that course we also have an advanced course available once you start to learn your stuff there's also links to that down in the description so yeah I guess that's all I had to say make sure that your muzzle flashes are flashy

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 72,088

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, motion graphics, motion graphics animation, editing video, VFX Workflow for beginners, Fusion tutorial, VFX, vfx tutorial, vfx breakdown, learn how to do vfx, how to make a muzzle flash in davinci resolve, how to add gunshot effects to video, how to make animations in davinci resolve, how to animate with davinci resolve

Id: kwpzwT0_lNM

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023