Editing Blog: Incorporating the Titles

    

Fusion page in DaVinci Resolve

    Using titles in Davinci Resolve is something I have never done before, so I did some research before starting. I naturally turned to YouTube and picked up the basics rather quickly. However, I felt that 2d titles on a screen would be quite plain, so I tried to challenge myself to create 3 dimensional titles that are fixed within space. To see if such a thing is even possible using Resolve, I did some research and found that it is indeed possible using the fusion tab in resolve. Fusion in Resolve is a node based vfx tool, which means the image is passed through a series of nodes before reaching the output. The main node that I would use is called the planar tracker. To use this, I first had to attach the node to the input. I then had to draw a rectangle on the surface I would like to track from a reference frame I set; the surface that is being tracked can be almost anything. I just had to make sure that the rectangle encompasses distinguishable features in order for it to track properly. For most of the shots the tracking worked with few hiccups. All I had to do from that point was to change the planar tracker from tracking mode to corner point mode, and then define the area for the text to be displayed. From there, I simply attached a text node to the planar tracker, along with a drop shadow node to make the text cast a shadow. 

    An issue I encountered was that there were some visual artifacts in the text, especially when the actor walked near the text. I fixed this by tracking a mask to the actor, and then specifying to the planar tracker node to ignore anything within the mask when tracking. I also had an issue with tracking the exterior shot in which the actor enters the house. The wall’s features confused the tracker, causing the tracker to spit out errors. I did this process for each of the titles, which was very time consuming. For the text itself, I used Copperfield bold font and set the text size to what I felt would be appropriate given the surface it would be projected upon. I had to use 2d titles for the shots that, despite scrutinous troubleshooting, refused to track properly. I also had to use 2d titles for the very last title, as I had no surface to track. 

Final Result