Make Your Fusion Titles Responsive — DaVinci Resolve PowerTip

so you've designed an animated fusion title and you're pretty happy with it but now you want to add an exit animation plus you want to be able to reuse the title in the future make it longer or shorter without having to mess with key frames and spline shapes and all that unpleasantness how great would it be if you could add both an exit animation and timeline responsiveness to any fusion title in about 60 seconds flat well in this tutorial you'll discover a super simple way of doing exactly that I'm David power and this is a DaVinci Resolve power tip before we get started I want to give a quick shout out to junior from JR TV I originally picked up today's technique from deep inside one of juniors fusion tutorials junior has a ton of great DaVinci Resolve tutorials on his channel so if you're not already familiar with his work I encourage you to check him out at youtube-dot-com forward-slash J RTB and you'll find a link to his channel in the description below all right here's a simple animated title I've created in fusion it's nothing too fancy just a white bar that slides left to right and reveals my name it's the kind of thing you might use for a lower third I'm on a 24 frames per second timeline and I use keyframes to animate the title in over 41 frames or about 1.7 seconds right now the title animates in and remains static if I want to add a reverse animation which I like to do because it looks slick and professional I have three options method number one hard-code the keyframes I can create an out animation by creating individual keyframes for each element in my title that's a perfectly valid way to get the job done but depending on your fusion skill level it can easily take an additional 10 15 or 20 minutes while you set up and tweak keyframe values timings and spline shapes for each element of the animation so again it's a valid way to create an out animation but it's tedious and time consuming Plus even after you've invested all that time your title still isn't responsive if you trim its length on the edit timeline you end up cutting off the tail end of the animation that means you've got to go back into fusion and spend even more time adjusting your keyframes so it's far from an ideal solution that brings us to method number two use a duplicate fusion clip this option requires less work than key framing but you still have to create a duplicate of your original fusion clip place it on the timeline convert it to a compound clip change the clip speed to reverse it and then trim its length to adjust the timing once again this technique can get the job done but it requires four or five different steps you've got to perform every time what if you could build responsiveness directly into your title so it automatically adjusts whenever you change its length on the timeline well here's exactly how you do that method number three add two simple fusion nodes okay I'm going to switch to my fusion tab and let's start by disconnecting our media out from the rest of our titles nodes you do that by hovering your cursor over the connecting line between the nodes until the line turns blue and then clicking on it next click anywhere on the fusion background so there's no node selected then press shift and space on your keyboard that brings up the select tool dialog now type the word time T IME click to select the time speed tool then click Add that adds a time speed node to your fusion composition we will come back in a moment and adjust the settings for this node but before we do that let's add one more node once again click anywhere on the background to deselect any selected nodes then type shift and space and this time type dissolve di SS o lve select the dissolve tool with your mouse then click Add that adds a dissolve node to your flow now let's connect these notes we're going to start with the last no of your title animation for reference I'm going to call this your final note this will most often be in merge note but whatever it is in your case your final mode is the one you normally connect to media out so let's draw a connection from the output of your final node to the input of your new time speed node next draw a second connection from the output of your final node to the green foreground input of the dissolve node okay now draw a connection from the output of time speed 1 to the yellow background input of dissolve 1 and finally connect the output of the dissolve node to the input of media out all right now everything's connected let's talk for a quick minute about what these nodes do first of all the time speed tool simply creates a copy of anything you send to its input but in addition to creating a copy it also gives you the ability to speed the copy up slow it down or reverse it and because what we want to do here is create an out animation that's identical to our in animation we'll select the time speed node and over here in the inspector window we'll put our cursor on the speed input field and type minus 1 so now the output of the time speed node is an exact copy of our title animation and it's at the same speed but it's reversed in sequence we can see that happening live if we bring our final node to view or 1 and our time speed node to view or to and use our mouse keys to step through the animation frame by frame you'll see viewer 1 starts with an animation and ends static while viewer to the time speed copy starts with a static title and ends with an out or exit animation make sense so now we have both an in and an out animation but we need a way to switch between them and that's exactly what the dissolve node does for us you can think of the dissolve tool like a valve that switches between two different inputs and we control what's flowing through the valve by adjusting the foreground background slider here in the inspector pane here's an example in a new fusion composition I have a pure white background a pure green background and a dissolve note I'll connect the white background to the foreground input I'll connect the green background to the background input and I'll send the output of the dissolve node to the viewer now notice here by default the dissolve note is showing me the foreground color of white but when I adjust the dissolve nodes background foreground slider here in the inspector pane the viewer fades from white to green and back again simple right so how do we make use of that in our animation well returning to our fusion title we'll use it as all know to switch between our in animation and our reversed out animation now one way to do this is to keyframe the dissolve slider but if we do that the title won't be responsive and we'll have to adjust the keyframes manually every time we want to change the titles duration and that would put us right back where we were with the other techniques we discussed earlier and that is no bueno so what we're going to do instead is use what's called an expression or a formula to automate the background foreground slider to transition between the in and the out animation at the halfway point of the titles duration now if you're not experienced with coding this next bit might look confusing the good news is you don't have to understand coding or scripting at all to make this work as long as you follow the instructions you'll be fine so here's the expression we're going to use essentially all this formula does is tell the dissolve slider when the title is less than halfway through its length display the foreground or in animation and when the title clip reaches the halfway point switch over and display the background or out animation and here are the steps to using this expression first select your dissolve node with your mouse then in the inspector pane right click the background foreground label and select expression next in the expression field to the following string the spelling and capitalization is important here so double check to make sure everything's accurate and since typing the string accurately is a pain you'll find a copy of the formula in the description below so all you need to do is copy and paste it into the expression field in the inspector window once you've done that let's confirm the expression is working properly place your cursor close to the halfway point of your fusion composition and use the left and right arrow keys to move it back and forth for instance my composition is a hundred and forty-four frames long so when my cursor or playhead is at any frame number below 72 the dissolve slider has a value of one so media out is displaying the foreground or in animation but as soon as I move the cursor to the halfway point at frame 72 the slider jumps from one to zero and stays there for the duration of the clip and with the slider at zero media out is displaying the background or out animation that is the reversed time speed version of the in animation will give our fusion composition a few seconds to render and when the render line is blue let's play the title so that looks great now here's where the magic happens remember my fusion clip is 144 frames long so in its current form the whole title takes six seconds to animate in and out because I've used an expression to control the dissolve note my title will automatically adjust when I change its length here on the timeline so if I want the title be on-screen for 9 seconds all I need to do is grab a right edge of the clip and stretch it out to 9 seconds give it some time to render and here's my title over nine seconds similarly if I need the title to be in and out in only four seconds I can shorten the fusion clip up so it's four seconds long let it render and boom the whole thing automatically adjusts to play in and out in four seconds so now we have a fully responsive title the only limitation here is that I can't make the Fusion clip shorter than twice the length of my in animation I mentioned earlier for this title my in animation takes 41 frames or 1.7 seconds so if I shorten the clip to 3 seconds or 72 frames that's less than the 82 frames it takes to render the entire in-and-out animation I end up with a little problem you'll see here the animation gets cut short but as long as I keep my clip at least 82 frames long everything's cool so there you have it a simple technique you can use to add both an exit animation and timeline responsiveness to any fusion title that's it for today if you have questions let me know in the comments below and if you dig this tutorial you know what to do once again I'm David power and I'll see you in the next power tip

Channel: David Power

Views: 7,903

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve 16, video editing, davinci resolve 15, davinci resolve tutorial

Id: R8LXJ3Cvz58

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019