Hey there good people! I'm Scott and this is Sword & Shield Studio. Right now we are going to
be looking at Groups and Macros within DaVinci Resolve Fusion and it's a lot of information.
So let's get right into it. Okay, so here I am on the Fusion tab of DaVinci Resolve
where I have created a fake logo composition here within Fusion. I've got a text node,
an ellipse mask over a background node and a merge feeding into the MediaOut. Pretty simple little
composition just for the sake of the tutorial here to show you how Groups and Macros work. To create
a group you hold left click and box select all the nodes that you want to include in your group.
So for me that's this entire composition here minus the MediaOut. And then I will hit 'Ctrl+G'
or 'Cmd+G' if you're on a Mac. Or alternatively you can right click and hit 'Group' here.
Now this has collected all of the nodes we grouped into a neat, single stack on our node tree
as you'll see here. You can still access all the nodes within the group by double clicking it.
And this will pull up the entire group within a window which you can still freely modify
each of your nodes in here within. You can also save a group and re-use it in
another project if you wish. In order to do that, you right click your group,
go to 'Settings', 'Save As...', and by default it will put it in a Fusion\Settings folder,
you can save it anywhere. I'm just going to save this on my desktop and call it 'FakeLogoGroup'.
Now in order to recall that group I simply go to my desktop, drag that 'FakeLogoGroup' file
directly onto my node tree and it's there. Just as though I placed it within Fusion.
This is very handy when transferring pieces of a Fusion composition between computers.
Now onto macros. Macros are a way to bundle nodes together, kind of similar to the groups.
They allow you to create really easy to understand and modify templates that can be used in other
projects and distributed Online. To create a macro, you hold 'left click' and box select
all the nodes you want to include in your macro. For me, that will be everything but the MediaOut.
Right click, go to 'Macro', 'Create Macro'. Now this brings up a checklist which at first looks
a bit daunting and confusing, but if you close out all the sections here you quickly realize
that this checklist is just a list of all the nodes you chose to include in your macro
and all the different control parameters within each of those nodes. Knowing this, all that we
have to do is identify what we want the user of our macro to be able to control and check the box
next to those options in our macro editor. Let's say for the sake of the tutorial we want our macro
to allow you to change the font face, style, and font color. We know these are probably all going
to be a part of our text node. So navigate to the text node and expand the controls.
Within the text node we want the properties specifically pertaining to the text controls
themself. So I will expand the text menu within the text node. Here I will check 'Font, Style,
Color, Green, Blue, Alpha'. This will allow your macro to control the composition's font face,
color, and styling. Next, give your macro a name. That's going to be 'FakeLogoMacro' for me.
Go to the top left of your macro editor, hit 'File', 'Save As...',
again I'm going to keep the name as 'FakeLogoMacro' and keep it in the
default directory of '...\Fusion\Macros', hit 'Save', close out of the Macro Editor.
Then when I disconnect the loose nodes I can come into my Fusion tree and 'Ctrl+Space' as though I
am adding any other tool or effect into my Fusion node tree here. Type in 'FakeLogoMacro' and boom!
There it is, as its own macro tool. I will add it to my node tree, hook it up to the MediaOut
and you will notice I have controls for the font face,
the style, and the color. All the selections I made in the Macro Editor are reflected here in
this neat window in my inspector. Now, if you want to get back to your node editor to add or remove
controls to your macro... You simply right click anywhere in your node graph, go to 'Edit Macro',
you'll see FakeLogoMacro for me is here in the menu. I'll click that. And it brings
back up the node editor so I can add or remove options to my macro as I please. Note, however,
that if you do make changes to your macro you will need to place a new instance of your macro
in your node tool in order for those changes to be reflected. For instance, if I remove the control
to change the font and save changes, you won't see that in the macro that is already already
in my composition here. I will have to add a new instance and you will see the 'FakeLogoMacro_1'
only has Style and Color controls now. Well that's it for Groups and Macros within DaVinci
Resolve Fusion. As you can see, knowing when to utilize these features can help you keep more
organized with your node trees within Fusion. Even better, you can use Macros and Groups to
re-use and distribute your most commonly used effects and nodes within Fusion too. So, I hope
you found this video helpful and this information was useful for you. I will see you next time.