Master the FUSION Page! (even if you're an Absolute Noob) - DaVinci Resolve

Da Vinci resolves fusion page might just be the toughest thing to learn for noobs like me in fact one of our community members called it the confusion page which I thought was pretty appropriate but today I'm going to try to walk you through it in a way that hopefully makes a little more sense than some of the other more confusing tutorials that I've seen on YouTube I'll be doing all of that courtesy of a brand new sponsor that I'm really psyched to have here today story blocks now there are a lot of paid sources that I use in my videos all the time to come up with things like b-roll and some of the music and sound effects and some of the images that I use in my thumbnails but the one that I've been using longer than any of them and I've been paying year after year because it was absolutely worth it is story blocks their website is designed specifically for those creators who want to grab that perfect shot that maybe they can't film themselves or find that perfect music track that will really make their video stand out from the rest storyblocks does all of these things so well that when they reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in working together I jumped at the chance now you'll be seeing me use some of their stuff right here as we walk through DaVinci Resolve Fusion but we'll only be scratching the surface I've got a link down below that you can check out afterwards where you can see all of the things that they really have to offer so thank you storyblocks for helping me show all my fellow noobs today how to tackle DaVinci Resolve Fusion let's dive into this so the fusion page is an interesting and very confusing portion of DaVinci Resolve that I'm gonna try to explain in a way that hopefully makes some sense by keeping things very simple today a lot of us are used to working in the timeline in the edit page which is pretty straightforward editing where we bring assets into this page and we cut them up and we'll add things like text and different elements on top of it let me start there just so we have a reference point I want to create a quick clip of maybe someone who's been struggling at work or having a tough time so let me see what I can find that would fit that idea inside of storyblocks let me go with something like a boss yelling at an employee and as you can see here there's all these videos I can choose from and if I hover over them they start to play so I can get an idea of what those look like this silhouette one here is kind of interesting let me see that I can click on it and what it'll do is not only show me that clip but it'll show me other options that are similar I kind of like this one so let me pick the 4K resolution version of it and download this let me bring that into my project and if I bring this down into my timeline this is sort of the thing that most of us are used to working in the edit page here's your timeline if you click Play here's your video track this particular clip doesn't have any audio with it but this is what we're used to seeing some footage we're going to work with starting in the timeline so imagine if you and I were working together on a video edit and I handed you a single video clip and said hey I want you to take this and I have a few things I'd like you to do to it I want you to make it look better or change it or add some things to it so that it's different than it is right now in my timeline and then I just handed you that clip and sent you off on a mission telling you bring it back to me when you're done that's kind of the way Fusion works let me show you what I mean I've got my playhead over this clip so if I go to the fusion tab it's going to pull this clip up in Fusion now this might look a little confusing to you these are what they call nodes and you're seeing a node and a line and then another node and that can be really confusing if most of us are used to looking at editing in a regular timeline but think of it it this way I'm a musician or at least I pretend to be and a lot of times I think about the way Fusion works the same way I think about playing instruments this note here is just the media in that's just this clip coming into fusion and this node here is just the media out that's sort of it going back out to the rest of the project and this line here is just the connection point between the two if I disconnect them I've unplugged it from the output think of this like an electric guitar if this is your electric guitar and this is your amplifier you need to plug in a cord from your guitar to your amplifier and now the two would be connected and if you hit play you'd make some music here and what you're looking at up here is the mini timeline of that clip itself this is me scrubbing and playing through just that clip if you've ever seen a guitarist play live a lot of times you'll bring some effects pedals with him maybe a distortion pedal or a delay pedal or something that he'll plug in to make his guitar sound different or better or unique for that specific song something to enhance or change the basic sound of the guitar itself and if he had a distortion pedal he would plug from his guitar into a distortion pedal than to his amplifier well Fusion's kinda like that too if we look up here in this middle section with some quick icons for common things that people might use this first section encompasses things like some background there's actually a paint option over here you'll see some color correction some color curves brightness and contrast even a blur so in this second section right here let's grab that blur the same way we would grab an effect that you were going to plug your guitar into and if you bring it down and stick it right between your guitar and your amplifier or the media in and the media out you'll see the line turns blue and yellow telling you that that can be added there and it's dropped in so now that clip is going into the blur and then back out again and if we click on this blur option down here here you'll see in the upper right under the inspector the same kind of controls we would see if we were back on the timeline clicking on a clip and opening up the inspector as well so back in Fusion here's that blur clip if I grab the blur size which is currently turned all the way down and then turn it up you can see up in the preview window that clip begins to blur so all I've done is I've plugged that clip into a blur and back out again and now I can control it now when you're looking at some of these nodes they can seem a little bit confusing because they've got weird dots around them and they have some things underneath it if you hover on them that show up let me explain some of those in general the arrows are going to be your inputs into whatever these nodes are and then your little square boxes here are going to be your outputs now if you hover over any one of these you'll see that this sort of a weird little two dot icon that shows up underneath that's actually the control for the windows that you see above so in this case you see the media out as one of those dots clicked and that's because it's previewing in the upper right of the preview window if I click the left dot it would Now preview in both of these if I turned off the right it would preview only in the left side this might be confusing as to why you need two different preview windows but it'll start to make a little more sense in a minute one quick shortcut I should mention here is if you click on any one of these and just on your keyboard hit one or two it'll automatically turn those things on and off as well let's say that in the right hand side here I'm seeing that clip plugged into a blur and then back out and that's what we see in the upper right well what if I wanted to see the original clip without the effect put onto it well I could hover there and turn that on in the upper left window and now you see it right from here up in the left before the blur's been added and then I have the final output up in the right with the blur added and if I click between these two windows you can actually drag them back and forth depending on The View you'd like so that's a real simple example of using Fusion to add an effect onto your video clip now what's really cool about this is that if I go back to the media page that Fusion clip is right here and it already has the blur worked into it but I don't have to do anything else it's just a single asset in my project Fusion allows us to take just that one asset out of the timeline and deal with it independently and do way more than we could do just in the edit page now there's some other things you could do here as well because this has an actual timeline up here I could do things like well I'd like this clip to start off not blurred and then end up being very blurred if I brought this timeline playhead all the way back to the beginning and I set the blur size here down to zero and put in a keyframe then I could drag that playhead to later on and I could add another keyframe and bring the blur size up let me turn the main one off now we're just looking at the output over here and if I bring that playhead back and I hit play you'll see that that clip slowly starts to blur over time because I've keyframed that blur to get a little more intense right here in fusion and again if I go back to the edit page and I play that clip all of those things that I told it to do in Fusion are going to be embedded right into this clip and do that here in the timeline when I'm back to my edit but what if you wanted to do something else a little more intricate let's try that let me get rid of this blur I'd like to change some of the aspect ratio I'd like to get this cropped in a bit so one thing I'm going to do is right in this section here you'll see there's some options and the one all the way to the right in this third section is transform I'm going to drag that down and put it right in line so that my media goes into the transform and then heads back out to the rest of the project once I put that in and select it up in the right of the inspector you'll see the controls that open up for that you can see it controls things like size how much it zooms in but also in the preview window up here can you see that there is a control that's right dead center that looks like a circle with some arrows in it well you can left click on that and move this around we can zoom in and we can get something worked out put this exactly where we want it in our project just by doing it by eye and if you go back to the media page you'll see that everything we've done there is reflected in that clip in the timeline it's now zoomed in and relocated the way we did in Fusion as this plays through you can see she's really getting humiliated by this jerk so maybe she's thinking to herself how much she really hates this job or doesn't like him well maybe we could put that thought right on screen here in fusion and to do that but in the first section you can see there's an option for text now this is going to do something a little bit different in this previous version what we wanted to do is add something in line between our media and the output so we were directly affecting the clip we were looking at but when we want to add text that's introducing another layer it's almost as if you had two guitar players and they wanted to each plug into the same app in that case what we need to do is merge that in sort of create a connection point where the two of them could plug into the same amplifier and then both of them could be heard now if I grab that text and go to insert it in line between the input and output of this clip you'll see that it does something different you see how it's created this merge node let me move this text node up so it makes a little more sense all we've done here is we've said okay you have your clip and you have your text and we're going to have those merged together and then all go out that same output now there's different ways to do this for different features if I get rid of the text and the merge this third box up here actually shows that the first option is a merge node so whenever you're bringing different things in there's another way you could do it which is just grab that merge node bring it down and drop it in line and then you could grab your text and bring it and don't connect it to anything and then choose where you're going to connect it to there's your output I'll left click on that and hold and then just drag it anywhere over the box and it'll connect it so now I've done the same thing but just a slightly different method bringing the merge in first and then adding a text node image text coming together and then going out to the project and I haven't written any text yet if I click on that text node and select it in the upper right in the inspector of course we're going to see the options to do something with the text let's contemplate what she might be thinking I'm gonna go with I hate him so much and now our text is there but the color's a little wrong it's white you can barely see it let me start by changing the color let's go with black because this whole thing is kind of a silhouette anyway I can change the size of it right here and just like before with the clip it's got that circle with the arrows and the dot in the middle I can move that by left clicking holding and dragging it up one thing I should probably explain when you see these arrows in that dot clicking on that Center dot moves it however you want and then just clicking on the Arrow alone only goes either up or down or if you click on the horizontal Arrow left and right let me just change the font to something I like a little better and then up in these controls I can do things like resize this get it to sit just like I want it to so now if I select median and put that in the upper left window this was our original clip here it is zoomed in and here it is with the text on top now what would be kind of cool is as he's yelling at her that thought kind of comes into her head there he is yelling at her and her hands go up to her face I'm thinking that's where that thought starts coming into mind now what's cool is if I put that playhead where I want that to start happening and click on the text node in the upper right under shading I can actually change the opacity of that text let me put a keyframe right here and turn the opacity down to zero so you can't even see it so right when she puts her hands to her head and everything before you won't be able to see that text but let me move that playhead forward where he really starts losing his mind and let me add another keyframe and bring the opacity of that text back up so now what will happen if I play through because I've keyframed in the amount of opacity during the clip you'll see in the upper right he starts to yell at her and as she brings her hands up to her head that text will slowly start to fade in so now we have all these basic elements going on but when we go back to our edit page we've just got that single clip with all of those things happening now back on the media page I can still do other things to this Fusion clip like for instance the name of this can be changed it's currently using the longer title from the clip from storyblocks but if I select that and go into the upper right inspector and click on file I can scroll down click on the name of that and just change it to something like boss yelling I can even change the color of that particular Fusion clip if I want to recognize it more easily in the timeline and now when I look in my timeline you'll see that I put a certain color to it and it's named boss yelling maybe I want this clip to start a little bit later so I can still grab it and I can edit it in a bit if I want and I can make any changes that I want to do along the way including having it fade in a little bit or maybe fade out at the end now maybe to really help sell this atmosphere I might want to try to bring in some music that can really help sell exactly the emotion of what's going on this is where storyblocks can really help out as well if you look under the selections above I can change from video down to music and let me just see if I can find something sad now you'll see all sorts of options for different types of sad music that you can preview and play Listen to and try to find something that might work for you there's a cool classical sad clip that I think that might work well I can choose to download that and then I can bring that into my project as well now I can bring that down into my timeline and really get this Fusion clip to jump to the next level and let's see what that gives us right [Music] play around with Fusion a little bit and let me know in the comments below what you think about it in the meantime I'm going to put a link down below that you can use to go check out story blocks so that you can start finding some of the things you need for your next project that can help you tell the stories that you really want to tell keep creating peace

Channel: Daniel Batal

Views: 219,125

Keywords: Daniel Batal, Creator Conversations, DaVinci Resolve for Noobs, DaVinci Resolve, Fusion, Fustion for Noobs, Davinci Resolve Fusion, Tutorial

Id: XZcu0CVcQsQ

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023