How to Change the Length of a Fusion Clip in DaVinci Resolve While Keeping It Responsive

Introduction: You’ve designed an animated Fusion title and you’re pretty happy with it. But now, you want to add an exit animation. Plus, you want to be able to reuse the title and make it longer or shorter, without having to mess with keyframes and spline shapes and all that unpleasantness. How great would it be if you could add BOTH an exit animation AND timeline responsiveness to any DaVinci Resolve Fusion title in about sixty seconds flat? Well, in this tutorial, you’ll discover a super-simple way to do exactly that.

Here’s a simple animated title I’ve created in Fusion. It’s nothing too fancy. Just a white bar that slides left to right and reveals my name. It’s the kind of thing you might use for a lower third. I’m on a 24 frames per second timeline and I use keyframes to animate the title in over 41 frames or about 1.7 seconds. Right now, the title animates in and remains static. If I want to add a reverse animation… which I like to do because it looks slick and professional… I have three options.

Option 1: Hardcode The Keyframes

I can create an “out” animation by creating individual keyframes for each element in my title. That’s a perfectly valid way to get the job done but… Depending on your Fusion skill level… it can easily take an additional 10, 15, or 20 minutes while you set up and tweak keyframe values, timings, and spline shapes for each element of the animation. So, again… it’s a valid way to create an “out” animation but it’s tedious and time-consuming. Plus… even after you’ve invested all that time, your title still isn’t responsive. If you trim its length in the Edit timeline, you end up cutting off the tail end of the animation. That means you’ve got to go back into Fusion and spend even more time adjusting your keyframes. So, it’s far from an ideal solution.

Option 2: Use A Duplicate Fusion Clip

This option requires less work than keyframing but you still have to: create a duplicate of your original Fusion clip, place it on the timeline, convert it to a Compound Clip, change the clip speed to reverse it, then trim the clip length to adjust the timing. Once again, this technique can do the job but it requires four or five different steps you’ve gotta perform every time. What if you could build responsiveness directly into your title so it automatically adjusts whenever you change its length on the timeline? Well, here’s exactly how you do that…

Option 3: Add Two Simple Fusion Nodes

Switch to the Fusion tab and start by disconnecting your MediaOut from the rest of your title’s nodes. You do that by hovering your cursor over the connecting line between the nodes until the line turns blue and then clicking on it. Next, click anywhere on the Fusion background so there’s no node selected. Then press Shift and Space on your keyboard. That brings up the Select Tool dialog. Now type the word Time… T, I, M, E. Click to select the TimeSpeed tool. Then click Add. That adds a TimeSpeed node to your Fusion composition. We’ll come back in a minute and adjust the settings for this node but before we do that, let’s add one more node… Once again, click anywhere on the background to deselect any selected nodes. Then type Shift and Space and this time type Dissolve… D I S S O L V E. Select the Dissolve tool with your mouse. Then click Add. That adds a Dissolve node to your flow.

Now, let’s connect these nodes. We’re going to start with the last node of your title animation. For reference, I’m going to call this your “final node.” This will most often be a Merge node but whatever it is in your case, your “final node” is the one you’d normally connect to MediaOut. So, let’s draw a connection from the output of your “final node” to the input of your new TimeSpeed node. Next, draw a second connection from the output of your “final node” to the green Foreground input of the Dissolve node. Now… draw a connection from the output of TimeSpeed1 to the yellow Background input of the Dissolve1. And finally, connect the output of the Dissolve node to the input of MediaOut. Alright. Now everything’s connected.

First of all, the TimeSpeed tool simply creates a copy of anything you send to its input. But in addition to creating a copy, it also gives you the ability to speed the copy up, slow it down, or reverse it. And because what we want to do here is create an “out” animation that’s identical to our “in” animation, we’ll select the TimeSpeed node. And over here in the Inspector window, we’ll put our cursor in the Speed input field and type minus one. So now, the output of the TimeSpeed node is an exact copy of our title animation and it’s at the same speed… but it’s reversed in sequence. We can see that happening live if we bring our “final node” to viewer one and our TimeSpeed node to viewer two and use our mouse keys to step through the animation frame by frame. You’ll see viewer one starts with an animation and ends static. While viewer two - the TimeSpeed copy - starts static with a static title and ends with an “out” or “exit” animation. Make sense? So now we have both an “in” animation and an “out” animation.

But, we need a way to switch between them. And that’s exactly what the Dissolve node does for us. You can think of the Dissolve tool like a valve that switches between two different inputs. And we control what’s flowing through the value by adjusting the “Foreground/Background” slider here in the Inspector pane. Here’s an example in a new Fusion composition. I have a pure white background, a pure green background, and a Dissolve node. I’ll connect the white background to the Foreground input. I’ll connect the green background to the Background input. And I’ll send the output of the Dissolve node to the viewer. Now, notice here by default, the Dissolve node is showing me the foreground color… white. But, when I adjust the Dissolve node’s Background/Foreground slider here in the inspector pane, the viewer fades from white to green and back again. Simple, right?

So, how do we make use of that in our animation. Well, returning to our Fusion title, we’ll use the Dissolve node to switch between our “In” animation and our reversed “out” animation. Now, one way to do this is to keyframe the Dissolve slider. But if we do that, the title won’t be responsive. And we’ll have to adjust the keyframes manually every time we want to change the title’s duration. And that would put us right back where we were with the other techniques we discussed earlier. And that is no bueno. So, what we’re going to do instead is use what’s called an “expression” or a formula to automate the Background/Foreground slider to transition between the “in” and “out” animation at the half-way point of the title. Now, if you’re not experienced with coding, this next bit might look confusing. The good news is, you don’t have to understand coding or scripting at all to make this work. As long as you follow the instructions, you’ll be fine.

So here’s the expression we’re going to use: iif((comp.RenderEnd-time)<(comp.RenderEnd/2),0,1). Essentially, all this formula does is tell the Dissolve slider: When the title is less than halfway through its length, display the foreground or “in” animation. And when the title clip reaches the halfway point, switch over and display the background or “out” animation.

Here are the steps to using this expression: First, select your Dissolve node with your mouse. Then, in the Inspector pane, right-click the “Background/Foreground” label and select “Expression.” Next, in the expression field, enter the following string: iif((comp.RenderEnd-time)<(comp.RenderEnd/2),0,1). The capitalization is important here, so double-check to make sure everything’s accurate. And since typing this string accurately is a pain, you’ll find it much easier to copy and paste it into the expression field in the Inspector window. Once you’ve done that, confirm the expression’s working properly… Place your cursor close to the half-way point of your Fusion composition and use the left and right arrow keys to move it back and forth. For instance, my composition is 144 frames long. So when my cursor or playhead is at any frame number below 72, the Dissolve slider has a value of one… so MediaOut is displaying the foreground or “in” animation. But as soon as I move the cursor to the halfway point at frame 72, the slider jumps from one to zero and stays there for the duration of the clip. And with the slider at one, MediaOut is displaying the background or “out” animation.

At this point, we’ve got everything working so let’s leave Fusion and return to the Edit tab. We’ll give our Fusion composition a few seconds to render.

• Automatic in/out animation using a single timeline-aware setup
• Minimal node additions to keep things lightweight
• Expression-based control for consistent duration when length changes
• Easy steps to connect TimeSpeed and Dissolve nodes for seamless switching

With this approach, the title remains responsive to length changes on the timeline, and you don’t need to manually tweak keyframes every time you adjust duration. This is especially handy for lower thirds and other Fusion titles you want to reuse across projects with varying lengths.

tags: #davinci #resolve #change #length #of #fusion