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Combining Techniques

Lesson 11 from: DaVinci Resolve: Compositing with Fusion

Casey Faris

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Lesson Info

11. Combining Techniques

Casey takes techniques you’ve learned and shows you how to combine them to achieve your ideal look.
Next Lesson: Basic Graphic

Lesson Info

Combining Techniques

So now, we've pretty much learned the basics of how to composite infusion. And there are really just a few essential things from loading or creating an image to running it through effects, to compositing images together, limiting things with masks. And all of those things combine to just pretty much create whatever you want. So I thought it would be helpful to look through a few different compositions and just explore how the nodes are put together because then you can see how these little techniques are combined to be able to make whatever you want. I'll go back to our Edit page here. And we'll take a look at an overview of a couple different shots. Here, we have this animated graphic that's pointing out that this guy has coffee and how much it costs, and if we jump into the Fusion page and look at the nodes. Again, initially, it's a little bit intimidating, but we're really just using the basic building blocks here. We're starting with the media in, which is just the image from our t...

imeline, and we're using a special effect called, "A Tracker." What that does is track the motion of an image and put another image over it, it's like an effect and emerged node mixed together. And so, let's take a look at what we're putting over it. Well, we're starting out with a blank background and we're merging some text over that, that's this "coffee 4398." And we're taking that and merging something else over that. What are we merging? We're starting out again, with a blank background, and we're adding a paint effect to it. Now this is an that lets you draw lines and shapes and everything. And then we're putting those together in our merge node, and limiting that with a mask. And this mask is animated. So all we're really doing is just revealing this graphic with the mask. And then we also have some animation back on our text that types it in. Then we're transforming it, putting it down where it's supposed to be. And we're running it through a drop-shadow effect, and then putting that over our footage with that tracked motion. Let's look at another composition. Switch over to our Edit page. And then we'll go to this shot of our business man talking about cats, switch over to Fusion. And this is a much simpler comp. Again, we start with a shot from our timeline. And we take a shot of the cat. We color-correct the cat. And we place these together with a certain tracker node which tracks the motion of our background image, and then it puts a foreground image over it. It's like an effect mixed with our merge node, and then we output that to the timeline. Let's look at one more. Here, we have a really cool shot of a flying saucer over a city, and it moves along with the camera because it's tracked. Looks great. And if we switch over to the Fusion page, we can see what's happening in our nodes. We're starting with our background plate which is just the city. And again, we're using A Tracker to track the motion which also does the merging for us. We're starting with this still image of a flying saucer, and we're color-correcting it. And then we're doing a little bit more color correction, but only on the sides here. What we're doing is grabbing this color corrector and limiting it with a couple of masks to relight and boost up the yellow light here. And then we're blurring it a little bit and moving it to the right place in our shot, and merging that over everything with our tracker. And we also have a polygon mask on our tracker, that's just fading out how strong this foreground is. So if we zoom this in and move this around, we can see it's fading out there. So we have a nice soft mask to just give this a little bit of atmosphere. It's blending with the sky and that just helps it blend with the background and look really nice. Again, some of these things look really complicated but if you take them piece by piece and you build them as you go, just thinking about, okay, what do I need to do next? Then you can build a really complicated node graph like one of these and understand each piece, 'cause really, these are all the same pieces. This is an image, this is an effect, this is emerge, this is an effect, these are masks, it's all the same building blocks. And if you understand the building blocks and how these link together, then we can make some really cool stuff. Let's jump into making some of these comps step by step.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

DaVinci Resolve - 17 Shortcuts.pdf

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.

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