Lessons
Class Introduction
01:14 2Hardware
01:27 3What Is Compositing
01:29 4Interface
03:17 5Nodes Introduction
06:01 6Your First Composite Blur
05:47 7Effects
10:30 8Merge Nodes
07:53Lesson Info
Basic Graphic
So, to get some practice building things in Fusion, let's make a couple of different comps. The first one we're gonna do is gonna be a little bit of a different take on this kind of idea. So, what I'm gonna do is just get rid of all of our middle nodes that we have, just our background here, and we're gonna make a little bit of a different graphic. What we're really going for is more something like this where we have this kind of red background with our text over it, and it animates on, and then we have this little shine that animates across it. So, let's go back to our original clip here, and we're gonna build this step by step. Again, right now, we're not really doing anything. Media in one is just picking up the footage and then media out is putting it back. So, let's do some fancy stuff in between. I think let's start out with our text, this third icon over, I'll grab our text plus, select that, and we'll say, welcome home. We don't see the text, 'cause it's not connected to anythi...
ng, and we also don't have it up in either of the viewers. So, I'll select text one and hit one on the keyboard so that we can see welcome home, and I'll switch our font to extra bold, 'cause I like it more. And, we'll size this up a little bit and we'll call that good right there. Now, let's take our text one and merge it over our media in. Now, we could do this a bunch of different ways. We could make a merge node like this, drag it down, and disconnect it here, connect it here to our media out and then take the output of our text one and plug that into our merge. But, that takes a lot of time. So, what we're gonna do instead is take a little shortcut. We're gonna take the output of our text one and, this time, we're gonna drag it just over the output of our media in one, just that little white square and let it go. And, that will make a merge that's connected to both of these. So, that's really how I add merge most of the time is just you take the output and drag it over the output of something else. And, then whatever you started with, that will add it as the foreground. So, now we have our text over our background, that looks pretty good. Let's make a background behind our text. So, I'm gonna move my nodes around a little bit, move my text to the right, and this time we're gonna make a background. So, I'll grab the background node and drag this in next to my text, and let's make this red, let's do kind of a dark red like that, and if I hit one on the keyboard, I can preview this red background. I want this background to be behind the text. And, so what I wanna do is merge this over our background footage before we merge the text over it. So, I'll take the output here and merge it over our immediate in one. And, so now we have our background footage and then our solid red background on top of that and our text over the solid red background. The problem is that I don't want my solid red background to be over everything. I just want this to be a rectangle. So, I'm gonna select my merge two, which is merging my red background over our original footage, and I'm gonna select a rectangle mask. I'll click on that and I'll bring the mask down below. I like to, anytime that I mask a merge node, is just to put the stuff that I'm merging over things above the merge and then any mask that I connect to the merge node under it. It just kind of keeps things a little bit more clean and then I'll take this mask and adjust it here in our viewer. And, now we have this nice kind of red field behind our text. So, that looks pretty good. And, I also want to blur our background. So, after our media in, I'll run that through a blur. So, I can just click on blur with that selected and that'll move everything around, and ruin everything in the whole world, but that's okay. Can hold command and roll out on my scroll wheel to kind of zoom out a little bit. And, now we have our blur and I'll blur this a little bit, just a touch. So, now we have our original footage and then we're blurring it. Then, we're putting our red background over here with the mask. Then, we're putting our text over that and then we're rendering it out to the timeline. So, a couple other things that I want to do is I want to animate this. So, at the beginning, I want there to be nothing. And, then I want this to kind of open up like this and we can see the text and the background at the same time. This is one of the really cool things about working with nodes, is I can animate this rectangle node, and control not only my background, but I can also control my text with it. So, let's work on the background first. I'm gonna start with... At frame 15 or so. I'll click the key frame here for our width, for our rectangle mask. And, then I'll move back to zero and take the width all the way down. So, now what this is doing, if I hit space bar, is this is opening up our mask there. But, the problem is that it's only affecting our mask. It's not affecting our text. Well, we could duplicate this mask and apply it to our other merge node for our text, but we don't need to, we can just take this node right here, and take the output of this node, and connect it to the mask input of our merge. And, now, it's affecting two things at the same time. This is one of those major advantages of nodes is you don't have to duplicate things and make copies of things like you do with layers in After Effects or different layers in Photoshop, you can always just reuse a node if it's going to affect things the same way. And, you can even do all kinds of fancy things like change a mask and run it through several different nodes before it masks something else, you can get really crazy. But, right now, we have it opening up and revealing everything. So, that's pretty cool, but our animation is a little bit jerky. It kind of just comes to a stop. And, remember, we don't like that. So, I can select this rectangle mask, which is what's animated, and go up to our spline panel, and click on width, and fit to width, and we'll select of these key frames, and hit F on the keyboard to flatten out those tangents. And, I can close that. And, now, as we play this back, it comes to a nice, easy stop. Pretty awesome. So, that looks pretty good. That's a nice little animated graphic. Now, let's say we want to add a little drop shadow to this. Well, if we were to run this through a drop shadow effect, if I were to hit shift space bar, and type D R O P, we do have drop shadow, but it's not gonna show up under this field, because what we're really doing is adding a drop shadow to the entire image, which we're never going to see, because the image is in the way. So, if we want to put a drop shadow, let's say under our field, well, then we have to rearrange things a little bit. Now, this isn't gonna be too bad, but we are going to take all of these nodes out. We're gonna put them up here and we're going to kind of skip them for now. I'm gonna take this blur. And, actually I'm gonna take my drop shadow out too. I'm gonna take the blur and put it into the media out. And, we're gonna do all of this compositing here, all of our background, and our text, and everything, all at once, before we put that over our blurry image. So, we can start with, I can get rid of this first merge, and we can start with our background, and we'll keep masking it. And, so now we have just our background and our text, and that is put together, and that's basically making, kind of, one big layer altogether, and we can take that and put it over our blur. And, now we have the same effect. The difference is that we have these both isolated, so I can hold down shift, and put this drop shadow under it. And, now we have a drop shadow under our fields here. So, let's keep this organized a little bit and... Move these around so we can see what the heck is going on. And, now we have our finished composition. That plays back nicely. So, that's how you would do something like a simple animated graphic like this in Fusion.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
WayDownSouth
This is a great course. I'm an absolute beginner to Fusion (although I know a bit about the editing within Resolve). The course walks its students through the basics in a very easy-to-understand process. I feel confident that I can now use Fusion effectively for my videos. Highly recommended.