Nodes Are Better Than Layers - DaVinci Resolve Fusion Vs. After Effects Compositing

[Music] hey guys Casey Farris here I make videos on DaVinci Resolve make sure to subscribe for more of that today we're talking about nodes and what the heck the big deal is why in the freaking world would you use nodes when layers work perfectly fine I'm gonna try to explain my opinion on this using this motion graphic I'm working on it's just this title that comes up and swooshes around it's like a little circle yeah neato huh neato gang and has this cool little like rotation blur kind of thing and here is the node graph for all of that which if you're not familiar with nodes probably looks like why in the world oh goodness oh no please oh no and I won't say this is simple necessarily but I want to show you the power of nodes we're gonna walk through each part of this composition and I'll show you how this is built with nodes and how it's actually more efficient to do that than with layers so the first node that we have is a blank background this is just a black background with the alpha turned down that just helps us set the composition size and everything then we have a merge node which puts something over something else the thing we're putting over it is a blue background with a circle mask on it so here's the mask and it's just making that blue circle a lot of the stuff here is just based on this one node this blue circle because the thing about nodes is unlike a layer that can only go one place in a layer stack a node can be put in multiple places at once so the first thing that we're doing is merging this over the background with a mask see we have this these little lines and that's created with a rectangle mask that's just rotating so that's an animated mask that's masking that circle to make those little kind of lines fly around so this is what we got going on so far we're putting that circle over the background and then masking it with this rectangle here's where things get really cool let's say we want to do this same thing but we want these little lines to be white what you would have to do if you are compositing with layers is duplicate this layer and turn it white and then put it over everything else so let's try and build this part with layers over in After Effects I have this somewhat built here and we're going to start out with we can not with our shape layer it's just a circle and then I have a mat that's on top of this that rotates you could also use a mask right on the layer but it's easier to rotate things with a separate mat just why I used that for this kind of animation and we have to set this as a track mat which I'll set here and After Effects and then that gives us that little animation that we're looking for so that's great that's made with two layers the circle and the mat let's say we want a white circle on top of this what I did was duplicated this circle layer went into its properties and adjusted the stroke to be white then we also have to duplicate the mat and put that on top of it so we have two separate circle layers and two separate mat layers then I've offset these in time just pushing them down and if we look at our keyframes kind of sped up the keyframes which we'll get into that in a little bit so far this is for layers for this part of our composition right now it seems like man it sure would be a lot easier to make it with layers it's a lot easier to get your head around it doesn't look so complicated right and that's true but what about if we want to change something because even before we get into all of this we run into some awkwardness let's say I want to change how thick this circle is I can just go to my mask node here and adjust the border width in the inspector and there I have a thicker circle the white animation and everything is also thicker that's because of the way this is set up everything that's a circle or masked in this comp is using a common note it's using this blue background node this right here and so any changes that I make to this are going to flow to everything that it's connected to this is going to be super useful in just a second let's take a look at doing that with layers okay here I have my circle and let's say I want to make the stroke 40 instead I could do that but then I have to go and select my other circle and switch that to 40 not that big of a deal to change a couple layers right but it is literally twice the work which when you get into a really big comp might be frustrating let's take a look at our next layer which is just another blue animation like blue lines kind of moving around here in After Effects we have another circle blue lines here but those aren't thick enough so we have to go up to stroke and thicken that up not that big of a deal but you know again something else we have to do let's say that we want to change the color of this we want this to be a green circle instead I'll just select my circle layer and go to stroke and we'll turn it green to make sure we have the same color I'm going to copy and paste this hex code up over to our next circle open that up stroke and paste that hex code so now I've changed that to green had to do that for two layers that's fine over here in the nodes if I want to change this to green I just select the background and make it green and everything changes because it's all using one node let's take a look at this other part of the comp what we're doing is taking our same circle and we're scaling it down a little bit with this node we're adding some distortion to it like this and then we're blurring it and then we're putting it behind everything else so to do that with layers I have another layer behind and this has two effects on it it has turbulent displace and radial blur and if I were building this step-by-step I wouldn't have to do this but I do have to change this to that green and also up my stroke in order to keep things looking consistent so now we have the circle behind the other lines and we also have to take this scale and bring it down a little bit something like that and so now we have one two three four five six layers for this composition and now let's say I want to take this and I want it to scale up so this kind of starts really small and then boom comes up like that that's a transform node infusion just animated here in After Effects I made a null object right here and I can parent everything to that a null object and then I can scale it like this and bring it down to zero at the beginning and we effectively have kind of the same thing happening right so that boosts everything up so now we have that kind of coming up and doing that animation some of this isn't eased but you'll get the idea so now let's put some text over it I have some text here which has the tracking animated we're just gonna merge that on top of everything else get rid of the snow because we don't need it and there we have our title right not too different in after-effects same thing put the text over it and we have our title so we're looking at this and it's pretty similar right we have ten layers and over here we definitely have more than ten nodes so if you're looking at just the ease of look at all these nodes versus look at these few layers you'd probably go man layers are so great the problem is the main factor isn't how many things are on-screen its how easy they are to use and change and share with other people so it makes sense if I already give you a screenshot like this and say okay what's happening here you could guess that there are some circles that are being mad at somehow and there's some texts over it looks like things are parented to something that's scaling one of the circles is white but you wouldn't necessarily know that well the smaller circle actually has a couple of effects on it you also probably wouldn't know that these mats are the same exact mat you probably wouldn't know that these circles are all based on the same kind of circle you could look at this parent and link menu and see which ones are going to scale but you kind of have to read through every line and it's really easy to kind of miss a line look over here at the nodes it looks a little confusing at first but really if you take it step by step okay we have a background and something's being merged on top of that it's some kind of background with a mask on it and that same background and same mask is being used multiple times one time it's just put over things another time it's color corrected before it's put over things then it's put over itself again and then it's changed a little bit it's transformed there's some displacement and some blur on it that's put on top of itself again and then look at these down here what's this rectangle mask looks like it's masking this circle every time that it's merged over the background and this is the same mask but the timing is changing here and here and once all of that is put together everything before this is being transformed somehow and that's all before text goes on top of it and it's rendered you can tell almost everything that's happening in the composition by just looking at the nodes again if I want to change any of the colors I just go to the background boom change the colors I'm done right it's a little bit harder with our layers which we've already been through right pink gotta make sure I copy that and I'll go to our other circle put that pink stroke in there this other circle in there pink stroke and now we have our colors changed but that was a lot more work even for a smaller pretty simple composition like this here's where it gets really interesting let's say I want to change this a little more maybe I don't want this as thick I'll just grab the ellipse mask just bring my border width down and everything's fixed already but now maybe I want this to rotate the other way I'll just go to my rectangle mask and I my angle rotation I'm just gonna make this minus 270 and now everything's gonna rotate the other way that might not be something you'd normally change but stuff like that is no problem takes two seconds what if we want to change those things in the layers well I can bring my stroke back down on this circle and this circle and this circle and this circle now let's say I want these all to rotate a different way I got to grab all of my mats and I'm going to change that rotation so here we'll have negative one this rotation will have negative one this rotation will have negative one okay so I've changed all of that not terrible but let's say I work for a couple more hours and then the boss comes in and says oh I actually wanted to rotate the other way after all okay here in resolve my work is done I'm literally already done let's do that same change back with layers go to rotation let's do one this rotation is gonna be one this rotation is gonna be one and there we go three times the work now how could we make this faster with layers because this isn't the only way to work right well you could link these up with expressions but there's a couple of problems with that first of all it takes time to link everything with expressions which you might not have then what if you want these to come in at different speeds that doesn't work because look all of these are actually rotating at different speeds what if you want this whole thing to take a little bit longer well you could grab all of the keyframes hold down alt and stretch them out like that and then come in and adjust all of your ins and outs like that I make that work and that's okay but with nodes I can open up my keyframes palette and here we'll just move this animation out and because I'm only using one animation it's going to flow down through these time speed things and it's just going to make the entire thing longer moving one control versus moving three or four controls now some of you are gonna say well this isn't even the most efficient way to work what you should do is use pre comps okay we could do that later down the line once I realize that I want to reuse this circle a lot I can hit ctrl shift C and pre comp this circle and I'll duplicate it and put this here and I'll duplicate it and put this down here of course I'll need to copy and paste all of my stuff into new comps I'll also have to reanimate everything and adjust the timing let's see this white circle will grab that and we can add a color correction effect like take down the saturation like that of course now we have to offset that gotta set my track mats now we pretty much have to redo all of our work in order to set those up to be duplicates of this then we have to grab everything and reparent it to make sure that it's gonna scale right that our track mat oh yeah we should have copied our effects because when we delete this layer it also deletes all the effects and so now we're about back to where we were of course I still have to animate our transparency again and actually what we should do is put these mats in the pre comp there we go and turn our track mats off but oh no we can't do that because remember our circle comp doesn't have that mat so we either need to duplicate this so that it's a different circle that doesn't have the mat or we need to keep the mats in here so I guess we'll just keep the mats in here and now if we want to change the colors all we have to do is double click on our pre comp drill down into that grab our circle change our stroke let's change that to green that's awesome we come back to our pre comp and there we go so that might be a little bit more efficient way to do it but what if we need to change the animation we have to go back through and change all the mats and go through this whole thing again you see what I'm saying as intimidating and complicated as these nodes look it's really set up to be efficient you do a few more things on the front end to give you a lot more flexibility later and you can do things like use a common mask merge things over themselves and you can see at a glance exactly what's happening with every single part transforming this putting on a displace blurring it and putting it behind everything whereas here you don't know what the heck's going on so there you go that's nodes versus layers I hope this has felt like a fair comparison I've worked quite a bit in After Effects used After Effects for years and the first time I saw nodes I thought they were the dumbest thing in the world but after compositing with nodes for just a little bit I've noticed the power and the simplicity that you wouldn't think would be there when it comes to using nodes like this I hope this has been helpful for you if you want to learn more about nodes check out this video right here this one this is the one yeah nice teaches you all about the basics of this if you are completely lost that should give you a nice little foundation to build off of

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 48,279

Keywords: nodes are better than layers, here's why., tutorial, davinci resolve, compositing, nodes, nuke, vfx, visual effects, blender, color grading, color correction, after effects, resolve, turorials, the foundry, how to, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 16, parallel, mari, texturing, software, foundry, video, cgi, digital, computer generated, nuke tutorial, autodesk maya, substance, modo, 3d modelling, serial node, parallel node, filmmaking, natron, layers, layer mixer node

Id: mlp-dNpE3Ao

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2020