Overview of Resolve - Fusion Page

This week's blog will briefly cover the Fusion Page in Resolve. This page is where you can apply any more advance effects, from compositing explosions, animating graphics and text, to tracking and adding 3D assets into a scene.

To start with, let's briefly go over the layout of the page. Much like the edit page, the top windows are as follows:

- The Media Pool, where you can access all of your media for the project.

- The Viewer, where you can view the selected media and any effects that are applied onto it.

- The Inspector, where you can view metadata and change the parameters for the various effects.

However, on the bottom of the page is a new window, the Node window.

Here, compositions are built using nodes instead of layers, a method used in other editing software. This is purely a different way to view your compositions and may or may not be preferable to you. However I prefer the node based system as it can be more organised.

When starting off in the fusion page, you will have a node called "MediaOut", this node will be the final node in the composition, the output where everything will be rendered and viewed in other pages.

To start editing a shot, you will need to drag your chosen shot into the Node window from the Media Pool. Notice, it will then create a "MediaIn" node. This represents your input media. If needed, multiple pieces of media can be taken from the Media Pool if they need to be composited together.

From here, you might notice there won't be anything displaying in the Viewer window. Whilst selecting any node, you can press either 1 or 2 on your keyboard and the node will display on either of the two Viewer windows.

For the "MediaOut" node to display anything, however, it needs to be linked to "MediaIn". Simply drag from the grey square on the right side of "MediaIn" and place the line onto "MediaOut" to link them together. Now "MediaOut" will display "MediaIn" or anything else linked to it.

If you want to add an effect, you can either drag it from the tool bar which already has some of the most useful nodes, or you can press Shift+Space to bring up a search tool to find a specific node. Simply drag and drop it into the Node window and link it between the "MediaIn" and "MediaOut" nodes, then change it's parameters in the Inspector window for the effects to take place.

Some effects such as text require a "Merge" node. Add the "Merge" node between "MediaIn" and "MediaOut", noticing the different coloured arrows. Yellow is Background, Green is Foreground, and Blue is Mask. Add the "Text" node, place it in the foreground arrow and add your text in the inspector tool. Then your final composition can be seen when selecting the "MediaOut" node.

There are literally hundreds of different nodes and effects you can do in the Fusion page, but it is a great way to combine multiple complex shots in one place whilst keeping organised. I highly recommend trying out different effects for yourself and researching different techniques.

Next week will cover the Fairlight page in resolve, stay tuned!