Audio Visualiser Plugin documentation

How it works

DaVinci Resolve gives Fusion almost no access to audio. Rather than fight that, the Audio Visualiser Plugin sidesteps it: the Converter turns your audio file into an image, and Fusion is very good at images.

That image is a spectrogram. The horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is frequency: left to right moves through your track, up and down moves through the frequencies, and how bright a pixel is tells you how loud that frequency was at that moment. Everything the plugin needs is in there.

Because it is just an image, everything Fusion can do to an image you can now do to your audio. That is where the equalizers, the frequency filters and the time effects come from. They are image operations that happen to be operating on sound.

The image on its own never moves. The Player is what walks across it over the length of your timeline, and the Converter turns whatever the Player is currently reading into something a visualizer can draw.

On performance: the plugin is designed for real-time playback and the internal parts do run in real time. If you see lag it is the visualizer doing the drawing, not the engine reading the audio. Some visualizers are cheap and some are expensive, so which one you pick decides your playback speed.

The Probe runs in real time too. What slows down is Resolve itself: the more parameters you wire the Probe into, the more expressions Resolve has to evaluate every frame, and past a certain point that is where the lag comes from rather than from the plugin.

Quickstart

1. 1

   Convert your audio

   Run your audio file through the Audio Visualiser Converter. It reads your track and your project frame rate and writes out a single image. Keep an eye on the length guidance further down this page.

2. 2

   Import the image and add vz_Player

   Bring the converted image into your Fusion composition and connect it to vz_Player. Nothing animates until you do this, because the image itself is static. The Player reads it left to right between your composition Start and End frames.

3. 3

   Match the lengths

   Your composition or clip has to be the same length as the converted audio. If it is not, the visualizer drifts further out of sync the longer it plays. This is the single most common reason a first attempt looks wrong.

4. 4

   Add vz_Converter

   Connect the Player output into vz_Converter. This turns the animated frequency data into the form every visualizer expects. One Converter can feed as many visualizers as you like.

5. 5

   Add a visualiser and merge it

   Connect the Converter into any vz_Vz node and it starts reacting immediately. Merge the result over your footage however you normally would. That is a working visualizer; everything else on this page is shaping it.

Installation

Editions

Free edition

Every Fusion node on this page is in the free edition. All 72 of them, including all 35 visualizers, every equalizer, and the Probe with full expression access. Nothing on this page is paywalled.

Full edition

The full edition brings the whole system onto the Edit page as presets, so you can do all of this without Fusion.

vz_Player

Animates the converted image across your timeline, using the Start and End frames of your composition so the timing lines up with the audio. It also has a bake function that writes its animation out to normal DaVinci Resolve keyframes, which is what lets you cut and trim the clip.

Pause playback before you bake. If the playhead is moving, Resolve bakes from wherever it happens to be and the result is out of sync. After baking you can trim from the left and right edges, but do not slide the clip along the timeline unless the audio moves with it.

vz_Converter

The standard converter. Takes the animated data from the Player and puts it in the form every vz_Vz visualizer reads. It can also drive a Displace node directly, which is how you build your own visualizers out of arbitrary imagery. Every built-in visualizer works this way.

vz_ConverterProbe

Outputs 10 frequency sliders you can read from Fusion expressions. This is what makes it open ended: instead of drawing a visualizer, you use the audio to drive any animatable parameter in Fusion. Shakes, zooms, color, speed ramps, anything. It reads from the Player, and its output does not need to connect to anything.

vz_ConverterProbeRange

The Probe with a single slider instead of ten, plus a control for which frequencies feed it. Use it when you only care about one thing, say the kick, and would rather not work out which of the ten inputs it lands in.

vz_T.Delay

An echo. Repeats earlier values so a hit leaves a repeating tail behind it. Good for giving a sharp, dry sound something to trail off into.

vz_T.Reverb

A smooth decay rather than a repeat. When a sound cuts off hard, the visualizer eases down instead of snapping.

vz_T.Smoothness

Smooths the audio data over time. Use it when a track is too aggressive and the visualizer animates faster than the eye follows. Long tracks already play back smoother than short ones, because past the recommended lengths the engine interpolates missing detail; this node adds smoothing on top, it does not fix that.

vz_F.EQ

The classic, and the fastest. Push or pull bass, mids and highs, lift everything at once, or use the gamma to make only the loud moments register.

vz_F.EQ2

A parametric equalizer, the kind you know from FL Studio or any other DAW. Use it when three bands are not enough.

vz_F.EQ3

The same idea as EQ2 but accurate to every adjustment you make, at a slightly higher processing cost. Use it when EQ2 is close but not quite responding the way you set it.

vz_F.FrequencyRange

A fully adjustable high pass and low pass. Isolate a range, or feather the edges of a visualizer so it fades to still instead of stopping abruptly.

vz_F.GradientEQ

EQ3 with a gradient instead of an EQ curve. White is full volume, black is silence, so you paint the response rather than dialing it in. Same accuracy, different way of thinking.

vz_F.Noise

Adds noise to the frequency data. Use it when a visualizer looks too clean or uniform and you want randomness in it.

vz_Fx.WarpCircle

Bends the visualizer into a circle.

vz_Fx.WarpCylinder

Wraps the visualizer around a cylinder.

vz_Fx.WarpSphere

Wraps the visualizer around a sphere.

vz_Fx.MirrorWave

Mirrors the wave vertically.

vz_Fx.FastGlow

A cheap glow, tuned for playback speed.

vz_Fx.Rays

Casts rays from the visualizer.

vz_Fx.SolidFill

Fills the visualizer with a solid color.

vz_Fx.HorizontalGradient

Colors the visualizer with a horizontal gradient.

vz_Fx.VerticalGradient

Colors the visualizer with a vertical gradient.

vz_Fx.RadialGradient

Colors the visualizer with a radial gradient.

vz_Fx.TimeColorize

Adds color effects based on time, like leaving color trails behind the movement.

vz_Fx.TimeWarpRGB

Offsets the RGB channels over time.

vz_Fx.LEDEllipse

Renders the visualizer as an LED wall of ellipses.

vz_Fx.LEDRectangle

LED wall made out of rectangles.

vz_Fx.LEDTriangle

LED wall made out of triangles.

vz_Fx.LEDStar

LED wall made out of stars.

vz_Fx.LEDNgon

LED wall made out of n-sided polygons.

vz_Fx.LEDText

LED wall made out of text.

vz_PVz.Zoom

Zooms the image in time with the audio. One of the two that are known safe.

vz_PVz.ZoomBlur

Zoom blur in time with the audio. Also known safe.

vz_PVz.Shake

Shakes the image in time with the audio.

Save and back up before using. See the note below.

vz_PVz.Glow

Glow driven by the audio.

Save and back up before using. See the note below.

vz_PVz.ColorCorrector

Color correction driven by the audio.

Save and back up before using. See the note below.

vz_PVz.Vignette

Vignette driven by the audio.

Save and back up before using. See the note below.

Expressions

vz_ConverterProbe exposes ten fixed frequency bands you can read from any Fusion expression. They are real Hz bands, laid out like a parametric EQ, so you can find the kick or the snare and target just that. Connect the Probe after the Player and leave it there; it does not need to feed anything.

vz_ConverterProbe.Input2 bass···vz_ConverterProbe.Input11 treble

Right click any animatable parameter, choose Expression, and reference an input. Input2 is the bassiest band and Input11 is the most treble, with the other eight spread across the range in between.

• •Because it is an expression rather than a connection, one Probe can drive as many parameters as you want across the whole composition.
• •Anything animatable is fair game: position, rotation, scale, blur, color, camera shake, particles, speed ramps, text, literally anything.
• •Back up your project regularly while working with expressions. DaVinci Resolve can corrupt a project when they are in use, and the cause is still unknown.

Audio length

The converted image can only hold so much timing information, and the ceiling depends on your frame rate and whether you are on Resolve Studio. Stay inside these and you get every moment of your audio. You can go to roughly double them and it will still work, but the timing detail thins out and the movement starts to feel smoother than it should.

These are limits of DaVinci Resolve itself, not of the plugin, and the Free and Studio columns reflect the image size each one allows. Version 1.2.0 added interpolation so longer tracks still work: the movement gets smoother instead of laggy, at the cost of timing precision. Avoid extreme lengths such as ten hours or more.

Troubleshooting

Frequently asked questions