Fusion Studio MacOS - Boris Sapphire Crash.

I've reached out both BorisFX and BMD support about this. Boris says that the crash logs give no clue to why this is happening and BMD says it's a 3rd party plugin so...try the forums.

"Very often Fusion will crash as soon as I send a Sapphire node to a viewport. Usually it seems to stabilize after 3 or 4 crash/relaunch cycles and sometimes it will crash when launching a preset browser. However everything seems fine with Sapphire in DaVinci Resolve.

This has been happening intermittently for a year or more across different versions of Fusion and Sapphire. Sometimes I hit the sweet spot of the right combination of versions and everything is fine but naturally I want the features of the latest versions of both.

At the moment I have Fusion Studio 18.6.6 build 4 installed (which was stable the previous version of Sapphire for quite a while) and the current Fusion 19 public beta (v.19 beta build 20). The crashes happen with both versions of Fusion with Sapphire 2024.5.

I thought maybe there was a problem with my comp files but the crash can happen with an empty comp...add a background node, feed it into a Sapphire Glare node, send the glare node to a viewport...crash."

I don't have any other 3rd party plugins installed installed other than a Reactor Cryptomatte and SplitEXR. Updated to latest MacOS 14.5 yesterday.

I suppose I could just use Fusion in Resolve but I've only just started to use it (been using Fusion Studio for 10 years), plus Resolve doesn't have the Floating Image view.

Has anybody else encountered this or have any suggestions?

Update:
After circling back with Boris support we found a workaround if not a fix. Disable GPU in Fusion preferences. Not ideal but it works.

I am Frustrated with Boris FX myself, since they seem to be putting all their marketing and development effort in After Effects and whatever it left into OFX, sometimes Nuke, but almost never into Black magic. Especially fusion. Every time there are issues and I go to BorisFX forum, they blame blackmagic. No other company does this but BorisFX, I think they must have some kind of sweet deal made with Adobe.

Like their new MochaPro 2024. It works fine in all platforms but Fusion. Boris FX blames Blackmagic again. There is a shocker. Everyone can develop plug ins but Boris when it comes to Fusion. Funny how that works. If I didn't know any better I would say they simply do not care enough. But their marketing manager has she/her in LinkedIn bio. So there is that.

That sweet deal is most probably just user base numbers, which directly translates into effort put into each host. Fusion can be the greatest thing since sliced bread, with nodez and whatnot, but in the end it comes down to whether there is enough user base that buys the plugins. ”Resolve 300 so pluginses must be 3$ because capitalism bad” crowd isn’t helping either.

Tangentially related, OpenFX API isn’t in all hosts implemented exactly by the book, each host does its own quirks so again it imposes problems for support, especially when those quirks randomly change because why not.

That sweet deal is most probably just user base numbers, which directly translates into effort put into each host. Fusion can be the greatest thing since sliced bread, with nodez and whatnot, but in the end it comes down to whether there is enough user base that buys the plugins.

I guess so. Probably correct.

I've noticed a curious thing about BorisFX. The main guy, founder Boris, seems to be the batch of well trained engineers, and developers that were brought over from Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union after the collapse and MIT in particular benefited from it quite a bit. It seems BorisFX made some pretty decent, but not groundbreaking set of effects and the rest of it was investment cash influx to acquire or merge with other more innovative and groundbreaking companies.

The company that made Mocha Pro. Recently. SynthEyes. Before that it was Digital Film Tools DFT that made all the cools stuff, including Silhouette. Now there is some new AI company for audio post production they also acquired. It seems that leadership of the BorisFX company is more interested in access to credit from the big hedge funds, hence the diversity hires, in order to get credit, to acquire new companies and either use that to raise more capital or get stocks up. Also the former competitor was GenArts who got bought up as well. So BorisFX is actually a wall street company masquerading as creative software developer. Which is a lot more aligned with what Adobe is than what Blackmagic is.

Adobe has followed a similar path. Actually just this morning there was an article about it. One of many.

https://petapixel.com/2024/05/18/adobes ... s-artists/

Is it any wonder that focus is one DEI and woke stuff, and subscriptions, Adobe even has rainbow logo, permanently. As for actual creative users. They are just a number on a spreadsheet that Adobe CEO personally detests as creatives. He comes from a whole other class.

Boris FX reminds me more of Adobe than Black magic, which despite its criticism, still had innovation culture. Something, Adobe and Boris seems to have traded for wall street. There are great developers and amazing individuals still employed by these companies, but management and leadership is focused on something else.

On the sidenote, the products from Boris, that used to be few interesting effects, easy to install and small are now pretty much a bloaded and repackaged offering that forces people to buy more expensive stuff. For example the Lens flare of Sapphire should be bundled with VFX stuff and some of the similar stuff is in Continuum so one has to buy two expensive bloated packages to get few useful plug ins. Than they tried to take useful Silhouette program and put everything in it. Sapphire, Continuum, Mocha, everything. But other than possibly mocha one only needs the roto and paint tools of Silhouette for which it was designed for, and now Boris is pushing it as practically some kind of all in one replacement for Nuke and Flame and Fusion and After Effects. When Digital Film Tools DFT was operating it, you could actually buy individual plug ins and only use the ones you need. Now its all or noting, and prices are higher than whole of BlackMagic package. While the value is very questionable.

At least with Blackmagic, AI has been added as assistance for users, while companies like Adobe don't even pretend anymore, they now advertise as replacement for users. Just sign up for subscription and watch their stock go up. lol

I mean am I crazy of what? For essentially lens flare and bunch of fancy stuff you can get in most applications, they want Perpetual License $1,695.00 for Sapphire. And how much is whole of Blackmagic Davinci Resolve with everything licensee? Thanks, but no thanks.

End rant.

Yea, about that…
Resolve - aquired
Fusion - aquired
Fairlight - aquired
By same logic BMD is a hardware company pretending to be a software company. Only difference is that their shares aren’t publicly tradeable, bad capitalists don’t even want to share the profits

If you only knew how much money some people want for just turning some knobbyz… One could buy that perpetual license every day. I don’t buy into that bollocks idea that software must be cheap ”just because I need it bro”. One can write ones own software, sell it for peanuts and see how simple it is. Good luck.

Yea, about that…
Resolve - aquired
Fusion - aquired
Fairlight - aquired

By same logic BMD is a hardware company pretending to be a software company. Only difference is that their shares aren’t publicly tradeable, bad capitalists don’t even want to share the profits

Not the same, read what I wrote. The innovation happened outside of acquisition in all products and AI was not implemented as a replacement for users, but as assistance, and they have not forced everyone on subscription model like Adobe or what indirectly Boris is doing, plus have you actually seen how much Resolve or Fusion cost before vs now. Quite the opposite from Boris and Adobe, the price has gone down, and value up. Also Blackmagic thank god is not pushing DEI and woke garbage in your face like Adobe and more and more Boris. They do that because on the back end that is where the credit approval comes from. Its an extortion racket, these companies play willingly. They push for woke garbage, they get access to credit. They use credit to acquire other companies and raise stock prices, and to pay it back they also move to subscription. I'm thankful that blackmagic has not gone that route to my knowlage. And I hope they never will.

If you only knew how much money some people want for just turning some knobbyz… One could buy that perpetual license every day. I don’t buy into that bollocks idea that software must be cheap ”just because I need it bro”. One can write ones own software, sell it for peanuts and see how simple it is. Good luck.

I didn't advocate for that, and its not money they are paid in by the way. But that is another story. My point is the culture argument and priorities of the companies that are more and more anti consumer and more and more "you will own noting and be happy". With Adobe you can't even buy it. Are you happy for it? I'm not. Too much power on one side, inventively leads to corruption as we have seen many times with corporations.

Its one thing to pay for software and its another to pay for speculation bubble on wall street that has nothing to do with what your job is as a creator. But we don't need to go into that rabbit hole, lets just say I'm no fan of nether subscription models or woke garbage or credit and speculation fueled overvalued companies, because it does not lead to good outcomes for users or industry as whole.

I suspect that this crash problem may have something to do with the implementation of OFX in Fusion Studio because these crashes don't happen in the Fusion page of Resolve. Also when I've asked people at Maxon why their Red Giant post plugins work in Resolve (I haven't tried them) but not Fusion standalone, they've said that the codebase is substantially different. Just my guess.

Its one thing to pay for software and its another to pay for speculation bubble on wall street that has nothing to do with what your job is as a creator. But we don't need to go into that rabbit hole, lets just say I'm no fan of nether subscription models or woke garbage or credit and speculation fueled overvalued companies, because it does not lead to good outcomes for users or industry as whole.

The track topic seemed to be slipping into the one about the 'rente' class Those schemes in which entities can 'earn' money while they sleep, from the toil of the unwashed. That's been going on since someone came up with the abstract concept of time.

The track topic seemed to be slipping into the one about the 'rente' class Those schemes in which entities can 'earn' money while they sleep, from the toil of the unwashed. That's been going on since someone came up with the abstract concept of time.

No, no. We are not talking about renting here, or rent class if you Marxist about it. We are talking about something entirely different. But you are right, its slipping into another territory, so I get the warning.