To Fusion or not to Fusion

Hi Gang
I cut the adobe cord in the spring and went all in on Resolve and purchased Studio.
Loving 16 by the way.

But I do also do some VFX and have missed after effects a bit.
I have played with fusion built into resolve, and I think it is fine for quick titles or such.
Still find it odd that studio fusion license owners get resolve but not vice versa.

So question is, would the additional 300 bucks for Fusion 16 be worth it? or just live with fusion in my studio resolve.

Did you go for the dongle version?
I'm biased since I've used Fusion since 1998, but in your case you would have been better off buying Fusion, because that 'came' with a Resolve license. I believe the intention is to have your Resolve license work with Fusion Studio in the future, but I don't know about that intention's current status.

Fusion Studio is definitely quicker and more efficient for pure VFX work than the Fusion page currently is, but if it's worth the additional costs kind of depends on what it is you want to do with it.

A hardware Resolve dongle currently unlocks Fusion 16 beta. No idea how long it will be before Fusion has serial number activation as an option.

The free version of Fusion 9 is still available, and most of the features in Studio are still available. The only thing liable to really hurt someone coming from AE is the inability to use the Krokodove plug-in suite, which would require a Studio license. But it doesn't yet work in v16, anyway.

The only other features you'll not have access to, between standalone free Fusion and Resolve 16, is ProRes encoding on Windows and the render node.

Having come from After Effects to Nuke to Fusion I found it was not a simple transition but it was more about learning the way things work in Fusion as the node based methodology is much more intuative than After Effects layers. Fusion is incredibly powerful but you need to put the time in to learn it, but if you are prepared to do that you'll find you can work faster, have more control and achieve better results. I personally find it a lot more satisfying to work in Fusion, you spend more time being creative and less time performing functional activities just to get a result. My 2 cents.