Update on Fusion for MAC

Hello BM forums,

It has been 4 months since the official update that BM Fusion 7 was being ported over to OS X after the programmers worked through the minor bugs, mostly with menus.

Just curious if there is an update as my entire studio is ready to move over to Fusion from After Effects.

+1

NAB is coming up in a little over a month, I hope there's an official announcement by then.

I hope so; I would just love a "tiny" little hint to hold us over until then.

Here Here brother I am with ya on this one... at least a "by the Windows version now and you can cross over to OS X when its ready" and I'd buy today

Here Here brother I am with ya on this one... at least a "by the Windows version now and you can cross over to OS X when its ready" and I'd buy today

From Grant Perry:

"One thing I can say though, is that our plan is to allow anyone who purchases the Windows version of Fusion 7 Studio to use their dongle on the Mac and to be able to download that Mac OS X version of Fusion free of charge."

I just found out about Fusion, and as soon as it's available for Mac I'll be downloading / buying it. It's perfect because I'm not actually quite ready for it yet, so I'm not in a hurry.

I'm dumping Smoke and Autodesk. If anyone is curious as to why, read this:

Independent filmmakers considering Smoke
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/159/860317

I'm really excited about learning Fusion and Resolve. This is probably dumb, but I'm a huge graphics snob and really attractive GUIs just grab me as crucial to what I want to work with. And they're gorgeous to look at. Can't wait...

I just found out about Fusion, and as soon as it's available for Mac I'll be downloading / buying it. It's perfect because I'm not actually quite ready for it yet, so I'm not in a hurry.

I'm dumping Smoke and Autodesk. If anyone is curious as to why, read this:

Independent filmmakers considering Smoke
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/159/860317

I'm really excited about learning Fusion and Resolve. This is probably dumb, but I'm a huge graphics snob and really attractive GUIs just grab me as crucial to what I want to work with. And they're gorgeous to look at. Can't wait...

Interesting post, but what's so great about a 7 year old render machine? A lowly i7 Devil's Canyon will blow the doors off of it, and memory is still pretty cheap these days. As for the new machine, that $3600 or so spent on an iMac could go so much further on a something that runs Fusion now, barring the display.

Chad, thanks for the post. My entire nervous system shudders at the thought of ever using Windows again, and while I can do very lightweight command line stuff, I'm a little scared of Linux, but willing to consider it if it makes sense. Can you tell me a little more?

I haven't even begun researching how to use an older machine for rendering with Blackmagic or FCP X. Resolve encourages running a render slave, and I'm assuming Fusion will be the same, but I haven't found out whether you can do so on Linux.

A key point is that my 7 year old machine is already paid for. It has two 3Ghz quad core Xeon chips (and a Quadro FX 4800 card), and I'm under the impression that most render software benefits from multicore processing and a GPU-accelerated graphics card for floating point jobs / rendering. But the OS X updates are a problem (I'm running Mavericks and unwilling to put Yosemite on it for fear of breaking [and disgust at how extraordinarily ugly the GUI is]). If it's running background, I don't really care how fast it is.

The 5K screen on the iMac is a real selling point, but I might be better holding off till later in the year and seeing whether other similar monitors get competitive. Anyway, thanks for the comment.

Fusion isn't going to run anywhere near as fast as Resolve does, which is to be expected, since it is doing a lot more, but one slave isn't going to make a lot of difference, especially if it's old. In my experience, comps either render so fast that you don't bother with the render farm, or they render so slowly that you need a whole render farm. One machine that is 1/3 the speed of your main workstation just isn't going to make enough of a difference to matter. And the Quadro FX 4800 isn't going to be running OpenCL 1.1+ or OpenGL 4.0+, though we haven't heard what the requirements for the OSX version of Fusion will be.

Point is, you can buy a 15" laptop with 3x the number of threads and 50% higher clock speed than the old Mac Pro machine, and while it's paid for, it's not worth building a workflow around it since you're going to be investing in new hardware and software anyway. You should take a fresh look at the current market and see what works best for you.

Crap, that's bad news. But I believe you. Thanks. If I could ask for a few more tips:
-I don't understand "a 15" laptop with 3x the number of threads," but would like to. Can you explain?
-re: Open CL / Open GL / Fusion OS X requirements, I get the impression that it would be smarter to wait and see those requirements before buying a new computer. Would you agree?
-What percentage of value would you place on the graphics card for buying a computer to run Fusion. Should the ideal graphics card, for example, be 100% of the decision?

Thanks for your responses. Very valuable information to me, and I hope to others.

Crap, that's bad news. But I believe you. Thanks. If I could ask for a few more tips:
-I don't understand "a 15" laptop with 3x the number of threads," but would like to. Can you explain?

I just bought a laptop with a 6 core CPU with a variable clockspeed between 4 and 4.4 GHz. This CPU has hyperthreading, so it can simultaneously run 6 integer and 6 float thread. Fusion runs a mix of integer and float, so this is good. Net is that Fusion sees 12 cores on this laptop. I misread your specs on the Mac Pro, I assumed it was dual Xeon 5160's, not 5365's. So really this is only 50% more threads at a 33% higher clockspeed, so it's really likely only 2x faster. But hey, 15" laptop!

-re: Open CL / Open GL / Fusion OS X requirements, I get the impression that it would be smarter to wait and see those requirements before buying a new computer. Would you agree?

Yeah, this is complicated. Apple computers bought today pretty much have AMD GPU's in them I think. AMD's OpenCL support is wonky (but so is Nvidia's, just for totally different reasons). Fusion might begin utilizing more advanced OpenGL features too as it modernizes it's renderer. Hard to know at this point. There's also a lot of things in Fusion that work great with Windows, like 10 bit display, that I have no idea how that will translate to OSX, since there's nothing in OSX to handle that natively, and in the case of an iMac, it's not like you can put an adapter as an input to the display. It might turn out that the OSX version just isn't any good at the initial release, or have lots of caveats. There's really no reason to rush out to get a computer to run software that is a big question mark right now.

-What percentage of value would you place on the graphics card for buying a computer to run Fusion. Should the ideal graphics card, for example, be 100% of the decision?

I'd avoid Intel integrated graphics for now. Supposedly Iris Pro ones work OK, but it's just not something I'd even consider until I saw a demo. I really like the new Quadros, the K4200 is a bargain, but the GTX 970 is a great deal too. The Quadros will get you stereoscopic 3D and 10-bit color support and they are a lot "nicer" when something goes wrong. The GTX cards will crash in a somewhat painful way in comparison. Unless you do a lot of crazy 3D though, it won't matter much. Unlike Resolve, Fusion only uses one GPU. This may (should?) change in the future though.

When it comes to selecting a Fusion computer, you need to consider a lot of things. Is 10-bit or 3D important? Are you working with other people or a file server? Are you doing client attended sessions? Do you do a lot of work with raw camera formats? Do you use Resolve?

For me, GPU is almost the least important thing. Very few tools in Fusion will use the GPU, and Fusion isn't designed for real-time use anyway, so if a tool runs in 11ms or 17ms, it doesn't make that much of a difference unless you are doing client attended sessions.

The number one thing for me is memory. 64GB is bare minimum for desktop. 128GB is much better, and it's just awesome from there.

Number two is I/O. If you are working locally, get a PCIe based SSD. NVMe is best, you can get M.2 and SATA Express ones for cheap. If you work off a fileserver, put striped SSD's in that and connect with at least one pipe of 10GbE or better. EDIT: Get a fileserver that supports SMB3. You can do server->client data transfers >16GB/s using really simple infrastructure. Requires Windows 8 on the client, but I think OSX is getting RDMA Direct support soon if it hasn't already. The speed is awesome.

Third is CPU. I prefer clock speed over cores because Fusion isn't as multithreaded as we would all hope. Unfortunatly, CPU class changes what you can do for memory. A cheap Devil's Canyon i7 CPU can only support dual channel memory to the tune of 32GB. A 2011-3 i7 can do quad channel, but currently to a max of 64GB. If you want higher, you have to get a 2011 Xeon, which can get you to 128GB in single socket configs, and ~1TB in dual socket, I think. So basically your memory loadout will chose your CPU for you, just get the one with the fastest clockspeed you can.

Fourth is GPU. For me, features trump speed. I'd rather have CUDA and quadbuffer and 10bit, so I'm basically looking at a K4200, K5200, or K6000. Budget will likely make the choice for you, and once you've spent money on the three more important things above, there might not be much left for GPU. 4GB should be the minimum you go with on a GPU though.

- Chad

Effing great info! I'd give you gold if I could. Many thanks.

Bump. Anyone seen it running at NAB?

Bump. Anyone seen it running at NAB?

Yes, but it is still several months away from being available...