Tutorial: 5 quick Fusion tips

[ShadowMaker SdR]

Hi, for most people here, this will be nothing new, but I've just created a new tutorial for Action VFX to show a couple of quick tips for Fusion.
Enjoy!

[intelligent machine]

Thanks for the tips!
That Alt-drag after selecting a view control is so great.

For the first tip you can also right-click and drag from an output to over a node to get the inputs pop-up menu...a tiny bit quicker than having to press Alt.

[TheBloke]

Awesome video, Sander and amazing production values!

It reminded me of a question I have been meaning to ask for a while: what do you use the Keyframe pane for?

So far the only time I've found it useful is when I made a macro of a text animation. I set up the macro so all its animations started at from 0, then I deployed the macro 8 times in one comp. I was then able to drag the bar for each instance of the macro in the Keyframe pane so it began on the frame on which I wanted the text to appear and start animating. That made all the animations relative to that start point. Eg if my macro had an animation from frames 0 to 100, then I deployed the macro and dragged Keyframes bar for that macro to start on frame 1000, that animation would now run from frames 1000 to 1100 in the new comp.

That's about the only time I've found any use for the Keyframes pane so far. At one point I thought maybe its Spreadsheet view might be useful, but it hasn't proved to be as yet.

[Midgardsormr]

I use it to retime groups of animation channels on multiple nodes. For instance, when I was building a title card for my new reel, I had a sort of slot machine animation with several 3d cards that rotated into view one at a time. I wanted the timing to be consistent for each set of cards, but I didn't know exactly how fast to make it.

I also wanted to line up the keyframes in a particular fashion. It's a little difficult to see the cascade here since I changed the order of the inputs, and thus disarranged it all, but this shows how you can easily select keyframes from multiple nodes in a relatively easy-to-comprehend display. I'm ready to scale them here to adjust the speed of the animation.



It's also a simple way to adjust the global in/out and trims of Loaders, although I don't often point that out because it often leads newer users (with whom I most often interact) coming from AE or editing software to think that it's showing layers.

You can, of course, see all of the keyframes from multiple nodes in the Spline View, but it's harder to select specifically the ones you want because they will often overlap one another, being all in the same spatial context. If I try to marquee select just one layer here, I'll have to then de-select the neighboring spline points that I didn't want to adjust:



I've never had cause to use the spreadsheet, either, to be honest.

[ShadowMaker SdR]

Awesome video, Sander and amazing production values!

Thanks for the compliment. What do you mean by the production values?

[TheBloke]

Thanks @Midgardsormr , that's very interesting.

Since you mentioned that I had an opportunity to use Keyframes last night for moving a bunch of keyframes on multiple nodes at once, so I gave it a go. And yeah it was definitely helpful. In my example, I had made an animation longer early in a composition, which meant I then needed to move forward everything else after that. I found it quicker and easier to do this in Keyframes, especially as it happened that all the nodes I wanted to adjust appeared consecutively, because I'd created them in chronological order.

What do you mean by the production values?

Production values means attention to detail and high quality presentation. In that example, I meant stuff like the 3D numbers landing with smoke and debris, and the piece of paper unfolding with the 'quick tips' label.

It's a step above standard YouTube tutorial presentation

[ShadowMaker SdR]

I did The 3D numbers myself and then used the Action VFX stuff to make it look a little cooler. The unfolding paper transition was provided to me by them. They took care of getting the footage for the example shots. But I did do all the writing, capturing editing etc. I have the feeling my voice-overs are getting slightly better as well. Thanks again!

[SecondMan]

Excellent video, Sander! 6 valuable tips in less time than some spend introducing themselves

Thank you!