HOW TO START USING FUSION - Your First Day in the Fusion Page of DaVinci Resolve!

in this video we're looking at some top tips for opening Fusion for maybe not the first time but one of the first times if you've used resolve for a little bit and you're just kind of nervous about jumping into the fusion page this video is perfect for you I'm going to take you through the very hardest part the blank page the very first step just getting started my name is Casey and I help content creators learn how to use Fusion so this is just this is great this is great and down in the description you'll find a link to my free course that VI Fusion Survival Guide which teaches you the top tips for actually getting stuff done in Fusion let's jump in let's get started shall we all right so here we are in D Vinci resolve in the edit page which have a nice little edit here little family trip video and maybe you clicked on this video because you want to add some VFX or you know maybe do some fancy graphics for your video and really kind of to start off there are really two ways that you kind of start a composition infusion the first would be to take a video from the timeline so You' just kind of be over a clip in the timeline like this and then just switch into fusion and that will bring the clip into Fusion to work on the other thing you could do is in the media pool you could right click anywhere where it's blank and go down to new Fusion composition then you can create a new Fusion composition from scratch I'll hit create and then you can just double click on that and that will open here in the fusion page as kind of a blank comp now what's the difference why would you use one versus the other generally if you're doing some kind of visual effect or you're tracking something to a shot you're kind of using a video that you already have generally you'll take that from the timeline and the edit page and bring that clip into Fusion if you're making something from scratch like Motion Graphics or you know you're creating some art or something like that some kind of design you might want to start just kind of with a blank canvas and that's when you would just make a new Fusion composition the cool thing about having a fusion composition here I'll just make something real quick so we can see what's happening and then I'll explain what the heck I did here in a minute but let's say this Fusion composition makes a red background okay you can take this Fusion composition here in the media pool and you can drag this down to the timeline and you can use it as kind of its own source clip right and so this is great if you have something like a graphic that you want to reuse in various different videos or multiple places in your video that's kind of what that's for versus if I want to add just some text to this shot or you know clone something out or do something fancy here I'd probably just make sure I'm looking at this shot here in the edit page and then switch over to Fusion like this and now I have access to the shot and I can do all kinds of fanciness I like to kind of break up the uses of fusion into basically two categories you have your visual effects and your Motion Graphics visual effects are doing things that kind of are supposed to look real things that are changing an image things that you would think of like using Photoshop for video this that kind of thing so it's cloning things out it's changing colors of things it's duplicating stuff that kind of exists in real life it's adding fire and explosions and kind of putting things into the real world I guess you would say whereas Motion Graphics is more like graphic design it's animations it's doing 3D stuff it's having words swoop onto the screen and you know change around and that kind of thing so let's dive into the first kind which would just be visual effect just by clicking the fusion page here and opening up this clip INF Fusion if you're just getting started in Fusion you probably look at this and go wow I don't even understand this interface what's this box about and how is that different from this viewer and what are all these tools and what is what is even what is that why is that why are there little boxes down here this looks like the most complicated thing I've ever seen well let's walk through this interface for a minute the first thing you'll probably notice is the viewer and so up here on the right we have our video so we can see what's going on and by default this is going to be what your end image looks like so after you're done with everything in Fusion that's what kind of shows up here on the left we have another viewer and this viewer is a lot like the viewer in the edit page where you can kind of double click on a source clip and kind of preview it here on the left and then we have our finished product our timeline viewer here on the right it's sort of the same idea the only difference is that infusion you can use either of these viewers to view just a part of your composition or to view the end result so for instance I can click on this media in node and hit one on the keyboard and bring this up on the left and I have two viewers now now these are going to be the exact same thing because of some stuff that we'll talk about here in a minute but it's good to know that there are two viewers and each of these can view any part of your composition or the end result down below the viewers we have the timeline so we can scrub through things we have the yellow in and out points for our shot and we have the transport controls where we can play stop play Backwards that kind of thing and below that we have the tools now these tools are a little bit different than the tools that you would see in the edit page where you click on a tool and kind of switches the selection mode these tools actually add a node down to the node graph so these are are kind of quick ways to just grab nodes that you need now what the heck is a node why what is that well you can think of nodes like a flowchart what we're going to do is adjust this image and we're going to do that with a series of steps and we're going to have kind of a little graph of the series of steps that we're taking down here in the nodes and by default we have two nodes that we start out with when we open up a clip from the timeline we have our media in and our media out and to kind of simplify this you can think of each of these little boxes which are called nodes each one of these boxes is a node you can think of each node as having essentially one job so every time that you need to do a new step in messing with your image or creating something you need a new node so this really simple two-step graph here has media in which has one job and its job is to grab a piece of media from the timeline that's this image and then it connects to our media out node our media out node has one job and that's to put the image back into the timeline so all of the fans fanciness that we're going to do is going to happen in between these nodes and it's going to be connected with these little lines so we're making a flowchart of what's happening to the image so for instance if we wanted to color correct this we could grab this node which is a color corrector and grab this and drag this in between the nodes and I'll just drop this on this little line when it turns blue like this and I like to grab this and kind of shake it around and make sure that these connections are actually being connected and now if I select this node I can go over to the inspector here which just shows the control for whatever I have selected and I can do some color correction of course this is probably the best color correction you've ever seen and I know you're jealous we're really just building a little flowchart of what we want to do here we're taking the image from the timeline as is then we're doing some color correction to it and then we're putting it back on the timeline so that happens if we go back to the edit page like this o we see our color corrected image here on the timeline now this is changed a little bit because of my color management settings but you get the idea anything that we do in Fusion for a clip here in the timeline we don't have to render out and we don't have to convert or anything like that it's just already happening to that clip in the timeline let's make this a little bit less extreme maybe we'll add a little bit of contrast and if we switch over to the edit page we have that contrast being added here to the timeline now like I said I have my color management stuff happening so I'll switch over to color and I'll just turn off my color management nodes here just so we can see it without being confused so here in Fusion I have this and maybe I'll turn it really green and then in the edit page it's going to look exactly the same because that's the finished product that's being pumped out of fusion and back into the timeline and this is where we can start to see the point of these two viewers right because here on the left what we've done is we've loaded media in so we're looking at kind of the result of this first node here in the left viewer and then this last node is here in the right viewer I know that because we can see the title here above the viewer we also have these little indicators here these little dots you might have two dots on your system I have three because I have an external monitor but whatever dot is white that's where this node is loaded and so I can also load this node into the left viewer by selecting it and hitting one on the keyboard I can also just take a node and just drag it into the viewer like this to preview it and so now we can see kind of the before and the after of our image and that's really the main thing in Fusion is that you have a lot of different tools a lot of things that you can do to an image but it's all based on hooking things up with this little flowchart which we call the node flow and what's really neat is you can look at this chart and you can easily tell what's happening to an image without even having to see the image I can close this up and say okay we're grabbing some media from the timeline then we're color correcting it and I can see just by looking at this that it's has a really big green push and then we're bringing it back to the timeline so I would assume that whatever clip we're on is going to look really green so I can switch over to edit and in fact it's really green right and then you pretty much just plug the nodes in in whatever order you want so maybe I want to color correct this green and then I want to scale it up up I can take this node which is a transform node put that in between like this I'll select this transform and here under size let's put two for size this is going to zoom this in to 200% so if I switch over to the edit page yep it's zoomed in 200% so there's a lot of value in having what you're doing kind of mapped out here in the nodes because you can easily tell what's happening to your shop so that's kind of the essentials with nodes is that you have this flowchart and you build it kind of in steps like that and you can see all the steps together so let's make this a little more practical I'll just delete those middle nodes let's say we want to have something like some text that is kind of floating right here one way you might do that would be just to first of all start with a text node like this grab this third node over it's called a text plus and I'll hit one on the keyboard to bring this up on the left viewer then we can say you know camping 2017 and this text node has one job and it's just to generate text and of course I can change the size and the color and all that stuff let's I don't know pick a different font let's say something like this but one big thing you'll run into is there are no layers in Fusion there isn't like a layer stack like you might be used to in layer based compositing programs or photo editing programs or even on the edit page where you know you could grab a title and put this over things there isn't really a stack of layers of any kind so how the heck do we put this text over this image I mean you can't just like put it over here you have to hook it up into the flow well again every node has one job and so we just need to use a special node for the job of putting something over something else and so to the right of this second divider is what we call a merge node if you take this merge node and drag it in in between these two nodes just like this then well nothing happens that's because this merge has a couple of different inputs here and these inputs are colorcoded so by default pretty much everything that we've done so far has this yellow input that's kind of the main input of a node most of the time but a merge has two other inputs it has a blue input which is the mask input just don't worry about that for now but it also has a green input which is the foreground input and so if you Mouse over any of these inputs it'll tell you what it is this yellow for AEM merge is the background and the green for the merge is the foreground so I can take the output that's this little gray square of the node and plug that into the input of the merge like this and look what happens we have the text over our background and so that's really how you kind of put things over other things in inside of fusion and again this still kind of reads like a flowchart we have our media in which is our original footage and then we're putting something over it what are we putting over it well in the foreground we have our text and then the result of that the image that that makes goes into our media out and that's what is sent to the timeline so if we switch to edit there it is in the timeline okay so we could obviously do something like this in the edit page why would we do it in Fusion well there are a lot of cool things that you can do with Fusion to animate things and move things around and that kind of thing but one thing you could do would be to use a tracker so let's bring up a node that isn't actually in our toolbar here and you can do that a couple ways you can go up to effects in the upper left and here we have all of the tools that are available in fusion and we could go down to tracking and we can use a Tracker a Tracker tracks the motion of a shot and lets you kind of stick things to whatever is moving so this shot has kind of a shaky camera let's say we want to kind of paste this text right here and kind of have it move along with the camera like it's floating in the air well one thing we could do is use a planer tracker grab a planer tracker like this and planer tracker has one job and that is to track things what do we want it to track well we have to put that into the main input the background okay so let's take the output of media in and plug that into the yellow input of the tracker now you'll notice something here you can take a node and you can plug it into multiple different nodes it doesn't have to just go one place it can go lots of different places and so we're pretty much just taking a copy of this original footage and we're putting it into the planer tracker which means that we're just telling it that's what we want to track so with the tracker selected I can bring this up in our first viewer I'll go back to two viewer mode and hit one on the keyboard to bring this up I can draw anywhere on the screen that I want it to track and a planer tracker just tracks like a bunch of points inside of a shape and so let's just track these trees here something like this and now with our planer tracker selected we can go over to the inspector and we're going to do a couple things first thing I'll do is set our reference time like this and then I'm going to track this forward with this far right button track to end like this and it's going to make a whole bunch of little tracking points and it's going to figure out their movement and we' tracked everything after frame 279 which is just kind of where I randomly started but that's okay I can go back to that reference time I can also hit go right here 365 and then track this backwards track to start and we're going to track all of that motion all the way to the start of the shot and now we have these kind of little green trackers throughout the whole shot so we can take this tracker and click create planer transform that will make a new node that we can put in between our text and our merge like this I'll hold down shift to just put this in there you can also just click on this connector to disconnect it and then hook it up like this but it goes in between the text and the planer transform and now if I play this back that text Will kind of stick to the background as it plays back so if I take this text and maybe I'll just take the size down a little bit and I'll move this over here to the right sort of where we tracked now I can play this back and it sticks where it's supposed to stick on the shot so now if I switch back to the edit page we have this title but it's track to move along with the shot very nice and so that's a quick way we can add kind of a little title just to a clip in our timeline if I switch back to Fusion I can go in here and change it all I want but before we wrap up let's just kind of read this we're starting with our media in I'll just bring this up in our left viewer and then we're tracking it and the planer tracker doesn't really have anything that it's outputting this is just a way to make this plan or transform which is just an effect that you run the text through to make sure it matches that movement it's actually the same thing as a transform node it just has animation on it pretty much so we're taking our original footage and we're putting something over it what are we putting over it well we're putting over this text and we're running it through a transform that's going to move it in the same way that our background moves and so we put those together and it looks like this is stuck to the background then we're putting it back into the timeline and now we have our attct shot so yeah if you're just getting into Fusion I think this is enough to get dangerous I would start out just by opening up a shot in Fusion maybe putting a blur on it something like that so you just kind of get used to how these nodes work and that you have to select a node and adjust its properties for it to actually do anything and then kind of experience that hey it puts it right back into the timeline like that and from there just try out some various nodes and try and hook them up and see how things work and if you're feeling really adventurous you know you could put some text over it with a merge note node and stylize that text and maybe even track it to the background with the way that we use that tracker and if you are just getting into Fusion I would really recommend checking out the fusion Survival Guide this is a absolutely free course where we go a little bit more in depth on some kind of need to know tips for working in fusion and kind of getting used to the interface and if you get this course you'll also have a coupon for a discount on our big course Fusion Zero to Hero which is all about learning the mindset of a compositor so not just how to use Fusion but how to make amazing original things in Fusion so when you're ready to dive deep into fusion fusion Zero to Hero is the way to go but for now if you're just getting started Fusion Survival Guide there's a link down in the description make sure to check that out and I'm making all kinds of content for learning Fusion including this one right here which you could click on you know keep uh keep on rolling as they say as the great Limp Biscuit once said keep rolling

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 31,028

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, how to start using Fusion, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners 2023, davinci resolve 18.5, fusion tutorial davinci resolve 18, fusion tutorial for beginners, how to use fusion composition, casey faris fusion tutorial, what are nodes in davinci resolve, how to use nodes in davinci resolve 18

Id: X07_Po4N450

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023