The Most POWERFUL Text Tool in DaVinci Resolve - Follower Modifier

so let's talk about the follower modifier instead of DaVinci Resolve Fusion it's a really powerful tool but can be kind of confusing to use at first it also has a few major limitations that I really hope Blackmagic design is going to focus on fixing in future versions more on that later to sum it up the followers a text plus modifier that allows you to animate a string of text and then add a delay between each one of the characters now it is limited to the fusion page of DaVinci Resolve but stick around and I have a really good solution for those of you wanting to use it on the edit page inside a fusion I'm going to add in a text plus node and then just connect this up into my media out we'll just add in some text to work with for now and add a follower modifier simply right click on the text box and choose follower that'll cause the modifiers tab up at the top to light up and when you click on this you can see all of the follower controls and a lot of these are going to look really familiar to those of you who have used the text plus node in the past however if you try and change any of these controls nothing's going to update and that's where this tool gets really annoying at first but there is a really good reason behind it if we wanted to we could use both the regular animations and the follower animations the same time say for instance you wanted all of the text to rotate in unison but you wanted the size of each letter to change independently just by using the normal rotation controls back in the text plus note but then using the follower controls we could animate the size of each letter adding a delay between each one and to make things simple Fusion defaults to using the normal text plus controls and that's why none of the follower controls are actually going to update anything to overcome this all we need to do is add a keyframe on one of the follower controls and now all of the changes will reflect inside of the viewer it pretty much causes Fusion to recognize that you want to use that control inside of the follower modifier instead of just in the normal controls so let's animate the size control on frame 0 I'm going to add a keyframe and bring the size all the way down to zero then at frame 15 I'm going to bring the size up to its final resting size so far we're getting the exact same animation that we would get just using the normal controls but this is where it becomes really fun if we go back to the timing tab we can add a delay in between each one of the characters and now when we play it you can see they're not all going to animate at the same time above that we have the option to select the character range which will limit which ones are being animated this is something you're probably never going to use below that we have the option to change the order in which it animates from left to right to right to left inside out completely random there's a bunch of different options Each of which can get you some interesting results we also have the delay type which specifies if this delay is between each character or between the first and last character so right now it's going to add a 1.2 frame delay in between each letter but if I set this to be between first and last character it's going to be a 1.2 frame delay between the F and the R so you would need to crank this way up to actually see a result if you explore all of the tabs inside of the follower modifiers there's a lot of stuff that we can do but one thing I noticed when I started using the follower modifier is the absence of the center X and Y control it's nowhere to be found in here why it doesn't have this built in I don't really know you can get around this by going to the shading tab coming down to position and using the offset X and Y controls just like the size we'll have to add a key frame on it then go back to the first frame and go back to the follower tool and then just drag the say the Y size down now when we play it it's going to go up and scale it it's not exactly the same but in the end you can get really similar results the other thing I ran into was setting the N animation as you can see the text is still animating even outside of the set keyframes the best way I found to do this was using the keyframes editor so if we open the keyframes editor we can drop down the text select these two keyframes and then clicking anywhere in here click on that to control V to paste them and then press V on your keyboard to reverse the keyframes so now it animates on and then animates off right away now to get this to wait until the end of fully animate off I usually put my playhead on the last frame select these two keyframes and then just drag them till I start seeing the letters again once I see those I'll drag it back a couple frames until they disappear and now when I play it it's going to animate on stay on the screen for a couple seconds here animate off right at the end of the composition for those of you who think this is just way too complicated or just want a really easy and quick way to use this on the edit page here's a look at my whip text tool from the editor collect this tool allows you to animate the text node using just a couple of check boxes and a few different controls and the really nice thing is you can just go over to this follower Tab and press one check box and now it has a follower tool complete with order and delay controls plus you can change the animation other styling stuff and I use it to animate pretty much all the text inside of my videos and not to mention all of the other really cool tools inside of the editor collection it's a great way to support the channel while also speeding up your workflow check it out at the link down below now let's talk about some of the limitations that the follower modifier has and stuff I really hope Blackmagic design is going to fix as soon as possible the first and biggest feature request is the ability to specify character word and line delays right now the built-in delay is per character but being able to have all of the letters in a word animated at the same time and then changing the delay in between each one of the words is an essential feature that they really need to add and I know that they're busy with a ton of other really cool stuff but I really believe that this is a huge feature that is holding people back from switching from after effects to DaVinci Resolve Fusion the second thing is adding more of the controls that you find in the normal textPlus note for example the center X and Y this will allow for more consistency Simplicity and thus a better user experience if there's something else that you would like to see leave it in a comment down below until then check out this video a 20 time saving Fusion tricks that everyone needs to know trick number five is one of my favorites

Channel: Jake Wipp

Views: 27,740

Keywords: davinci resolve, follower modifier, davinci resolve text animation, davinci resolve letter animation, animation delay, davinci resolve fusion text, davinci resolve fusion animation, fusion text animation

Id: MzBhzMoUc4s

Length: 5min 27sec (327 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023