Blackmagic Forum

Hi
First I want to say that BM is doing fantastic job bringing amazing software like Fusion and Resolve to people specially at the current price (I own the Studio). The problem is this version (9 and 9.0.1) is extremely unstable, most of people are having many crashes during the day and during rendering. If this software should be used by professionals this is not possible. When you work on the project with thigh deadline you need reliable tool. I think this is crucial if BM wants user to migrate from Nuke or AE. I hope the development team will work it out. The new features are fantastic but if you cant use the software at all they become useless.
I don't know if the development team is looking at the forum, but if you are please make it stable to use it in production and thank you so much for the amazing work!!!

Without specific cases that make Fusion crash 'make it stable' means absolutely nothing.
I've been using Fusion Studio in full production mode for the last couple of weeks and get maybe 4 crashes a day. So there are different use cases, configurations and causes for these crashes.
Report every one that you can reproduce to tech support, that's the only way anything will ever get fixed.

To support Jiri, i must say that most of the crashes that happen in my Fusion install are not easily predictable and reproducible. I happens to me that i'm normally configuring the nodes and sometimes simply selecting a different node or dragging a preexistent node to a viewer cause a crash. And after restarting Fusion and repeating the very same operation, everything works correctly.
So i guess it's not a specific case but it's something more transversal, maybe some resource leak like memory i think. I'm more on a memory leak because i deactivated all OpenCL features (due to the high instability on my system).
It would be really nice being able to activate some kind of crash reporting system to log something that may help developers to nail the bugs. But too bad the only thing that happens on my side is that Fusion closes unexpectedly, no error no nothing... Only me trying to complete the mouse movement i started when Fusion were still running. Difficult to track errors in this situation

Random crashes without errors do sound like memory problems. From my own messings with node based scenegraphs, the usual problem was some rotting data structure. It would accumulate all sorts of bad data, invalid pointers, wrong connections, you name it. And at one random point it would all fall over with ambiguous crash. Initiator could be simply connecting some node, evaluating some branch that was disconnected before and so on.

Yes. Few weeks ago i tested all my memory modules and found one faulty module.
I replaced all the memory modules and ran memory test for an entire day so now i can state that there is no faulty hardware involved.
All my crashes with fusion are headless crashes, i mean no message only Fusion window disappearing and nothing more. I guess there is something wrong (and non easily spottable) in Fusion memory allocation logic. And i guess too that when this hidden fault is fixed, Fusion would be nearly rock solid, at least from my type of usage.

My crashes are also without any pattern, I have experienced a number when the application is in the background not doing anything? I am guessing that it may be shared resource such as Ram, GPU or IO that is the cause of the problem. I feel like render nodes are more stable than interactive work but that may be in my head. Is anyone using OpenCL without any major issues? If they can get it as stable as the later version 8 releases I would be a happy man.

We are using it here under heavy production stress and experience endless crashes.

Best short term help and rule of thumb:

Save Version early - Save Version often!

However, I have to fully agree with Sander - the only way bugs get fixed is reporting them. I agree that this would be simpler with a more meaningful crash scenario (Fusion had that in the older versions like 6.x, though...).

OpenCL seems to be a weak point at this time. Could be related to cards not meeting the standarts anymore. We have e.g. GTX580 cards with 1.5 GByte - but the specs say an OpenCL card with 2 GByte is required... On systems equipped with Titan X cards we don't see those problems.

However, I don't think its only OpenCL. It could be something else, like a memory leak.

What bugs me is that it dissapears so suddenly - and sometimes even without even touching anything. I have witness a couple of time when Fusion died while I was reading emails on another computer.

However, as we do network rendering I can not fully guarantee that a third party render job killed the machines... Trying to investigate that.

i got to agree on the crashing ''thing'', im also experiencing a lot of crashes and unstable stuff. for example, i just re-opened a project and the work i've done with a paint node (cloning, retouching stuff) seems to be gone. i mean, what the hell. there was a message in the node controls with something like ''no object selected''. i've done this stuff before with fusion with no problems at all, so its hard to see the problem. Also, if i make any change in the color corrector node fusion just crashes. i tried some different settings but i just accepted it and i use ''color gain'' as replacement now.
these are just examples, but im experiencing this kind of stuff every day.
it sounds like a lot of negativity, but i like using fusion, and im really making cool stuff with it now. this just makes it a little less ''robust''

I've just crashed my fusion comp by copying the animated parameters of one bg and pasting settings to another and scrubbing the timeline between the animated keys having bg # 1 viewed while selecting the second and viewing its solo on the timeline tab.

Code: Select all

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Sander de Regt wrote:Without specific cases that make Fusion crash 'make it stable' means absolutely nothing.
I've been using Fusion Studio in full production mode for the last couple of weeks and get maybe 4 crashes a day. So there are different use cases, configurations and causes for these crashes.
Report every one that you can reproduce to tech support, that's the only way anything will ever get fixed.

I'm sorry and I certainly don't mean to sound rude, honestly I don't. But even four crashes a day sounds like a lot. Is that okay?

It's not okay, but it's not unusable. Hardly any software I use, be they browsers, Word Processors or 3D packages makes it through a whole day without a single crash. Maybe it's a special gift I have in making software crash, but 4 times a day is not good, it's not okay, but it's not uncommon for *any* software (or phone or ...)

I'll add my experience of the latest Fu 9. I don't get to use it a lot these days, but the little I have worked on it, it has been highly unstable. It crashes so much, and it's never really the same. I try hard to pick up on patterns, but it's been super tricky. Sometimes it's just copying a few nodes, and pouf..gone.
The one thing I think is amazing is that Fusion loses very little data. ( compared to other software.) I'll loose up to 5 minutes of work max. Usually it's 1 min or less.

I don't think I agree with you Sander software crashes. I'll go several days using Chrome, AE, Premiere, photoshop or several other pieces of software with no crashes. I'd say that 4 crashes a day is the norm for Maya maybe, but has definitely not been the norm for Fusion over the years I've used it ( or many others). And to be honest, at this point, if a production were to start and have to pick between AE and Fusion, I don't know if I would suggest Fusion or not, because of how unstable it is....and I dislike AE so much...ugh. But at least there's some predictability to it that right that Fu9 doesn't have.

As much as I like Fusion, in general, people tend to take the path of least resistance. If a software crashes all the time, without having a huge advantage to it, they move on. To me, it sounds like a lot of these crashes could be memory related. Maybe these will be fixed in the next version and it will all be just a bad memory. but there again...unpredictable...

4 crashes a day sounds like a dream ATM!

I have been logging over 20 crashes daily and its really starting to annoy me. I estimate I am losing over 30 minutes a day because of this, that's a lot of productivity down the drain. I circumvented support in Australia as they are hopeless, but US support have responded once with suggestions I've already tried and work arounds I've already implemented, they have not got back to me yet. They also sound surprised that its unstable???

I may suggest sending me a copy with debug code compiled into it (if that still happens) and see if I can generate some useful error information.

I may have to get a trial of Nuke if this continues to see how that goes, its expensive but 100 lost hours a year is nothing to sneeze at either. My experiences with Nuke are not great but I never had as many crashes.

I also asked if the could show a bit more interaction on the forum when required (e.g. undocumented functionality/behavior, bugs they are looking into, work arounds ...) but we'll have to wait to see if anything comes of that. Support is only useful to an individual where as every problem solved on the forum becomes a solution for all of us.

Just as a thought, how many people are experiencing a lot crashes are running Nvidia cards (like myself GTX 1080)?

Sander de Regt wrote:It's not okay, but it's not unusable. Hardly any software I use, be they browsers, Word Processors or 3D packages makes it through a whole day without a single crash. Maybe it's a special gift I have in making software crash, but 4 times a day is not good, it's not okay, but it's not uncommon for *any* software (or phone or ...)

Again, I don't want to sound confrontational, but that is not my experience at all. I can't remember the last time Microsoft Word crashed on me. The same with Excel, and I've made spreadsheets that literally take 15 minutes to recalculate. I don't use Chrome much, but Edge has never crashed on me, as far as I can recall.

I also use Avid Media Composer, and for all its flaws and annoying behavior, it will go months without crashing.

Resolve does crash a bit. But there are so many new features added to 14, that I'm not surprised.

I have Creative Cloud, but I've been making a concerted effort to use Resolve, so I can't really comment on the stability of latest versions of Premiere Pro and AE. But when I was using them, they seemed pretty stable. I did follow advice to keep timelines at around twenty mins, so maybe that helped a lot. I still use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I can't recall the last time either crashed.

So maybe you do have a special gift of making software crash, lol. And in all honesty, maybe something is off with your system?

Fusion 9.0.1 is totally unusable on my machine. It crashes with almost every single action.
Previous version was a bit better, but there were still a bunch of things that would immediately make Fusion crash (setting a histogram to Match for instance, or just clicking the openCL pane on preferences).

So yeah, something's not well...

I've gone back to Fusion 8 at the moment.

To everyone who is having severe problems with Fusion 9. Turn off your Open CL.
Nine times out of ten this will help a lot.
Check out this link for more info and assistance on this.

https://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?p=12057#p12057
It will not fix everything and there do seam to be some strange memory leaks as well, but turning off Open CL is a good start - for now.

Bruno Simoes wrote:Fusion crash (setting a histogram to Match for instance, or just clicking the openCL pane on preferences).
.

the crash in the preferences is reported very often here in the forum and there are some ways to solve that:
- install new graphics card driver
or
- install cpu opencl driver
or
- delete the preference file and restart fusion
or
- manually edit the preference file and disable open cl there

fusion crashes in the preference openCL tab if it cant find a proper OpenCl device (or driver) that will also make a lot tools crash

Could you give some more details on how to this on a mac? Thanks!

in this thread are some tipps:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=64987

i often also get bugs/flickering stuff in the final render. when i preview my animation its all ok, but when i click render it just trips balls. black frames/half transparent frames, and sometimes a good frame. i guess its always a combination of 3d and 2d. i checked, and changed the opencl/gl settings but nothing seems to work. i also updated the driver for my gtx1080 but that also doesnt change anything. as a workaround i rendered different merges as files and comped them back together in my NLE.

I've been working on a piece for the US National Aquarium the last few weeks - I'm doing it ProBono and it's probably the first project I've ever attempted to actually to my own compositing in 30+ years in the Biz. I'm running Fu 9.0.2 on an AMD Ryzen 1950 16 Core/32Thread machine with 128GBs of RAM and an Nvidia 1080ti, w/twin 4K monitors. All SSDs on board.
I've been getting mostly random crashes, 20+ times a day - could be more, as I've actually stopped counting anymore. Only one crash is repeatable, an absurd "Save As" crash. Who knew a File>Save As would crash Fusion? As it is, I had to implement the OS Directory Prompt script, as the Fusion's File Open would take close to 30 Seconds to respond. And no, my drives don't spin down. I have all SSDs on board and Thunderbolt3 & 2 RAIDS that spin constantly and hang off of a Sleepless Intel Kaby Lake box on the network. 10GB networking all around (that I'm starting to suspect?).
I see Fusion crashing for any reason, or seemingly no reason at all. Scrubbing, dragging an image into a viewer - Crash. Painting - Crash. Sit idling in the background - Crash. 20+ times a day... But really, a "File>Save As" crash every single time? - I think since I implemented the OS directory Prompt script 'fix' it's been happening...Not Save Version, only Save As.
I won't say unusable, as I've managed to still get work done, but I probably wasted ~2 Hrs per day recovering and getting back to where I was - and that's with an auto save every :30 Secs. I'm starting to suspect maybe the Auto Save, but without that, I'd be TOTALLY ******. Literally a save every :30 secs, cause I NEVER know when or why it might crash. Except for "File>Save As," of course. Damn, I wish I could figure this out...

Boyd,

I have a very similar setup (except I'm GTX 1080 and 64GB Ram) and I had the same multiple crashes problem (timeline scrubbing was a big one and random crashes when nothing was happening). I did a couple of things to improve stability, the first is the obvious disable OpenCL in preferences, the 2nd was I ran the Display Driver uninstaller software which completely cleans up the GPU drivers and then reinstalled the Nvidia drivers.

For me the biggest problem is: this happens a lot while rendering.
I don't mind if it crashes while im working because I'll restart fusion and continue working.
But turning the screen on in the morning and see the rendering crashed after a hand full of frames is driving me nuts.

9.02 helped a little but its still pretty unstable.

I can not do anything but accode to you in random crashes that unfortunately no longer permit Fusion to be used seriously in production.

The last usable release remains version 7. And this is a real shame.

Crashes happen randomly and several times during work.

We use it in widows 10, with geforce TitanX, on different PCs. But the crashes are always there.

I was having some crashes and had re-installed the software and updated all drivers. To my surprise, There was an firmware update for my SSD that once installed, solved my crashes. The other thing to check would be clean power.

Fusion Studio 9.02, Windows 10 pro, 24 gb ram and GTX 960 4GB

In our company we use Fusion 9.02 in 4 workstations and in general it is very stable. Normally only a crash in an entire week, tops.

But we had some instability in one of the workstations when we tried to overclock it. This instability seemed to affect only Fusion. The other programs (DaVinci, AfterFX, Sony Vegas) behaved normally.

In the Bios we chose "Load System Optimized Defaults" and the instability were gone.

The system aforementioned is:
Windows 10
AMD FX-8350 / 32GB RAM
GTX 1070 for OpenCL / OpenGL
GTX 1060 6GB for GUI
Motherboard ASUS M5A97PRO

Hope it helps.