MediaIn Node in DaVinci Resolve

If you’ve recently dipped your toes into the node-based world of Fusion inside DaVinci Resolve, you’ve probably spent a lot of time learning about cool effects, keying, and merging. But before you can blur, color-correct, or add sci-fi glitches to your footage, you first need to get that footage into your Fusion workspace.

Mastering the MediaIn node is the first true step in mastering DaVinci Resolve Fusion.

The Bridge: How the Edit Page Talks to Fusion

o understand the MediaIn node, we first need to look at where your footage lives: The Edit Page.

The Edit Page is the traditional, timeline-based workspace where you cut your video, add music, and build your story. It is linear and track-based. Fusion, on the other hand, is a completely different environment — a 2D/3D node-based compositor.

So, how do these two completely different worlds communicate?

When you right-click a clip on your Edit Page timeline and select “Open in Fusion,” Resolve does a lot of behind-the-scenes magic. It takes that specific clip and creates a connection to Fusion. The physical manifestation of this connection is the MediaIn node.

When a MediaIn node is automatically created by sending a clip from the Edit Page, it essentially says: “Hey Fusion, take this exact piece of video from the Edit timeline, bring it into this node graph, and make it available for compositing.”

Figure 1: MediaIn and MediaOut Nodes

In Figure 1, the node MediaIn1, which points to an image on the Edit page, is connected to a node called MediaOut1, which connects the output from Fusion to the Edit and Color pages.

What is the Primary Job of the MediaIn Node?

In the simplest terms, the MediaIn node is the input valve for your composite.

Fusion doesn’t automatically know what video files you have open in your project. It relies on the MediaIn node to fetch the raw pixel data of a video or image and feed it downstream to your other nodes (like Blur, Color Corrector, or Merge nodes).

Without a MediaIn node, your Merge nodes and effects have nothing to process. It is the foundational starting point of almost every visual effects workflow in Fusion.

The Power of Choice: 3 Media Sources Inside MediaIn

Here is where the MediaIn node truly shows its flexibility. If you create a blank Fusion composition and manually add a MediaIn node (or if you want to change the source of an existing one), you aren’t just locked into what’s on the Edit timeline.

By opening the Inspector panel while the MediaIn node is selected, you will see a dropdown menu labeled Media Source. This dropdown gives you three powerful options:

1. Timeline

This is the default behavior when you send a clip from the Edit Page to Fusion.

2. Background

Once you can actually access the background clip that’s underneath your main clip, the MediaSource will automatically change to the background.

3. Media Pool

When you drag a clip directly from the Media Pool into Fusion, it’s gonna use the Media Pool as its source. And the Media Pool, in case you didn’t know, is just DaVinci’s way of keeping all your footage and assets organized in one place.