28/02/23 - Fusion Work

In today's lesson, we were learning how to use DaVinci BlackMagic Resolve Fusion. We did this, by following along with the tutorials that the software has provided within it's website.

To begin with, we firstly had to download the Project Files for the work we were going to be following, onto our computers, so that we could actually use the images that we needed to use. We then started to watch the first video, which explained some of the basics as to how this section of the software worked and what to expect from it. From here, we actually began following it's instructions.

First, we had to rename our first node to 'Actress', so that we knew what we would be editing when using this node, and to this, we connected up a Colour Corrector node, which we edited the levels of to bring out more details within the image, such as the woman's freckles, which you couldn't really see before. We then added a Brightness/Contrast node to the line, and altered the numbers of it, to give the image more depth.

We then added in a mask to cover the woman's face, changing the size and shape of it to do so, so that the effects would be applied to this area, however, until we connected up this no
de to the rest of the others, we could not see any changes within it.
We then went back to the comparison screen, to see how the changes that we had already made, made our work look in comparison to the original clip we were given to edit.

After this, we had to add in the file 'HUD', from the media files that we had available, and merge this into our node tree. We also had to do this for our 'Glass' media file. With thi
s Glass file, we had to edit the Apply Mode of the node, to Screen, and slightly take down the Blend option, to change the opacity slightly. We then had to add a Transform node to the HUD node, and changed the size of the image file, so that we were able to see all of it on the screen. We also added in a Look Change node to the HUD file connection line, and then all of the nodes that we had added, we also copied over onto our Glass node connection line.

We then added a Text node onto our node tree, and
connected it off of our HUD node, this created a merge node as we did it, which we used to edit the fill and outline colour of the text, to be red and orange, so that it stood out. To this text, we added in some keyframes every ten frames through the video, so that it would flash on the screen as a warning light, however to do this, we had to go into our Spline options, and select the keyframe pins that we had created, and select the Step Up option, to make the text flash up, rather than fade in and out. Whilst on these options, we also changed the frequency at which it flashed, as it was quite slow initially. We also then set this as a loop, to that it would continuously flash.

Returning to our node tree, we then added in a secondary colour corrector, next to the first one that we placed in, and made it red. We then attached an ellipse, over the text that we had put in, and attached this to the colour corrector. For this node, we then had to open the Probe Modifiers, and drag in the Merge node that was created when adding in the text. After we had done this, we were able to drag the Probe Modifier over the text, which activated it, making it so that the text and the ellipse flashed at the same time as one another.

We then softened the edges of the ellipse, so that it looked more like a light reflection, rather than just a solid shape.

To finish off the work, to make our node trees look a little bit tidier, we added in some Underlays to each branch, such as for all of the Glass or HUD options, and named these, changing each one's colour, so that they all stood out, and mad some of the more important nodes, such as the actual media files, into larger icons, so that they stood out more, in comparison to the other nodes.