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 Area area encompasses the Time Ruler and transport controls. The Time Ruler is
the principal “timeline” of the Fusion page, which focuses exclusively on the current
composition you’re working on and may consist of one clip or several. This area can be set to
display either one or two viewers at the top of the Fusion page, chosen via the Viewer button at
the far right of the Viewer title bar. Each viewer can show a single node’s output from anywhere
in the node tree. You assign which node is displayed in which viewer. This makes it easy to load
separate nodes into each viewer for comparison. For example, you can load a Keyer node into
the left Viewer and the final composite into the right Viewer, so you can see the image you’re
adjusting and the final result at the same time.

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