After Effects Camera + Image equivalent

What would be the simplest way to replicate this (very fast) After Effects workflow in Fusion, using an image asset from the Media Pool?

- Import an image file as a single layer in a composition. Turn on 3D in the layer switches.
- Add a Camera above the image layer.
- Frame the image with the camera. Keyframe the Camera position.
- Futher down the timeline, reframe the image by moving the camera closer (e.g. zoom in for a face closeup) and add a Camera keyframe.
- Ease Out the start keyframe, Ease In the end keyframe.
- Render.

Please note that this is *not* the same as animating the scale value of the image in 2D. This false "camera movement" doesn't maintain apparent constant speed when zooming.

Now that I've learned some basic compositing and titling in Fusion, this is the only thing I'm using After Effects for, because the resulting effect is butter smooth and replicates a physical camera's movement perfectly.

I find the Edit page's Dynamic Zoom lacking in control compared to the very precise animation tuning I can achieve with After Effects, and I would very much like to be able to achieve this with Fusion.

Thanks for your help.

The quickest way to do this is by creating a camera3D and feed your image into that camera.
This will create a projected image that exactly fits the frame automatically.
Now if you duplicate this camera, but don't feed the image into it, it will 'film' exactly the same area (because it's the same camera) as the one with the projection. Now you can animate this second camera the way you describe with the two keyframes and the Ease In and Out options. Just select the second camera into your 3D renderer and you should be good to go.

It might be slightly slower than in AE, but I can set this up in about 20-30 seconds, so it shouldn't be too much of a slowdown.

I'm sorry but I'm not *that* familiar with Fusion yet... Suppose I get the MediaIn output connected to the Camera3D ImageInput (rose input arrow), where does the Camera Output go (white square) ? It won't go connect into MediaOut.

You have to add a 3D renderer or Render3D I can never remember from the 3D submenu. It renders (hence the name) what Fusion sees in 3D space as a 2D image to further work with.

Thanks, I'm sorry but Renderer3D (with CameraOut as its SceneInput) won't connect to MediaOut either... I'll have a look at how 3D is implemented in the manual as it seems to be slightly more complex than I thought

Can you show a screenshot of what it is that isn't working for you? Because it's a 4 node setup, if it isn't working it's probably an easy fix.

I've had another go at it this morning and I managed to get it done. I probably got mixed up in the UI perspective views yesterday. The workflow is slightly less smooth than what I'm used to but it's largely offset by the flexibility of doing this sort of thing directly on the timeline without shuttling files around.

Thank you so much for your detailed description and patience, you've been a great help!

I don't see many more steps in the Fusion description than in the AE one, I'm pretty sure you'll get used to it, so you can do it more quickly in the future.

If you get more used to Fusion you'll be able to set this up as a macro as well, so it could become an almost one-click solution.

Yes, I thought about macros immediately but I'll need to get deeper into the software first, especially navigating, locating keyframes, easing and such, which I'm doing very quickly with keyboard shortcuts in AE. Just a question of getting in the habit though.

BTW, I've tried this several times since and I seem to get inconsistent behavior: sometimes adding the second camera "just works", but in other cases I have to manually change the Renderer3D output resolution to 1920x1080, otherwise it just gets set to the image resolution. I couldn't find the particular order that makes the Renderer3D always assume the MediaOut resolution automatically.

I don't know what could be the cause of this. It might have something to do with the way Resolve approaches resolution/mixed image formats. If you can find reproducable cases, that would help in finding out whether or not it's a bug, user error or a UX thing, where user error happens because of the black boxing of Resolve.

OK thanks, I'll see if I can find reproducible steps.