Lessons

Lesson Info

Fusion Page: Examples

Let's take a look at a couple examples of how to use nodes in Fusion to actually make some cool stuff. So I'm gonna go back to our timeline here, just clicking on the edit page, and let's move to our first shot of these people walking up to the house. And let's say we want to add some text over this. I can switch to the Fusion page, just by clicking Fusion with my play head over this clip. And that will load it into Fusion. By default, anytime that we open a clip in Fusion, we have two nodes: media in, which again, is opening the footage inside of Fusion, and then media out, which is putting it back on the timeline. So really now what we're doing is, we're grabbing a piece of footage, and we're putting it back. That's all we're doing. And all of the magic happens in between these two nodes, right? In between picking up the footage, and putting it back, We actually do stuff with it. So I think one of the easy things to start out with, if you're just learning nodes is a blur. So let's ta...

ke this media in, and then we're gonna blur it. And then we're going to put it back in the timeline. So, here in our toolbar, we have a bunch of the most commonly used nodes. And to the left of the second separator from the left, we have this little tear drop, and that is a blur node. So let's grab that and drag that in. And now, nothing's happening. Nothing's blurry. What's going on? Well, the reason nothing's happening, is because we have to hook this up to our nodes. So if I mouse over any of these little connections, and it turns blue, I can click on it to get rid of it. And now if I click and drag on this little gray square, I can drag the output of this node onto whatever I want. I'm just gonna drag it on top of my blur node, and let go. And that's going to run this footage through a blur effect. Now I can take the output of the blur, and run that into our media out. And now still nothing's hap happening. What's going on? Well, remember anytime that we have a node, if we want to affect kind of, its controls, that happens in the inspector. So I can select blur, and then go up to the inspector, and look at my blur size. It's just one. So, it is a little bit blurry, but you can't really tell when we're zoomed out like this. So if I push this blur size up, you'll see we have a blurry piece of footage now. So now again, what we're doing is, we're taking the footage, and then we're blurring it, and then we're putting it back. And now at any point, if I like this, I can just switch back to the edit page, and look, now we have our blurry footage here in the edit page. So that's like the very most basic thing that you could do inside of Fusion. This is technically a visual effect that you've created inside of Fusion. So that's pretty great, right? Not too hard. Let's go back to Fusion again, and make this a little bit fancier. Remember for every single thing that we want to do in our composite, we need to add a node. So let's say we want to put some text over this, okay? I can grab a text node right here. This is the third icon over, this little T, and I'll drag this in. I can select this in and I'll type some text. So we'll say, "Welcome home." And now nothing happens. Again, that's because we don't have this linked up to something. But we can select a node, and hit one on the keyboard, to preview whatever that node is doing, on this left viewer. So let's size this up a little bit. Maybe we'll change, maybe we'll change the font a little bit. Nice. So now how do we put this text over this blurry background? Well, remember we need a node for everything we do. So let's make a merge node. Here in our toolbar, just to the right of our second divider here, is our merge node. I can grab this, and drag this in. And this time I'm gonna drag it on top of one of these little connectors. When it turns blue, I can let go. And it will put this node in between these other two nodes. So now what we're telling it to do is pick up some media, blur it, put nothing over it and then render it out. So let's tell it to actually put something over it. So let's take this text, and we're gonna take the output of the text, and drop it onto the merge. And now we see that it's connected to the green input of the merge. We have one input, our blurry footage, and one input, our text. And then again, up here in the right viewer, we have, "Welcome home." That is technically like your first composite, because you're putting something over something else. Pretty cool, right? And once we like this, all we have to do is go back to the edit page, and we see our composite right here. but why in the world would we do something like this instead of Fusion? It's it's so simple. We could probably do it in the edit page, right? Well, one of the advantages of Fusion is the animation. So let's switch back over to Fusion. That's gonna open this up again. And let's say we want this text to kind of fly in, and then gradually stop right here in the middle. Well, let's say maybe we want it to take about, I don't know, half a second or so to fly in. If we're around 30 frames, a second 24 frames a second. If we bring our play head to frame here in our time ruler right here, then we can add a key frame to this text node, and tell it to be right here at this time. That's really what a key frame is, you're just telling something to be a certain value at a certain time. So what value is it? Oh boy. So I'm gonna go over to the inspector right here, and click on layout. And under this first section here, we have center. This is what we're gonna animate here, because that's what controls this position of our text. Control z to get rid of that. And we want this to be right in the middle here, at 15 frames. And so I'm gonna add a key frame. The way that I do that, is by clicking this little diamond right here, on the right hand side of whatever I want to animate. And when it turns orange, that means that it's going to be right there at that time. Now we can move somewhere else in our timeline. So I'll move up to the start of our clip, at zero. And now I can just grab one of these and adjust it. I'll just grab the y, and move it this way, so that it's off screen. And let's just play this back. And now this flies in like that. Pretty cool But there's one problem. This flies in, and it just stops immediately which doesn't look very good. So what can we do to have this slow down, and just be a really nice, easy animation? Well, we can go to our spline panel, which is in the upper right. If we click on this button, we can bring up the animation graph for our text. All we have to do is just click on this little tick box here, and click on this little button called zoom to fit. And now we have our graph. And I can drag and select this last key frame, and hit f on the keyboard for flatten, f for flatten. And that will take this little control handle, and flatten it out. And if you're looking at this graph, this value goes all the way up, and then it slowly kind of rolls off right here, and it slows down before it stops. So now let's take a look at our animation. And there we go, much smoother, really nice little animation here. And I'll go ahead and close our spline panel. And now we have this fancy little effect for our title, which, again, lives in our edit page as well, and will play back nicely, as soon as this little bar right here turns blue. Now I can play this back, and now we have this nice little animated thing. not too bad, right? Let's have a look at another example, here. Let's go to the last shot here. I'll just bring this into Fusion. Here we have a shot of our businessman on the computer, and we have this nice little dolly in. You might have seen, in TV shows, where, you know, you see a screen, and it's not flickering, and it's exactly what everybody thought would be on the screen. A lot of the time, that is actually added in post. And in Fusion, we can do something really cool, and just replace this screen, and put in whatever we want. So again, just like before, we have a really simple graph here, where we're picking up a piece of media, and we're putting it back, and all of the magic happens in the middle. So what do we need to do first? The first thing that we need to do is track this motion, because whatever we put on this screen, needs to move at the same speed, and in the exact same way, as the rest of the shot. So I'm gonna do something really fancy here. I'm gonna search for the next node that I want to add. And I can do that by a holding shift and hitting space bar. And that'll bring up our select tool panel right here. And we can type in whatever we want. This is a great way to figure out what is possible, inside of Fusion. But right now I'll just say, "Tracker," t-r-a-c-k-e-r. And there are a couple different trackers that come with Fusion. And what I'm gonna want is the planar tracker. The planar tracker is a node that will look at a whole bunch of points inside of an area, and it will track the motion of each of those points, And it will figure out where a plane should kind of stick onto something, which is absolutely perfect for something like a screen replace. So with the planar tracker selected, I can zoom into our right viewer, and I'll move this around a little bit. And I'm just gonna draw a really rough shape around our green screen here. Now they shot this with a green screen, but they don't really need to, because we're just gonna cover this up. So I have that selected, and in the inspector over here, I'm gonna set a couple things. The first thing is our reference time. So this is basically, at what point did we draw this shape, which I randomly just picked a point at 41. So that sounds great. Over here where it says reference time, I'll hit set. And everything else should be good by default. I'm gonna hit this track forward button right here, and I'm gonna track to the end of our clip. And it's gonna track that motion. Then I'm gonna go back to our reference time, by hitting go, and then track to the beginning of the shot with this little button right here. And now we've tracked the motion from beginning to end, and we figured out the exact movement of our screen. So what do we do with that? Well, with the planar tracker selected, we can go up to our inspector, and here where it says operation mode, instead of track, I'm gonna switch this to corner pin. What that's going to do is take a corner of whatever we're going to put on is the fake screen, And it's going to put the corner where it's supposed to be in perspective. And it starts out with this little red outline. and I can grab the upper right corner, in put that where it's supposed to be, and the lower right where that's supposed to be, lower left, and upper left. And I'll hold down command and zoom in, just roll up with my scroll wheel. I can middle button mouse, and grab to kind of move this around. And I just want this a little bit bigger than our fuzzy green screen here, just so it's covering up all the green pixels. And I'm just clicking and dragging and moving this around. And I want this to be roughly where the other corners are, but just a little bit bigger than our green screen. Now, it realistic that it'd be actually bigger than our green screen? No. Is anyone ever gonna notice? Nope. And it's a lot easier this way, so we're just gonna go with that. So now we have this pretty much prepared to replace the screen but we need something to replace it with. So let's go up to our media pool, in the upper left hand corner. I'll click on that, to open that up. And, I happen to have a convenient shot of a cat, which by the way, if you ever replace a screen with anything, always, at least at first, replace it with a cat, just to double check, just to make sure and make sure everything's okay. All right? So what we're gonna do is take this picture of this cat and drag it down into our nodes, and that's gonna make another media in node. And just to keep organized, I'm gonna hit function F2, to rename this node. And we'll call this Cat Screen. And just like a merge node, I can take the output of this cat screen, and drop it on the planar tracker. And after it thinks for a second, it will put the cat onto the monitor here. So I'm gonna switch back to our edit page. And now we have our composite here. And let's play this back in all its glory. A guy's just doing cat business, I guess, that's all. He talks on the phone about various cats, all day long. You know, just like, I feel like I've said a hundred times, the sky's really the limit when it comes to what you can do inside of Resolve. So just a couple other quick examples here, if we switch over to this shot here we have a green screen composite, which, now that we've looked at nodes for a little bit, this should start to make maybe a little bit of sense. I'll select our media in, and hit one on the keyboard, and this is all on green screen. And then what we're doing is removing the green screen, and then adjusting a little bit of the color. And then we're merging this over a background that's just this still, that's kind of blurred, and zoomed up, and we're putting them all together, into this kind of composite. We're just scratching the very surface of what you can do inside a Fusion. You can do something really basic like we did just now. Or you can have a huge composite, with 200 different nodes and, you know, 17 different pieces of footage. It really depends on what you're working on. But Fusion is powerful enough to do pretty much anything you can imagine.