Blackmagic Forum

Hey all! Just getting into learning more about the fusion section for using nodes to put effects on my clips, and I can't wrap my head around why I can't mask this thing properly.

When I add an ellipse node onto this merge here, it doesn't appear to crop out or even mask anything. Please see the first picture attached.





As you can see, in the preview for the ellipse mask, it is black and white for some reason.

However, when I attach the ellipse node straight to the initial media file, it appears to be working fine?




Is there something that I am missing here? I was watching this youtube video and followed the steps to the tee but for some reason despite doing the same stuff and it always ends up black and white instead. What am I doing wrong here? Ive been trying to hack this for hours any help or nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

This is quite confusing indeed!

I often find when I encounter these things is that talking it out in sentences (full, part, run on, it's up to you) often solves the problem. Ask yourself: what am I trying to mask? In your example you are trying to mask a merge which of course won't do anything. All a merge does is plop something on top of something else. EDIT: You CAN actually mask out a merge when it's doing something. So if you had a 2nd mediaIn going in to that merge, your method would work. But really this is still merging mediaIn2.

I believe you're trying to mask Media 1. Try connecting your polygon directly to the blue input on Media 1.

Oh and for the black and white on your 2nd image: That is in fact accurate. The polygon (ellipse) tells Resolve "What is white, keep. What is black, omit." Since you have your polygon in viewer 1, you're seeing the polygon telling Resolve to keep the white part which is why you can see the eye in viewer 2

Hey,

Don't know what you're really expecting but if you need to get what you see in the right viewer of your 2nd screenshot with the ellipse piped into the merge, go to the settings tab of your merge node and tick "multiply by mask"