daniel.partzsch wrote:1. I am a visual person who needs to see what's going on. While in the flow you have a nice overview that's definitely not the case for the timeline. The lines are just too close to each other so that I can often not really tell on which line I am currently working. Maybe I am just used to the ae diamonds but for me the key frames are just too thin. When I am placing the timeline indicator on top of them I can not even see them anymore and grabbing them gets harder as well so that I often find myself moving the indicator away. Sliding keyframes around to me also doesn't feel very robust somehow. Could be a personal thing.
Right click in the timeline and select "All line size" and set it to Large og Huge to your preference.
daniel.partzsch wrote:2. Despite working with nodes is certainly great on its own, for a timeline I just prefer a fixed bottom to top order like in ae. Evertime I need to make adjustments to a tool my selection ist lost and the next time I select the tools I want to animate the order is different. I know you can use filters and certain criteria to define the order however I don't want to manually click 10plus tools evertime in the right order all over again. I wish you could store ore lock a selection (order) somehow.
No remedies for this one; Fusion just works differently than AE. Come to love the node based view of working and layering in the Flow instead of the timeline and you'll be speedier than ever.
daniel.partzsch wrote:3. I often need to make loops so I need to be able to easily treat a complete tool setup as one footage element just like a precomp in after effects which I can easily reuse, cut and slide around as desired. The only way I know how to do this in fusion is using the keyframes on a time stretcher node which unfortunately renders super slow imo. Retiming stuff in general is always taking its time to render which makes it hard to just quickly tinker around with it.
* Precomp using the right-click Cache-to-disk option, then add a time offset / speed node to retime.
* Precomp using the saver and loader approach (more sane option) then add a time offset / speed node to retime.
* Duplicate node with time offset.
daniel.partzsch wrote:4. An essential part of my workflow in After Effects ist using Keysmith to adjust the velocity values of multiple keyframes at once without needing to go to the graph editor. Would be great to have the option in the timeline as well to adjust the handle lengths and angles of multiple keyframes at once.
You can still manupulate the majority of the attributes of a curve simultaneously, just not the tangents specifically. But you can set the ease in and out using the right click Smooth/linear/Flat etc option
And you can hit Shift-B to do some pretty complex transformation of your curves using the box tool. Including weird perspective(!) transformations.
daniel.partzsch wrote:For these kind of projects I think ae is definitely the better option to go. Although, as said, because of the quality I would very much prefer to use fusion more often. Maybe someone has some better practice examples for these points...?
Fusion is RIDDLED with hidden options to make it work more or less exactly how you want it to. Spend a little time right clicking and you'll find a lot of goodies not mentioned in the manuals...
Fusion video tutorials : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTCeDas53OEcWcRujkQiwLg/videos?view_as=subscriber
Fusion Tools : https://github.com/statixVFX/stx_tools
Nuke 2 Fusion nodes : https://github.com/statixVFX/nuke2fusion