Fusion Python scripting review and comments please.

I have been looking for ways to make fusion faster and I think I have found one. If I change the project (default and all the tools) to a lower resolution it renders faster and uses less memory. The plan then is to put it back to the format I want when I render it out. I am not sure this will work well when I also mix in 4k footage.

I am looking for comments from those who know Fusion Scripting better than I do. Will this work? Is there a better way to change the project to 1080p and then back to 4k UHD? Are there other things that should be changed to make the project faster?

The code can be seen here: https://github.com/creacominc/HT_Fusion ... /Comp/Comp

Feel free to use it and/or submit pull requests if you have suggestions for improvements.

Well a really easy way to do it is just activate the proxy mode inside of Fusion. This will do it for you.
Every loader will also accept proxy images as well.

A not uncommon way to achieve this is by adding instanced scale nodes after every loader/creator tool, this takes care of a lot of overhead as well. When you're ready to render in final resolution just bypass all those scale nodes.

These are all things I would try before diving into scripts, but that is my personal preference.

Thanks for the reply. I like the idea of using an instanced scale tool. I tried it and find it didn't run any faster with the scale set to 0.5 as with it set to 1.0. It still runs faster for me if I make everything use a lower resolution. Is there something else I am missing?

I normally have HiQ and MB turned off and Proxy set to 4 and AutoProxy set to 8. Still, Fusion is far too slow for me. Especially when I try to use it on my laptop. The first pass over a simple 4k UHD composition without the proxy renders at 5fps on my laptop. Turning the proxy on and setting it to '4', it renders at about 10fps. Running the script to drop it to 1080p lets me render it at 12fps without the proxy (and yes, I restart Fusion between tests to clear the memory and cache). I would have expected the Proxy to have similar performance, but it is consistently 20% slower than lowering the resolution. Am I missing something? Does proxy work as fast as a lower resolution timeline for you?

Proxy is always a bit slower than a lower resolution for me, because you always have to calculate towards the lower resolution (I'm not sure if that is actually English) so you lose some there.

But what kind of laptop are you running this on? 4K is never quick with Fusion, because those are large files.

The laptop is a grossly underpowered MacBook Pro that has only 16G of ram. It's not the laptop per-se. I find Fusion slow even on my iMac Pro. I plan to upgrade it to 128G soon.