This video is about
making motion graphics in Fusion. Specifically, we're going
to look at how you can connect trackers and shapes to make
graphics that follow your footage. Along the way, we're
going to use expressions, neural engine tools
like Magic Mask and IntelliTrack, learn how to fix tracking issues with
tools like Reduce Points, and have some fun. If you'd like to
follow along, there's a link to download the media
we're using in the description. Here's the footage we are working with. I want to create a graphic that
draws attention to the fact that the hiker is constantly scanning
the terrain for hazards, and that in particular,
she has spotted these three rocks. So we need a shape that locks
onto her moving head and these rocks. Remember the camera isn't locked
off, so in essence the rocks are moving too. Select the clip and
head to the Fusion page. I will start by creating the
shape that shows where she is looking. I'm using a polygon node. Her head is one point, the three
rocks on the ground are the other points. And now I can close up the shape. A polygon node by itself is just a shape. We need to feed it
into another node like a background node to
get an image out of it. By the way, the hot key to bring up
the select tool dialog is shift space bar. You're going to see me use that a lot. Connect the
polygon node and the background node and connect
the background node to the main node tree. Remember if you drag
the output of one node onto the output of
another, Resolve will automatically create and connect a merge node. Nice and easy. Alright, I want to change
the color of the background node. Black isn't the right color. I think a strong red is what we need. It communicates danger. Here's the problem. As I drag my playhead back and
forth, the camera and the hiker move. The shape needs to be tracked in. By the end of the shot,
it's no longer in the right place. It's possible to
animate shapes to change over time. That's what this
keyframe control here is for. It allows you to
keyframe the entire shape. That's the problem, you see. It's all or nothing. The inspector doesn't expose
individual controls for each point. By default, we can change that. When a polygon node is selected,
these controls appear at the top of the viewer. These are the tools we use for drawing
and manipulating the shapes that we create. Start by selecting
all the points in this shape. A simple click and drag will suffice. And head to this
drop-down menu, which allows us to publish the
points that we have created in this shape. Have you come across
this word in Fusion before? Publish. When a control in the inspector is published, it's made
accessible to other nodes in the composition. Publishing points does a similar thing. There's a bunch of different
options here that sound very exciting. I'm going to choose the most
basic publish option, the one at the top. Check this out. It has created
individual controls for each point in my shape
in the inspector, each with its own individual
keyframing and expression controls. We'll look more at that later. For the time
being, we're going to use one of the other
publish options that we saw in that drop-down menu. I just wanted you to
see the basic tool first. So I'll undo that. Those controls have now disappeared. Let's head back to
the publish menu and this time, choose
publish to IntelliTrack Tracker. As you can see, those
individual controls for each point are back. But this time, Fusion has created a tracker node and
automatically linked those point controls to four separate
IntelliTrack trackers in this tracking node. Let me show you more, but first, a quick thank you to Audio for
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awesome way of supporting our channel. Thank you for watching! First, the composition
has got momentarily broken. That's because this
tracker isn't connected to anything. Let's fix that by
connecting it to the node tree. When you hold shift and drop
a node on an existing connection, Fusion will
automatically connect it when you let go. There we go. You can see it's now connected. By the way, I'm
connecting it to my node tree in line. I'm connecting both
the input and the output, and now it's a part of my image pipeline. But you don't have to, because we're not using this tracker node to make any changes to the image. You could connect
it to an isolated branch by just feeding it the source image, but not connecting its output. It's up to you. Either way, that's better. The image is now no longer broken. Because I drew my
shape in the correct place, and then used that
to generate the tracker node with that publish to
IntelliTrack tracker button, the tracking points are
automatically in the correct place. Good news. Additionally, these
are IntelliTrack trackers, not the old point trackers. This is a version 19 studio feature. Now you could do
this with point trackers. They work really well on the rocks, because they don't
change shape or move around as much. But the IntelliTrack
tracker will do a better job with the hiker's face. Point trackers rely on
recognizable points of contrast, whereas IntelliTrack does a better job of just locking onto the object. As I'm on the first
frame of my composition, all I need to do now is track forward. That's awesome. I can see it's already working. Now the track's
finished, let's just watch through it. Yeah, look at that. That's super cool. Now that we've done the technical
bit, drawn the shape and tracked it in, let's make it look better. I'll start by
lowering the opacity of that merge node. I'd like the shape to have a soft
edge. I can do that by selecting the polygon node and adding some edge softness.
Next I want this scanning beam to sort of fade away as it gets towards the
ground. So I'm gonna add a feathered rectangle mask to the beam shape. By default
when you connect two masks they get added together. You can see in the
viewer my shape is now a combination of the rectangle and my scanning beam.
If I change the paint mode on the second shape, which in this instance is the
beam, if I change it to minimum, there you go in minimum mode the new shape
appears wherever the two shapes intersect. Back to the rectangle node to tweak the
shape. I will add some softness and then rotate and move it into place. Let's add some text. I'll use the
Text Plus node for that. Connect it to the node tree. Choose a font. I'm going to
type Hazard Awareness and I'm putting some extra spaces in there to make room
for the hikers in the image. And then I will change the Merge Nodes Apply Mode
to Overlay. I really like the way the text interacts with the image. As I
scrub back and forth it feels like the hiker walks between the two words but the
text still obscures her. Let's fix that. This is an easy job for Magic Mask. I will
add a Magic Mask node. I'll connect it to my source image and then merge it
back to the composition after the Text node. Immediately, as you can see, it's
obscured the text. I cannot see the text anymore. That's because we have
not yet configured the magic mask. Let's equip the magic
mask node in the left viewer. I'm doing that by clicking
and dragging it into the left viewer. And also, I'll put the playhead
back to the beginning of the composition. It just makes it
ever so slightly easier as I only need to track the
magic mask in one direction. Let's draw the hiker in. Instantly, you can see the
text is back as the magic mask node, now knows what
part of the image we want to keep and then
composite back on top of that text. I'll add some extra strokes to
make sure that we get those arms too. In this instance, I think I will
use the better quality Magic Mask mode. Now we can track forward. Done. How easy was that? And look at that, the
hiker now walks over the text. Let's see the finished result. That's pretty cool.
Now that we've learned the basic skills needed to
link shapes and tracking points, let's look at
another example, but this time a more complex
composition. But just before we do that, did you see our
masterclass on switching to Resolve from other NLEs? In 35
minutes we cover the Media, Edit, Fusion and
Color page. We even look at Blackmagic Cloud. If
you're new to Resolve, it's the perfect
introduction. But even if you're a long-time Resolve user,
I'm sure you'll still learn stuff that you never knew
was in Resolve. There'll be a link at the end of the
video. Please go check it out. All right, time for example too. Here's the clip
we're working with. Look at all the equipment that
this hiker is carrying. I'd like to create a motion
graphic with labels and arrows that point to each
piece of kit. It's going to be another comp that
requires tracking. So over to the Fusion page.
This time, instead of creating the shape first,
we'll do our tracking first. It's time to add a
simple Tracker node. I'll position the first
Tracker on the bag. I'll create another IntelliTrack
Tracker. Position that on the rope. Create
another. Position that on the ice axe. I will
position one on her crampons. And lastly, I'll
create one more and position that on her cap. You'll
see why later. Because in this instance I am at the
end of this clip, I need to track the clip in
reverse. I really love IntelliTrack. The previous point
tracker would have really struggled with
these points, especially the crampons, because they
change shape and move around so erratically.
IntelliTrack is so good at locking onto objects. Let's
do a little more setup before we start making lines.
First, let's set up the text. This can be as
complicated as you want. I'm going to keep it really
simple and write all my labels in one text node. Bag, rope, ice axe, and crampons. Let's tweak
the font, the font weight, the line spacing, and alignment. And I'm going to head to the
shading tab and turn on this fourth preset. If you
change the level drop down from character to
word, it's a super easy way of giving the text a
color background. This primary blue is not the right
color for me though. Let's try the red that we
used on the last example. Finally, let's change
the apply mode of that merge node to overlay. A
quick position tweak and there you go. That
looks all right. Time to draw some lines. We need a
polygon node for that and a background node so we
can control the line's color. I'm going with white.
Let's get everything connected. Awesome. I can draw that first line. This one is for the bag. Let's modify the
polygon. I don't want to make a solid, I just want a line,
and I want to make it nice and thin. The border width
control affects the line's thickness. As I scrub back and
forth, you can see the line is not tracked in yet. It
doesn't stay attached to the bag. Let's fix that. The
polygon node is selected. I can select all the
points in the shape using this button, and now
go to the publish drop-down. Because I've already
created a tracker, I'm going to use the top option to simply
publish the points. Nothing else. Now that these controls
have been enabled in the Inspector, I can right-click on them, one
at a time of course, and check this out. There's options here to connect this control with the
tracker that we created earlier. I get to choose which of
the five tracking points I connect this control with. It's as
simple as that. That's really cool. I'm not going to
do it that way though. I'm going to set this up
manually using an expression. It sounds more
complex, but it's not. I actually think it makes it a
little bit easier. Here's the code. Tracker1, that's the name of
the tracker node we created, .position1. That's the name of
the property that has the tracking data from the
first tracking point we created. You might have seen the
line jump a teeny bit when we did that. Now look at
this. As I scrub back and forwards, you can see that the line
is glued to that bag. Awesome. Let's make the other three lines.
I don't need to build them from scratch. I can copy and then
modify the one that we did make. Command-C or Control-C if you're
on Windows, and then Command or Control-V. I'll hit it three times and check
that out. Because when I pasted those nodes, I had a node already
selected. Those new nodes have been
automatically connected to the node tree. This is one of the reasons I
like doing this with expressions. Look how easy it is for me to update
each new node to point to a different tracker. Just change one number in the expression. I like working like a factory
line, doing all the same jobs consecutively. So now I've done all the
points on the left-hand side of the lines, let's circle back and sort
out the points on the right-hand side. I could edit them in the
viewer by clicking and dragging. Alternatively, because
I've published all these points, I can manipulate them in
the inspector to keep them lined up. I'm only changing the Y value of
each point. Let's check out the result. That's pretty cool. Let's see if
we can make it even more interesting. First, let's add some
dots to the end of the lines to help make it
clearer what they are pointing at. To draw those dots, I'm
going to use an ellipse node, and once again feed that into a
background node to control its color. I can copy the existing
background node I've already created, and then get everything connected. I want to make a perfect circle. Ordinarily, the height and width
control of the ellipse tool are not connected. Look what happens. It's not necessary to connect
them, because to create a perfect circle, I can manually adjust
the width and height to match. Here's a little trick
that I like to use though. Add an expression to the height tool, and then drag this picker
button onto the width control. The way this button works,
whatever control you drag it onto, its name will be added to
the expression that you're building. It's a great way of finding the
name of a control when you don't know it. In this instance,
it was a super quick way of linking the width and height controls. Out with just a single control,
I can change the size of this ellipse, but keep it as a perfect circle. How can I make this follow the
tracking points we created on the equipment? That's right, the same
controls we explored earlier. The center property
controls the dots' position. I could use the connect to
option in the right click menu, but once again, I'm not going to
use that, I'm going to use an expression. I'll type the same
code we used on the lines, and voila, the dot is now
following the tracking point too. All right, you know the
drill, it's time to duplicate this node, and then go through and
edit the expression in each, so that each dot
follows a different tracker. While I'm doing
that, here's a top tip for you. If I was to create
these new nodes as instance nodes, I could de-instance
just the center expression. The big advantage would be that if I wanted to change the
shape or size of the dots, I could affect all
four of them at the same time, even though they have
their own center expressions. We demonstrate instance nodes
in our Fusion Compositing Masterclass, if you've not seen
it, please go check it out. In the meantime, let's see
how this composition is looking. That's pretty good. Here's a problem
though. The tracking point on the crampon is a
little bit jittery. I guess that's because the
foot changes shape and moves around so much it's
easy to confuse the tracker. That's not a problem though because it
is possible to manipulate the tracking data. That's because
Fusion stores it as keyframes and like all
keyframes they can be manipulated. In this instance
I'm going to use the Spline Editor. I have the
Spline panel set up to only show the currently
selected node. I'll turn on the fourth tracker in
the viewer. There's a really cool feature you can use to simplify complicated animations
that have lots of keyframes. First, select all the
keyframes that you'd like to simplify then right
click and go to reduce points. As you reduce the
precision slider can you see how the amount of
keyframes in the graph is reduced? It only leaves
keyframes where it feels they are needed. Now if I want
it even simpler I can select these clumps of
keyframes and use the reduce points tool again but
instead I'll just manually clean up some of
these unwanted keyframes. There's one last
thing to do. Let's zoom to extents again so we can see all of the keyframes. That's this
button up here. Select all the keyframes and hit S
for smooth. It converts all of those linear
keyframes into a bezier curve with nice smooth transitions
everywhere. This will make the motion of our line
smoother. Let's see how that's worked. That is better. It's
subtle, but it makes a difference. Next, let's make
some changes to the text. There's too much info here. I'm going to make it simpler. It's just going to say equipment. And then I'm going to
modify that background we added. If I increase the width, that color
band now goes all the way across the screen. That's looking good. I'd really like the
text to move with the hiker. Do you remember that fifth
tracking point we created on our head? Well that's what it's for. I can have the equipment text follow that tracking marker
using the same trick I used with the dots and lines. This time, I will
connect it to tracker number five. That's definitely worked. Cool, you
can see the text perfectly follows her head. But I don't want it to be glued
to her head. I want it off to the side. That's pretty common,
right? That the point where you place a tracking
marker isn't always the point that you want to apply your graphic to. The tracker has
controls that allow for that. I've got the fifth
tracker selected, the one on her head. By the
way, a quick side note, it is possible to rename
those trackers. It's also possible to rename
all the polygon and lips nodes that we've been
making. But because they're in the same order as
the text and the items on her back that we're
tracking, I've not bothered to rename anything as
it's pretty intuitive and easy to follow as it is
and I'm working quickly. Now that the tracker is
selected, there's additional controls for it down
here. Look, there's an offset control. Let's add
some x offset and some y offset. Perfect. Now we
need to update the lines so that the ends aren't
just floating in the middle of the image. They
need to be attached to that fifth tracker. That's
easy to fix with some more expressions. I'm going to be adding expressions to the
second points of all of these lines. Here's the expression I want to type. Tracker1.position5. Let's
add that to the other nodes too. I guess this is a
situation where creating these polygon nodes as
instance nodes would have helped as I could have updated
them all in one go. Never mind. Let's add another
ellipse too. I'll copy one of the ones we've
already made and change its expression so that
it's following the fifth tracker. Now we have a
dot on the other end of the lines and I think I'll
make this dot bigger than all of the other dots.
I like the way that looks. Now it's kind of too
close to the equipment text so let's nudge the
text over a little bit. Because I don't want to
mess up the expression in the merge node, I'm
going to use the text layer's own position
controls to move it over. They are in the text plus
nodes layout tab. Remember the position controls in
the text node, merge node and the offset controls in
the tracker all kind of get combined together to
determine the text's final position. Awesome.
Now let me show you the power of these techniques
we are using. Look how easy it is to continue to
edit and tweak this motion graphic. Because
everything is linked dynamically together with
expressions, if I change one node, it ends up
automatically adjusting all the other nodes too. That is
so cool. Of course the other trackers have offset
controls too. I can move the bag arrow lower. I can
move the rope arrow a little bit higher. And
finally I can move the ice axe arrow lower so it's not
on her hand. It's actually on the ice axe. Next, as
with the previous graphic, I'd like the hiker on
top of the graphics. We'll do the same trick.
Make a magic mask node, connect it to the source and
then merge it back on top of the text layer. I'll
just tidy up the node tree a little. Just like
before the text has disappeared because we have not
yet configured the magic mask. I'm making sure
I include her arms and body. And just like before, as soon as
we've drawn in the shape and the Magic Mask node now knows what to cut out and
what to leave, the text now reappears. Let's track that forward. I was a smart boy
again, I drew my Magic Mask at the beginning of the comp, so all
we need to do now is track forward. Brilliant! That's done
and looking pretty awesome. You know what? After
all that adjusting, I think I still need to tweak the
lines and text a little bit further because that crampon and
ice axe line, they are too close. They've almost merged into a
single line. They're getting confusing. Let's fix that by
moving the equipment text over and adjusting
the arrow for the ice axe. Finally, I've had a change of heart. Let's make the background on the
text semi-transparent and change it to blue. There you go, I'm happy with that.
Let's see what the final product looks like. That's looking great. If you're following
along and are looking for ideas to make your
motion graphics even cooler, here's three quick ideas
for you to try in your own time. One, use the line length and
position properties to have the lines animate on. Don't forget,
wherever you see those diamond icons, that's a
property that you can animate. Two, animate the ellipses
so that they grow from nothing. You could even add some bounce to the animation, have them
grow too big momentarily, and then shrink back down. And finally, three, use the write on
write off properties in the text plus nodes to animate the text
on one letter at a time. Well hey, that's it. If you like the way
we teach and would like to round out the rest
of your Resolve knowledge, please check out our
DaVinci Resolve for Editors course. It covers the media, edit,
color, fairlight, and deliver pages. It's nine entire
hours long, so pretty thorough. It comes with two hours of
practice media, you get our help, and you get a certificate
from Blackmagic Design at the end. We find that when a long time
Resolve user goes through a systematic course, they have so many moments of discovery. Creatives are amazing at finding
inventive ways of getting the job done. But just because you've been doing
something the same way for years and years, doesn't mean it's
the best way of doing it. There might be new
or old tools in the program that you don't
realize can help you do amazing new things, or do the same things
you already do, but better and faster. So whether you're a
newcomer or an experienced editor, there's something for everyone
inside DaVinci Resolve for Editors. If you have any
questions, please get in touch. There's free sample
lessons from the course on our website. There's also our amazing 35
minute Masterclass we mentioned earlier. All the details are
down in the description. We hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a like. Make sure you are subscribed so
you don't miss out on future videos. You can download the follow along
media using the link in the description. Thanks for watching!