User Manual

The Work Area
You’ll probably not see this term used much, in favor of the specific panels within the work area
that you’ll be using, but the area referred to as the Work Area is the region at the bottom half of
the Fusion page UI, within which you can expose the three main panels used to construct
compositions and edit animations in the Fusion page. These are the Node Editor, the Spline
Editor, and the Keyframes Editor. By default, the Node Editor is the first thing you’ll see, and the
main area you’ll be working within, but it can sit side-by-side with the Spline Editor and
Keyframes Editor as necessary, and you can make more horizontal room on your display for
these three panels by putting the Effects Library and Inspector into half-height mode, if
necessary.
The Work Area showing the Node Editor, the Spline Editor, and Keyframes Editor
Viewers
The Viewer shows the frame at the current position of the playhead in the Timeline. The
contents of the Viewer are almost always output to video via whichever I/O interface you have
connected. At the top of the Viewer is a header that displays the Project and Timeline names,
as well as a Viewer Timecode display that shows the source timecode of each clip by default.
The Timeline name is also a drop-down display that lets you switch to any other timeline in the
project. A jog bar (sometimes referred to as a scrubber bar) underneath the image lets you drag
the playhead across the entire duration of the clip, while transport controls underneath that let
you control playback. A toolbar at the top provides controls governing Image Wipes, Split-
Screen controls, and Highlight display. Additional controls let you turn audio playback on and
off, and choose which onscreen controls are currently displayed.
Dual viewers let you edit an upstream node in one while seeing its effect on the overall composition in the other
Ordinarily, each viewer shows 2D nodes from your composition as a single image. However,
when you’re viewing a 3D node, you have the option to set that viewer to one of several 3D
views, including a perspective view that gives you a repositionable stage on which to arrange
the elements of the world you’re creating, or a quad view that lets you see your composition
from four angles, making it easier to arrange and edit objects and layers within the XYZ axes of
the 3D space in which you’re working.
Chapter – 1 Introduction to DaVinci Resolve 63