The Fusion page is where you can let your imagination go wild and create cinematic visual effects and motion graphics! It’s built into DaVinci Resolve and features a node based workflow with hundreds of 2D and 3D tools. Fusion is ideal for everything from quick fixes such as retouching and repairing shots to creating true Hollywood caliber effects. If you’ve seen the Hunger Games, Avengers, Terminator Genisys, or many major Hollywood blockbusters, then you’ve already seen Fusion in action! You can use it to clone out an unwanted mic, replace a sign, create dynamically animated titles or even place characters into 3D scenes. It's your new secret weapon for visual effect and motion graphics!

Nodes Are Easier Than Layers

Fusion uses a flow chart called a node tree that visually maps out how effects are connected and work together. Nodes are like building blocks that represent effect tools, generators, transforms, masks and more. There are no confusing stacks of nested layers and hidden menus! You build effects by stringing nodes together one after the other. The MediaIn node represents the clip from the edit timeline. To add a blur, drag the blur node from the toolbar to your flow chart and connect it in sequence after the media in. Simply drag the output from the MediaIn node and connect it to the input of the blur node. Tools can be combined in any order, letting you create an unlimited number of effects!

Animate 2D and 3D Titles

Text can be designed in either 2D or 3D. For 2D text, drag a Text+ node into the node tree and type your text to get started. You’ll find advanced yet familiar text controls in the inspector for font, size, alignment, spacing, kerning, leading and more. Click on the shading tab to stylize text with gradient or video fills, outlines, drop shadows and glows. Adding a Text 3D node gives you similar formatting controls along with 3D extrusion, custom beveled edges and more. To add textures, surface properties and reflections, just connect a replace material node to the text 3D node. You’ll find controls in the inspector to animate entire blocks of text, lines, words or even individual characters!

Add and Track Infographics

The Fusion page allows you to quickly and precisely add and track infographics. First, connect a tracker to your clip, use the on screen controls to place the tracker over the part of the image to which you want to attach the graphic, then click track forward. After the track is complete, click on the operation tab and change the operation to “match move”. This turns the tracker into a merge node! Import your multi layered Photoshop files using the import menu or by dragging them in from the media pool. Connect the graphic to the green foreground input on the tracker node to complete the composite. Now, as you animate your graphics, they’ll move in sync with the tracked object in your scene.

Replace Signs, Screens And Billboards

Fusion’s powerful planar tracker lets you add new screens to a smartphone, replace a sign on the side of a moving truck, add a new billboard to a shot and more. All you have to do is connect a clip to the planar tracker, draw a shape around the area you want to track and click the track forward button in the inspector. A tracking cloud will be created with a precise motion path that contains position, rotation, scaling, and perspective changes. The planar tracker node includes built in corner pinning, making it easy to connect the new screen or sign into the node and position the four corners. You can even use the tracker data to animate mask shapes, making rotoscoping tasks incredibly fast!

Add 3D Particle Effects

Particles can be used to create realistic atmospheric effects like fire, rain or smoke, or fantastic swirling glowing bits for use in motion graphics and broadcast design. You can create particle systems from any type of image. To create particles, you need to add both a particle emitter and a particle renderer to your node tree. Click the particle emitter and open the inspector to customize and start animating your particles. There are more than a dozen particle specific nodes that can be inserted between the emitter and renderer to simulate gravity, friction, turbulence, bounce and more. Best of all, particles work in 3D so you can make them flow around and bounce off other elements in the scene!

Track and Follow Any Object

Tracking plays a key role in creating sophisticated visual effects and motion graphics. Fusion makes tracking easy with advanced 3D camera tracking, powerful planar tracking and rock solid 2D tracking. The 2D tracker is great for following most objects that move throughout a scene. Planar tracking lets you track image planes, or flat objects, in a scene. It’s ideal for replacing signs or screens. The 3D camera tracker is extremely powerful because it analyzes the motion of the camera that shot the original scene and recreates it in 3D space. This lets you add objects such as text, 3D model set pieces, or even atmospheric particles such as fog or smoke that seamlessly blend into the scene.

Speed Up Your Workflow

Fusion is packed with time saving tricks to help you click less and move faster. Keyboard shortcuts like Shift+Spacebar enables a tool search window, type in the tool name and press enter to add the tool. Node versioning is perfect for trying out new animations without duplicating a node. Quickly switch between versions by clicking on the numbers located at the top of the inspector. The clip timeline gives you quick access to every clip in the timeline on the edit page, so you can work on new shots without having to leave the Fusion page. Lastly, quickly view any selected node in the right and left viewers by pressing the number 1 or 2 key, and clear all viewers by pressing the tilde key.

Advanced Visual Effects and Motion Graphics Tools

The Fusion page features hundreds of advanced feature rich tools for creating photorealistic visual effects, powerful broadcast graphics and sophisticated title animations. Unleash your imagination with an infinite 3D workspace, transport characters to new worlds with 3D set extensions, or build custom templates that can be used right from the edit and cut pages for efficient broadcast workflows. Best of all, Fusion’s powerful spline based keyframe editor and expressions let you create incredibly smooth and sophisticated animations. There's even built in scripting and automation. There really is no limit to what you can achieve with Fusion, and it’s right inside of DaVinci Resolve!

Import and Render 3D Models

You can import 3D models or even entire 3D scenes from apps such as Maya and 3D Studio Max directly into your shots on the Fusion page. Using the FBX import menu, Fusion gives you the option to import FBX (Filmbox) scenes or Alembic animated geometry files, dramatically increasing your creative options for visual effects and motion graphics. For example, you can import a 3D model of a mobile phone and replace its screen, add a new car into a commercial spot, create a swarm of attacking spaceships, or add a dragon fighting live action knights in front of a castle! Then add textures, shading and lights, composite your actors into the shot and create photorealistic Hollywood style effects!

Spline Based Animation

The Spline Editor, which can be opened by clicking on its icon at the top right, gives you incredible control over curves that control the speed, or rate of change, in an animation. You can change the speed between keyframes using linear or fully customizable bezier and b-spline curves. The spline editor features a strip at the bottom with tools to reverse, loop or ping pong animations, making it faster and easier to create keyframe animations. You can even squish and stretch keyframes to shorten or lengthen animations without changing the relative motion! Curve shapes can be copied and pasted between parameters, independent of values, so you can create consistent, perfectly timed animations.

Advanced Mask and Rotoscope Tools

Rotoscoping is a technique used in visual effects compositing to cut characters or elements out of a scene so you can seamlessly place them in another. Fusion’s masking tools let you perform advanced rotoscoping with bezier and B‑spline shapes. You can track masks with the planar or 2D trackers, set custom feathering per point for precise blending, and use keyboard shortcuts to quickly manipulate shapes in the viewer to help you work faster. Masks and roto shapes can all be animated to morph as characters and objects change in a scene. This level of control lets you create feature film quality VFX composites. You can even send masks back to the color page to perform isolated corrections.

Deep Pixel Compositing

Deep pixel compositing uses 3D metadata stored in a 2D file to speed up the process of compositing elements such as actors, other 3D objects, volumetric effects or anything else in a scene. Instead of being a simple flat image, every single pixel has a 3D x, y and z coordinate. When you render a 2D EXR image out of a 3D application you get RGBA (red, green, blue and transparency) data for every single pixel, along with XYZ position information. That means you don’t have to load massive 3D scene models that take a long time to render. It allows you to add fog, custom lights or actors and render it in seconds, not hours, as it would in 3D software that uses full models with complex geometry!

Scripting and Automation

Once you’ve designed titles and graphics, creating and updating them with current data can be tedious. With support for Python and Lua built in, you can write scripts to automate repetitive tasks and to feed live data sources into your animations in realtime. For example, you can use a Python or Lua script, along with a simple text document, to automatically create and render updated broadcast graphics, titles and animations with things such as up to the minute weather forecasts, sport scores and player statistics, news headlines and more. It’s not just for motion graphics, either. It goes beyond motion graphics as scripting can speed up your workflow by automating virtually any repetitive task!