Write On Effect TEXT ANIMATION in DaVinci Resolve
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Write On Effect TEXT ANIMATION in DaVinci Resolve - In this DaVinci Resolve tutorial Alli shows you how to create a stunning Write On Effect Text Animation in Fusion! Even if you're a beginner in the Fusion page, learning how to create this Write On Text Effect is a great place to start!
In this DaVinci Resolve tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a really cool write-on effect. If you're new here, I'm Ally Will, and I work on commercials, social media videos, and we release weekly YouTube videos all about editing and DaVinci Resolve, as well as gear reviews. Coming up, we'll be sharing a video that will show you how to save hours and days editing, so subscribe to see that when it comes out.
Now, let's hop into Resolve. Now, if you're new or intimidated by Fusion, I would say this is a pretty good spot to start because it's not too complicated. So we're in the Edit page. We have this background of some beautiful tropical trees that we're going to have our write-on effect show over. Let's go up to Effects to open it up, click on the search bar, and type in "Adjustment." There it is—Adjustment Clip—drag that above your clip onto the V2 track. Just because I'm clumsy, I'm going to lock the V1 track so I don't accidentally move it around.
Okay, we have our playhead over our adjustment clip, and we're going to be using our adjustment clip in the Fusion page. Now, the reason I like using adjustment clips for this technique is because you can put them over your clip so that when you pop over to Fusion, like we'll do now, you'll be able to see the clip and the composition that is going to show underneath. I'm just going to change this to full screen by clicking this viewer button.
Let's click on this "T," which is our Text+ effect. When we do that, it's automatically brought down into our node graph and connected to a Merge1 node. Grab your Text1 node and just drag it above the Merge1 node. I just like to do that for organization. You can also move MediaIn and MediaOut if you want to straighten things up a bit.
Okay, click on the Text1 node to make sure it's selected, and this will bring up our Inspector and a text box that we can write in. In all capitals, let's write the word "TRAVEL." Let's change the font to one that looks more handwritten. I like "Masiku"; I believe I downloaded it from dafont.com.
Currently, these letters are all super close together, and some of them are even touching. That's going to be a bit problematic when we're doing our write-on effect. So, where it says "Tracking," move the tracking slider to the right to increase the space in between each of these letters, like so. We can also use the size slider—move it to the right to increase the size of our word.
The next thing you want to do on your keyboard is hit Shift and the space bar. Doing that will bring up this window that lets you select lots of different tools. Let's search for "Mask Paint." There it is—press "Add"—and that will be added on top of our text node here and, by default, selected. You may have noticed that our word disappeared—that's okay. In our Inspector, let's select "Mask" and choose "Invert."
Now, we want to change our brush type to "Stroke," which we can do up here on the left by clicking this brush icon. If you hover over it for a second, you'll notice it says "Stroke." Select it, and we now have this little green circle that we're going to use to paint over each of these letters. It's a little small right now. You want it to be just a bit bigger than the thickest part of your letter. To adjust that, we'll go back over to the Inspector, select Controls, click the Brush Controls drop-down menu, and increase our size slider a bit.
Let's just check—okay, so now it's a bit bigger than the thicker part of the letter. I'm happy with that, and you want to bring softness way down. It's just not needed, so let's drag it to the left as far as we can. We also want to click the Stroke Controls drop-down menu. Where it says "Stroke Animation," click and choose "Write On."
Awesome! Okay, now we can start writing or drawing over our letters. You want to keep in mind that when you're doing this, do it in the pattern or style in which you would actually handwrite the word. I'll start just below where the "T" is. Click down, and go slow because if you make a mistake, you have to start from the beginning. Another thing—don't let go of your cursor until you're done. If you let go by accident, you'll have to start again.
Oh, see, I made a mistake here because I wanted to include this part in my brush stroke. So, I'm going to press Command+Z on my Mac (Control+Z on a PC) to undo and start from the beginning. I'm going to speed this part of the video up because you get the idea, but as you're actually doing it, go slower because there's less chance that you'll accidentally draw your stroke over part of a letter you didn't mean to.
Okay, when we're done, we're going to see all these little points, and we cannot see our word again. Under Mask, let's uncheck "Invert." There it is. Next, we want to open our Keyframes tab, which brings all this fun info up. Let's click here on this little double-arrow icon to zoom to fit so we can see everything. Click on the drop-down menu that says "MaskPaint1" and "Stroke1."
Okay, and "End" here shows all those same points that you can see above. Drag your cursor over all of them, which will turn them yellow, and we're going to click on "Time Stretch." This is a tool that allows you to shorten or increase the duration of the animation. Let's hover our mouse over the end here, and you'll see these double arrows come up. Click and drag way inwards—a whole lot.
Okay, now let's check this out—awesome! So now you know how to create the write-on effect in DaVinci Resolve.
On a side note, if you want to know our favorite drive, it's this one right here that we edit all of our videos off of because it's super fast, super portable, and super tiny. Or, if you want to know any of the gear we recommend and use on our commercial video shoots as well as our YouTube shoots, then check out the description below.
Oh, and I just released a video showing five creative masking techniques, and one of them I've never seen taught anywhere. So check that video out next to learn my masking secrets.
I hope this video was helpful to you, and that you have a lovely day. We'll see you in the next video!
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