Fusion Performance

Hi Fellows,

i am trying to make a transition from Adobe Apps to BMD. I have recently switched from Premiere to DaVinci and i am totally happy with it. The performance on Resolve is lightyears better than the adobe-crap.

So the logical consequence was to switch from After Effects to Fusion. But that is actually quite hard. I watched a handful of tutorials and basically understood how the workflow works with all the loaders and mergers and what not. BUT none of the tutorials covers the subject "performance" or the right settings in general.

I have a MacPro 12-core with 32GB Ram, and 2x 2GB GPU. And still i cant get a preview in original speed at all times and i just can´t figure out why that is. I mostly get around 18-21fps but very seldom i get the full 25fps. Eventhough the preview is pre-rendered. I went to the path map and set the the paths for the caches on external HDDs. and still the preview is kinda slow, even if i only use a solid in in the BG and merge an animate plain text from small to big. wich is actually something very simple but i can´t see it in original speed. What is that all about??

And it does not really make a difference if i use a 4K UHD Video or a FullHD JPG still for a BG. Makes no difference. even if i just animat text it won´t play in original speed. Since i have a powerful computer (wich btw works incredibly fast with resolve) and since BMD advertises Fusion as a very perfomant App i figured i must be doing something wrong.

It would be great if someone had a few hints for me and point me in the right direction. Or maybe someone knows in detail what my problem is and can give me a solution.

Thanks in advance
Mark

Hi Mark

Are you using HDD drives or SDD?

This might be helpful:
https://www.jasonmyres.com/fusion-7-performance-tuning

Hi Adrian,

thank you so much. I will check this memo out later and see if i get any improvement. But it really looks promising.

Thank you!
Cheers
Mark

Hi Folks,

i have tested Adrians recommendations but no improvement. Fusion still allows for no preview in original speed.
Here is what i did that doesn´t work the way i want it to work:

I have set a LD importing a 4K UHD Clip. I have added a CC, then a Blur and then a scaler animated. The actual framerate during preview i get is 4.7 fps. This way compositing is out of the question...

Any help is welcome.
cheers
Mark

do u use the last version?

try: rightclick on the "Play" Button. ->Plackback Update -> set to "Fast" .

Thanks Adrian, that will be useful when I get back home.

Hello Stefan,

not even that brought any improvement. still at around 12-17fps.

I don´t get this. But thanks anyway!

cheers
Mark

I assume you are using the latest release of Fusion... It would be interesting to see what type of performance you get when using Fusion 7. I keep trying to use 9 but I find it much slower than 7.

What performance are you expecting? Fusion isn't designed to be a realtime compositor, and it certainly won't be on that hardware.

Hello Stefan,

not even that brought any improvement. still at around 12-17fps.

I don´t get this. But thanks anyway!

cheers
Mark

You generally aren't going to get realtime playback with any kind of media, regardless of disk speeds. That's just not what Fusion is designed for (even Nuke won't be that much better for most codecs / containers). Once media is loaded into the viewer cache everything will play back realtime (up to a point, very high resolutions will still chug a bit), but you shouldn't expect any kind of realtime playback straight from a Loader. It's a bit like a freight train -- not very nimble but once you load it up you can ship a loooot of pixels.

After Effects is really a different beast, it's comparing apples to oranges. AE straddles the line between editorial tasks like sequencing clips, keyframe animation and 2D motion graphics (not discussing plugins here), with a tiny bit of compositing thrown in for good measure. Fusion has almost no editorial tools, a very different kind of motion graphics toolkit (which does not really overlap that much with AE), and extremely capable compositing and finishing tools.

I am on a similar trajectory, looking for a way to cancel my Creative Cloud subscription, but replacing After Effects wholesale with Fusion is going to leave you with a lot of holes in your pipeline.

Hi Jed,

of course i do not expect to get a realtime playback by simply clicking the play button. i do press the play button and wait for my in-out range to be pre-rendered until it has its green underline. but from that point on i expected it to play in original speed. but even then it doesn‘t do it. and thats what i figured what you meant with viewer cache, right? but how can i do any kind of animation/ compositing if i can see my work at original speed/timing.

well unfortunately i have realized that i won‘t be able to cancel the cc suite cuz there is obviusly no equal alternative to after effects. there seems to be no market for it. when it comes to compositing there is fusion, nuke, natron, flame and many other stuff. but does anyone know a worthy competitor to AE?

cheers
mark

Hi Jed,

of course i do not expect to get a realtime playback by simply clicking the play button. i do press the play button and wait for my in-out range to be pre-rendered until it has its green underline. but from that point on i expected it to play in original speed. but even then it doesn‘t do it. and thats what i figured what you meant with viewer cache, right? but how can i do any kind of animation/ compositing if i can see my work at original speed/timing.

well unfortunately i have realized that i won‘t be able to cancel the cc suite cuz there is obviusly no equal alternative to after effects. there seems to be no market for it. when it comes to compositing there is fusion, nuke, natron, flame and many other stuff. but does anyone know a worthy competitor to AE?

cheers
mark

Hi Mark,
I understand your problem is not rendering but playback of cached footage/composites.
It should not be a matter of hard drive and barely CPU, as long as your ram can back it, which based on the specs seems to be fine (depending on the composition of course).

First off: That is not expected behaviour. I've been running cached realtime playback since decades in Fusion in realtime.

Sorry if this sounds like stating the obvious (or repeats the performance tuning tips) but maybe we can eliminate some factors:
- Composition playback speed is set to desired Framerate (e.g. 24 frames/sec via Preferences, "CompositionName", Frame Format)
- You are not running out of memory for the cache (that is the green bar on the bottom of the timeline during playback does not try to "catch its tail")
- You can try to manually adjust for the memory (Preferences, Global and Default Settings, Memory)
- Playback speed in composition is set properly: Right click the play button. You'll see the options
- You don't have secondary views doing calculations. E.g. Second view of a 3D scene, or something in the B buffer doing other state of the composition. That's something I saw in the past. Sometimes Fusion might be ready with its render but has to wait until the 3D-space is drawn.
- Graphics Driver or settings affect V-Sync
- You are not using nodes that could affect time (time stretch), They tend to give Fusion's caching strategy a hard time if they trigger other unpredictable nodes. Preview Prerendering helps (as stated below)
- You are not using complex particles, expressions etc. that might make it impossible to cache the results.
- You do not have other applications open that significantly drain memory (or GPU memory for that fact).

I other applications use use memory the os might swap memory on the harddrive. It might be even worse on the GPU as the driver has to go through the bus in most instances. You might want to check the system monitor to see if something else drains memory/cpu. Actually Fusion or any other application might have a memory leak, which means that they collect more and more memory over time and never free it. Then you might see problems with caching. This is unwanted behaviour and should be reported to the developer of the affected application.

Another thing you might try is to render a preview. Right click a node in question, "Create/Play Preview on", "Left".
This will prerender/cache that node and the playback will only evaluate that cached node. Most compositions work without it, however it is a good way to prerender under lower resolutions on compositions which exceed your memory. Just check if this prerendered mode will not give you realtime as well. If it doesn't then it must be something else.

I am not a Mac users so it is hard to make any statements beyond that. If none of the points help let's hope that BMD's support can take over to identify that issue. Maybe there are other Mac users who had similar problems on the forums?

That's all I can think. I hope you will find a solution, would be a shame to loose a user over something that fundamental.
Cheers,
Blazej

Hi Blazej,

first off, thanks so much for taking the time to give me such a detailed answer. i really appreciate it. i just didn‘t have time today to check all your recommendations.

Next week i will have a lil more time then i will try all that and then í will let you know if any of it led to the results i have hoped for.

So thanks a lot and have a great weekend!!

cheers
mark

i don't think it's mentioned yet, so just to add:
Deselect any nodes when doing playback. It makes a big difference for me...

i don't think it's mentioned yet, so just to add:
Deselect any nodes when doing playback. It makes a big difference for me...

OMG this!! Thank you!

also turn of high quality playback in fusion, is a right-click on the area between the viewers and node part... on the right side. NOT VISIBLE


Here you can choose the proxie quality, and turn of high quality when doing your flow work.

Also great difference when not having the last node selected (media out).

also turn of high quality playback in fusion, is a right-click on the area between the viewers and node part... on the right side. NOT VISIBLE


Here you can choose the proxie quality, and turn of high quality when doing your flow work.

Also great difference when not having the last node selected (media out).

Can you screenshot the playback quality thing? I can't find it

It's really awful that they hid these buttons in a context menu. And even worse that there's no visible indication that there's even a context menu there. The Resolve GUI is terribly user-unfriendly.

This menu is not available in Fusion 9.0.2 right? No option to make render time faster? CPU goes to 100% and ram goes to 4400 MB 55%, and I am just doing some rectangle and ellipse size/rotation animation, no complicated effects or particles used, so why does it use so much cpu and ram?

Fusion 9 is properly designed. The HiQ, Motion Blur and Proxy buttons are always visible to the right of the shuttle controls.