Masking, Rendering and Production Flows

I'm new to Davinci Resolve and still stumbling around, but I think i'm using it alright to produce a podcast. I have a production question though because my current production process ends up being quite time consuming and it doesn't seem like it should be.

I have a show that has two hosts talking, and occasionally it cuts to a clip of a movie or something to provide some context. Currently I have a gutter around the two hosts of a moving star field, with a strip seperating them down the middle, and when I go to a different clip the central gutter is removed. Finally at the end, the hosts fase out and there are credits the roll over the whole star field. See attached images.

TwoHosts.png (214.94 KiB) Viewed 448 times

Clip.png (191.33 KiB) Viewed 448 times

Outro.png (132.93 KiB) Viewed 448 times

At the moment, i only have the star field as the lowest layer, then crop everything to suit sitting on top of it. This works alright but is a pain to adjust everything to fit constantly. Is there a better way to do this? I'm open to any suggestions.

My thought for how to do it, was to create three separate video files, a top level outer board video for use as a top level frame over everything, with an alpha channel cutting out the middle of the screen, for clip videos, a two hosts version of the same file with two cutouts for the hosts, and then a final simple starfield video. My thinking was the layer them into davinci resolve prerendered with the alpha channels so they sat on top of each other creating a seamless image of the backdrop and then I could put the host videos above the background and below the two hosts file, showthem through with the frame around them, and then layer the clip video on top of that to provide the top level framing and put any video clips above the two hosts frame but below the outer frame in the time line, so it covers the hosts and the lower frame up and sits under the top level frame. Does that make sense?

The thought was to make it quick and easy to load the three frames and put the clips between them and not have to worry about lining up the edges as much (just a rough crop so they fit under it) because the frame above would define where the edges are.

However my attempts to create the frames and render them with an alpha channel have met with failure so far. The colours were darker on the two host frame than the clip frame (I didn't adjust anything) and i'm not really sure what I am doing wrong, or if this is completely the wrong way to approach the problem.

I'm a bit lost, so any advice would be most welcome.

I think I may have worked out how to get it all to work just using fusion.

Though if anybody can help, what is the right process for taking two different rectangle masks and merging them into the one image? It isn't straight forward. I bashed around and got it to work but i'm not quite sure what I did.

maskTwo@0,5x.jpg (396.18 KiB) Viewed 412 times

maskOne@0,5x.jpg (101.03 KiB) Viewed 412 times

Hello,
I avoid everytime to "bake" something in film, problems with compression, alpha mask and most importannt, impossibility to change something quickly because its necessary to "re-bake" the film.
I would use Fusion Composition to have one with one mask, other with two masks with faciity to change it when necessary and to add some elemtns, text or other.
I tried to show you the way.
Jacques

I've never used it, but maybe the Video Collage effect can make things easier here?

I've never used it, but maybe the Video Collage effect can make things easier here?

I'll take a look

maskTwo@0,5x.jpg

maskOne@0,5x.jpg

Hello,
I avoid everytime to "bake" something in film, problems with compression, alpha mask and most importannt, impossibility to change something quickly because its necessary to "re-bake" the film.
Jacques

Yeah that makes sense. Thanks for the tips. I think I figured out how to get what I want done in fusion. Now if I can figure out how to save and edit them.

I made the masks in fusion and they were stacking and working like I wanted but when I go back to the fusion tab for the clips it is the basic fusion layout. I should probably do one of the detailed fusion howto's

Hello,
You can produce a macro from the fusion nodes, making available for edit page the parameters you want to change to adapt for different situations. After that you can save it to the proper folder inside daVinci as to be able to use it directly as generator in edit page.
Too long to explain here but there is many tutorials explaining it.
Have a nice day.
Jacques

You can also do it on the edit page.

1. Create 2 white solid color generators and place them accordingly

2. Select the 2 generators and create a compound clip
3. Set the compound clip composite mode to Inverted Alpha or Inverted Lum
4. Place the starfield video on top of the compound and set the compositing mode to Foreground
5. Place the clips of the hosts bellow the compound clip

6. You can select the compound and the starfield and create a new compound to have it on a single video track.

And yet another option would be to use a couple of rectangle power windows in the Color Page to create the simple two part mask (on your starfield clip)... first mask would be the main inset mask (for your general b-roll vision), second would the divider mask (to separate the two host clips). In use you'd just enable/disable the mask nodes as needed ie enable both when showing both hosts, disable the divider node when showing just one host or b-roll.
In the Edit Page, put the starfield clip on top and the two host clips and/or b-roll clips underneath.