Tracking Objects and RotoScoping in Resolve 17 - Intermediate Fusion Tutorial

[Music] hey everybody casey ferris here i make videos on post-production here on youtube today we're talking about doing just a little bit more than a basic composition inside of fusion a lot of you've been asking like hey when can we go a little bit beyond the basics i'm still not ready for just like 5000 nodes i really want something that's more than you connect a blur node so this is that video let's take a look at what we're going to be making all right so let's go back in time here here we have some footage of a dad just being an awesome dad way to be dad let's say we want to do some compositing let's say maybe in a movie we want to put the word tuesday here because it's like this is what happened on tuesday this is maybe one of several shots that kind of go throughout the week show what the father and son did you know story stuff let's take a look at how we might do something like that with my playhead over the clip here in the edit page we'll click on fusion and that will bring everything up in the fusion page if you're not familiar with fusion make sure to check out this video that goes through all of the basics because i'm not going to explain the basics this is an intermediate video okay this is like fusion 201 if you are looking to dive in and really get your hands dirty i really recommend checking out our end to end training resolve 17 end to end this is where we go step by step in creating a short film in davinci resolve 17 and yes it includes a lot of intermediate fusion stuff doing muzzle flashes and disappearing effects and adding lights to things it's a lot of fun check that out at groundcontrol.film let's first start out with our text that's going to be stuck right here let's go up and grab a text plus node and we'll merge this over our media in i'll select text and we'll say tuesday all right let's make a font that isn't just the basic font yeah something like that and to move this where we want we could do it in the text node we could also do it in the merge node but in my opinion it's always cleaner to do it with a transform node so that you always can kind of see what's happening here in the flow so i'll select text one i'll hit shift spacebar and type xf that'll bring up transform and we'll hit enter to add that now we can use this transform to move our text scale it down put it right there job text but we have ourselves a little bit of a problem the best laid plans this is a very shaky shot so how do we stick this text to this moving shot there are a bunch of different ways to do that i think the easiest way to do it is the planar tracker here in fusion so let's go back to one of our earlier nodes here media in and i'll hit shift spacebar type p-l-a-n-a-r and we want planar tracker i'll hit enter to add and now that will put the planer tracker between our media and one and our merge and what this is gonna do is have a look at the movement of whatever we plug into it and allow us to move things along with the movement of the camera over here in our options i'm just gonna leave all of these at their default but right here at frame 45 i'm going to set my reference time what that means is that we're looking at this frame to track it kind of throughout the shot i like to usually pick one that's in the middle of the shot because it's going to be the closest to how things are at the end and the beginning most of the time and now we can just select an area to track and the best idea is usually to select the area closest to whatever you're going to stick things to so we might do something like grab this little area here and i'm selecting just this part of the wall because there's a lot of contrast i'm selecting the floor because it's close to where we want our words to be and i'm not selecting stuff in the background because it's going to move differently because of parallax than right here we want this to kind of look like it's sitting on the ground next to the wall so let's start with that and i'm going to click this far right button which is track to end and let's see how it does it's going to track all of that movement all the way to the end and now if we hit go that'll go back to our reference time in the middle of the shot and we can select track to start and that will move throughout the shot so now if we play back it has all of these little points and it's tracking them throughout the shot so now what do we do the easiest thing to do if you can get away with it in the planar tracker is to create a planar transform and use that to move everything else a planar transform is just like our transform node but it has animation on it that matches the track just like we ran our text through this transform to move it kind of to the side we can run something through a planar transform to move it along with the track so let's select our planar tracker and i'll go over here to create planar transform and i'll hit that and that will make a new node here called planar transform again this is almost exactly like a transform node and what i'll do is take both of these and i'm going to drop this planar transform in between my transform one and my merge the reason for that is because i want this transform one to still move and kind of stick my text over here but then i want it to move along with the shot so we're going to move it over then i'm going to hold down shift and drag this onto our little connector where it turns blue and now it's in between our two nodes and now we'll take a look at what's happening we're making our text and then we're moving it over to where it should be and then we're taking that text that's already moved over and moving it the same way that our camera moves so now if we move this back and forth it moves along with the camera there's only one problem it's like stretching weird and i could cut this out of the tutorial like this never happens and it always works great but it doesn't so what the heck happened here well you know how we selected this little area here because there wasn't going to be much parallax and we were going to have just a great time well maybe that wasn't such a good idea sometimes you'll make a track and it just doesn't really work for whatever reason um what's probably happening is that the little bit of parallax between the points right here and the points right here are kind of making this text kind of wobble back and forth which we don't want so let's give it another old college try let's delete our planar transform go back to our planer tracker and we'll reset everything this little button up here and we're going to do the same thing but this time i think what i'll do is just select the wall because that's all on one plane just like that and it's pretty close to where we want to stick things and i'll make kind of a nice little rectangle here we're gonna do the same thing set our reference time and track to end go track to forward create our planer transform hold down shift and drag that in between our text and our transform and now let's take a look oh much better much better yes yes that's how we do it good sometimes it'll take a couple tries i'm not gonna pretend like it doesn't all right so i'm gonna take my transform here and we'll just adjust for where we had it make sure this is in the right place something like that and now if we play this back she'll be beautiful yeah couple things that i'll do to make this better is one under planar transform here let's go ahead and go to the settings and right here let's say motion blur what this is going to do is add some actual motion blur as this thing moves around because everything else in the world has motion blur text you aren't special man you need motion blur too don't pretend like you don't yet elitist anyway so that's looking good and i think wait a minute wait a minute look at this little buddy what are you doing bro you're getting in the way of the text this is what we call some nightmare fuel mcesher kind of stuff where something that's supposed to be behind something in physical space appears to be in front of it and that's a dead giveaway for you put this text in afterwards so how do we deal with something like that well there's a few different ways to do it the brave and totally not cowardly way would be to take this text size down and move it over like that so that the bird never goes in front of it and problem solved right that's what the cool kids do that's what that's what we really do but let's say for whatever reason you're like dude i gots to have this word a little bigger all right that's the size i want doesn't matter if there's a bird in the way well our next option is to trace out this bird put him on a new layer and put him in front of the text or we can trace out the bird and cut a hole out of the text and leave the bird behind it so that it looks like he's in front of the text either way is almost the same process and it has to do with tracing out the bird that little fun process is called rotoscoping if you don't know what rotoscoping is you don't know that that's kind of a dirty word let's do some shall we there are a million different ways to rotoscope something the way that i like to do it is start with a background so i'll grab a background node here like this and we'll merge this over everything and let's take this background node and we'll turn its color to reddish yeah and we'll take this merge and turn the blend down a little bit so we can see there's this background node kind of laid over things all this is going to do is make it easier for us to see our shape and give us a nice little convenient place to put it for now let's turn off our text i'm going to go to our merge one that merges our text and just turn off this merge one slider here actually before we do that let's figure out how much of this we need to actually trace i think we need to trace until about frame 20 because then the bird is not in front of that t anymore so from frame 0 to 20 we need to trace the bird so again let's let's turn off our text and we can start at frame 0. it might actually even be smart to start at something like a couple frames in it doesn't really matter sure we'll start at frame five because we have a nice clear shape for our bird and what i'm gonna do is select our background one and what we really wanna do is mask out some shapes that will cover this bird to make a little silhouette of him and it's smart before you go through all of the work of tracing it out to kind of strategize what the best way to trace him out is so let's see we'll zoom in here so we can see this a little better i'll hit the left and right bracket on the keyboard and let's just take a look at how this bird moves his body moves left to right and his head kind of bobbles back and forth like that so it would be probably pretty smart to be able to move his head really well and his body really well and we can kind of do this in two different shapes so again i'll start at frame five select our background and let's go to this mask here this polygon mask i'll click that and we're going to trace out his body and kind of part of his neck so we'll start on his back kind of make a little neck thing here and we'll just trace out his body as good as we can like that that's cool let's go to this polygon thing and we'll rename it we'll call it body roto and i'm going to select this mask and make another one and this one's going to be called head roto and we're going to do the same thing just going to make a little shape here for his head this little beak just connect it like that it's pretty good so now we have this traced out shape but if we move off of frame five it just it completely falls apart it's lost its mind so how do we stick this to the bird well there's a bunch of different ways to do it if this was a really long shot with a whole bunch of parts we might want to actually track the bird itself but we can probably get away with just using the same planar transform that we have that has that camera data i'll just select this and hit control c double click off and hit control v now anything that we plug into this planar transform is going to move along with the camera so if we take our background with our roto we put that transform in between then that's going to move along with our camera it's basically going to stick this pigeon shape to the sidewalk which is sort of what we want but it is going to make things a lot easier to where we can just animate the pigeon and we don't have to animate him up and down and all of that stuff so let's select both of these roto masks i'll hold ctrl and select both of them and now we can actually select all of the points here and i'll move this back to where it should be which it looks like it kind of moved around i probably should have connected the planar transform before but that's okay we can change it just go up here to this right here the shape box and we can adjust this a little a little bit good i'll select the head roto and move that to where it's supposed to be and now at frame five oh baby we have a pretty good trace now each of these masks will animate the shape if you move to a different keyframe it automatically has a keyframe set on its shape animation and so what we can do is take each of these and we'll move to frame 20 which is going to be the end and i'll take this body shape select everything and i'll just move this over to where the bird is now okay and we'll make sure everything is butamus and it looks good we're also going to do the same thing for the head take that and move that over and now we have it actually roughly following the pigeon because the pigeon apparently is walking a pretty steady speed at least here for a second or so and that shape is sort of on him let's do the very beginning too take our head shape put that on his head take our body shape put that on his body we'll adjust this as we see fit and now we have it pretty much following him throughout the shot you notice how we did one in the middle and then one at the end and one at the beginning and if you do it that way it will stay very close to where it's supposed to be throughout the shot because it interpolates it in between those keyframes so you have to do very minimal adjustments and the less adjustments that you do on roto the better so take our body roto and sometimes this happens too especially when you're going through a planar transform is it will offset your points if you just click on a point it'll snap back to where it actually is no worries nothing's wrong it's just kind of a weird little bug and i'll just move this a little bit to be exactly where it's supposed to be and now we have really really accurate body shape anyway let's go to like frame 12 same thing just make sure everything is pretty good then we can go in between our two keyframes here select frame eight and it's probably going to be pretty darn close like close enough for what we're doing okay let's do the same thing for the head and this one's going to move around a little more so again let's do in between so like frame two click on this to move it back to where the heck it should be and we'll put this back to where the head should be like that and kind of stretch the neck down something like that and i can hit my brackets to go back and forth and again just placing this where it should be for every frame again starting in the middle putting it roughly where it should be doing the middle of the other two existing keyframes just kind of stretch this out a little bit looks like our body needs some help right there and we're really just trying to get this silhouette to be all red and at a certain point it will be close enough to be just fine you probably don't need to even go as crazy as i'm going for this specific shot if it's pretty darn good it's going to sell the idea that that bird is on its own kind of layer now we have our mask and it's just coloring this bird red i can take everything that i've done to kind of trace out this mask and i can actually use it as a mask for another layer because i don't really want this to be red i can actually just delete this merge and turn on our tuesday letters and check this out now that i've done all this work let's maybe just move this under our nodes here and we'll just kind of put these out from left to right i like to have my nodes arranged to grid just makes me feel a little more clean and we'll take the output of this planar transform that we would normally merge over things and we're just going to connect it to our mask input of our merge 1 right here and now look what's happening any place where the bird is that's where we see our letters which is sort of what we want if we go back to our merge node here and go over to settings we can apply this mask inverted and look what happens oh baby we have our bird in front of the letters check this out and now we totally sell that those letters are back there in physical space pretty neat that's pretty cool is this roto perfect no but will it totally work yes it will totally work and nobody will ever care how well this bird is rode i might even want to blur this mask just a little bit so we can go over to our head roto zoom way in here and give it just a tiny soft edge same thing for our body roto tiny soft edge that'll help that look a little more natural now let's do one more thing to kind of solve this text let's add a little bit of a shadow this is really easy compared to what we have been doing i'm just going to take a background node and drag this over and merge it over everything and in our merge node let's take the blend down a lot and let's make the apply mode multiply and we're going to add a little mask and i'll just be lazy and add a little ellipse and we can size this and position it to be right under our letters kind of on the ground something like that and we'll soften the edge a little bit so now there's just a little bit of a contact shadow there here's before and here's after we actually probably want to put that under our text so let's take this shadow i'll hold down shift and just bring this back here in the flow so it's in between our planar tracker and our merge now that's kind of in the background and now we want this shadow to move with our camera right so we can take this planar transform i'll hit control c select our background and hit control v and that will paste that there make sure our ellipse is still working just put this back where it's supposed to be and let's also to make sure we aren't putting the shadow in front of the bird here let's connect our planar transform mask to our merge 2 which is our shadow and go over to settings apply mask inverted and that'll put it everywhere except for on top of the bird because remember the bird's supposed to be in front if you do have a lot of things that you are going to put behind this bird it might be a good idea to just use this mask to put the bird over everything with like a reference to media in one but this will work just fine now we have that little shadow under it and our bird walking in front pretty cool little project and here's the finished shot and this same process works for i mean basically anything that you're trying to put back in space or stick to things put behind things same basic idea so hope that was helpful for anybody who's wanting to dig into fusion a little more a little bit beyond the basics make sure to check out that end-to-end training if you want to and hey i hope that your pigeons are always in front of your letters there isn't some kind of visual weirdness there because nobody needs that nobody's got time for that silliness in their life we got stuff going on like appointments and things

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 24,658

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, resolve 17 tutorial, how to use resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 for beginners, blackmagic design, casey faris, Fusion, tutorial, rotoscoping, adding text, tracking objects, Intermediate Fusion Tutorial, Tracking Objects and RotoScoping in Resolve 17

Id: 7bvjAHMbTLE

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021