Using Expressions WILL Change DaVinci Resolve Fusion Forever

be the first to say it Fusion is a complicated program but if you start to understand some of its core features like Expressions you can start making Fusion do the hard work and solving all of the issues and doing the complicated tasks for you before I dive into how Expressions work and how you can use it in your project I want to take a look at some of the examples of what is possible with Expressions the first example and one that I'm really familiar with is a bunch of the packs that I have created for DaVinci Resolve expressions are so useful when it comes to making templates when it comes to making them responsive making them retimable and all sorts of other cool features that you can use only with the power of Expressions let's take a look at this title that I worked on from beer Media Link down below if you want to take a look at the whole pack this title has a lot of cool stuff going on first off it's animated next I have some controls off in the inspector like I can change the position of it I can change the angle at which it is slanted and just with that one control it updates all the text that updates the box everything and then I can also change the text padding and all of this will also update the animations so that the animations don't get screwed up I can also come down to the animation trolls and I can toggle whether it animates in and animates out and how many frames the animation lasts and all of that's done with Expressions there is not a single keyframe in this preset there is another upcoming pack for beer media it's called anim Suite the pack is a collection of Animation presets that are designed to save you time when creating animations in DaVinci Resolve I've been using those animations throughout this entire video and to sum it up each preset is constantly calculating where the text is on the position where the animation needs to be at the end in the beginning and then figuring out when it needs to actually animate just like this title there are no keyframes in the entire preset you can also use a drop down menu to change the direction of the actual animation so I could have it slide up slide down left right all in one preset another really good example comes from another DaVinci Resolve teacher named Patrick Sterling for one of his presets he took this huge no graph and was able to simplify it to just two nodes using one expression that's some pretty cool stuff and really highlights the capabilities of expressions and how how much easier it can make it for you by simply understanding how they can work you can use use and modify them for your own projects and while the best examples of expressions are in templates and presets and all that good stuff they are also very beneficial in your day-to-day Fusion workflows let's take a look at how they work so let's start with adding an expression and this is the easiest part let's say I want to add an expression to the Y size all I have to do is right click on the do expression alternatively I can also go into the the value box here and type the equal sign and hit enter now I always right click because that's easiest for me and also if you right click again you can hit remove expression to take it away anyways now that you've added an expression you can see the expression box appear below control you also have this little plus sign which is a pick whip tool what that allows you to do is drag it over onto any other control and it'll instantly link those two controls together you can also link multiple controls so let's say I do exercise and then do plus sign and then I use the pick whip again and connect it to Angle now it is adding those two values together and that is returning the Y size referencing controls is used all the time and you can create some really cool stuff with it so let's talk about all the ways that you can do that so to reference to control you can either use the pick whip tool or you can type it usually I end up typing it anytime I want to reference a tool in the same note all I have to do is type the name of that tool for example X size and now that I've typed that I can hit enter and it is apply the expression so now when I use the excise it'll also move the Y size since they are linked together but I can also link controls that are in other nodes and the way you do that is by putting the name of the node first let's say you do text1 dot size you see that's going to set it to be really small but now if I go over to the text control and change the size it'll also scale up the Y if I if I drag this up if you ever don't know why your control is not linking properly or what to type in if you go over and hover on any of these controls down in the bottom left you can see exactly what you need to type to reference that control but now that you have referenced the control there's a lot more you can do with it inside of an expression box you can do any math that you want for example I could times this by four so now it's going to be a little bit bigger to start and then once I scale it up it's going to really start to stretch I could also type in excise and then put it to the Power of Two And now when I change the excise as you can see it'll it'll create a kind of funky animation right there anytime that you want to reference a point control so for example the center X and Y or pivot X and Y all you need to do is add dot X or dot y to the end of the control for example if I want to connect the Y size to the Y position I could do Center dot Y and now whenever I move this center.y it's also going to adjust the Y size so now that you understand the very basics of how they how they work and you can actually add and use them let's take a look at some of the other stuff that you can reference inside of a fusion composition not only can you reference certain controls but you can also reference certain parameters of the composition for example if I right click on the angle and do expression I can type in comp.render end and it will return the last frame of the composition which if you look off to the side here is 119 and the angle is set to 119. I could also type in time and that Returns the value of the current frame so whatever is in this box that's what the angle is going to be set to so over the duration of the composition I can have it rotating now this is cool and all but what if I wanted to go from 0 to 360 in the angle control over the the duration of the composition what I can do is do time divided by comp.render n so that will keep the value between 0 and 1. 0 being the beginning of the composition and one being the end of the composition and now I can multiply this by whatever value I want it to be at the end so 360. at the first frame it's going to be zero and at the last frame it is going to reach a full rotation of 360 degrees so you see that was really easy to set up and now it is doing a perfect rotation and no matter what the length of the composition is it'll automatically update that so that at the beginning it's at zero and at the end it's at 360. expressions are really cool now there's a lot of different parameters and stuff that you can reference in fusion and I do not have time to go over all of those in this video so I'm going to link a great resource by William Justice down below it kind of highlights a lot of the most commonly used ones and gives you a little explanation as how to use it you can mix and match these Expressions to create something that is unique for your project while a lot of those expressions are pretty easy to understand I want to take a look at one specifically one of the most powerful expressions in fusion and one that requires a little more explain that's going to be the if expression it allows you to change what the expression is based on a condition here is very basic one if the time is greater than the ending frame divided by 2 then it will return one otherwise it will return zero this is great if you're working on a transition and you wanted to switch between two clips right in the middle of the composition no matter what the length of it is so let's break this down a little bit first thing you'll notice is if it's spelled with two eyes and that is extremely important if you don't do this it's not going to work so don't even try it two eyes all the time now we have the opening and closing parentheses also very important everything in between those two parentheses is going to be your if expression and then finally we see two commas dividing it into three different sections so the first section is going to be the condition and if the condition is true it's going to return what is in the second section and then if it is not true it's going to return what's in the third section so in this case if the playhead is halfway through the composition it's going to return one otherwise it's going to return zero another thing to keep in mind is that if you're trying to do an equals to expression for example if time is equal to 30. you need to use two equal signs otherwise it won't work just for the two eyes you need two equal signs another thing that you can do is nest if Expressions inside of each other so you could do if this checkbox is selected and then if the time is greater than this and you can keep putting more if Expressions inside of other if expressions and that gets a little messy sometimes and a little bit complicated so don't start out with that off the bat instead of just using one or zero in the actual expression you can use any Expressions you want so just like the ones that we were talking about earlier in the video now I know what you're thinking this video is done already well sadly yes there is just too much to explain about expressions and I can't cover it all in this one video this video is meant only to scratch the surface about expressions and teach them very basics of how they work and how you can use them in Fusion I didn't want to overwhelm you with a 45 minute video just talking about code the entire time I would encourage you to play around with Expressions on your own checking out that cheat sheet for William Justice and then just messing around with them in fusion and I'd love to see what she'd come up with I run the DaVinci Resolve Discord server which is a spot that you can ask and answer questions about DaVinci Resolve as well as share your work so check that out down in the link down below and you can check out the fusion section so you can ask and answer questions about the expressions and then get one-on-one help from people who are really good at this stuff and then also if you come up with the cool expression let me know and I'll take a look at it I hope to make many more videos about expressions in the future but for now check out this video on a circle graph I used a bunch of Expressions to make this really easy to use and super powerful now that you understand the basics this is the next step

Channel: Jake Wipp

Views: 13,539

Keywords: fusion expressions, davinci resolve expressions, davinci expressions, expressions fusion, davinci resolve expressions tutorial, how do expressions work, if expressions, how to use expressions, davinci resolve how to use expressions, davinci resolve presets, how to make davinci resolve presets, how to make a template davinci resolve

Id: FQPwMOjW-XI

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022