Just a quick (
) bug list/feature request from tonight's workflow! (and I'll just ammend it as I come up with more)
Mostly Fusion related as I've been diggin into that a bit more.
GENERAL UI: Requests
Interface behaviour - Make clips/time based elements 'sticky' - I use a Wacom tablet/pen, and it's incredibly easy to accidentally move clips a frame or two in the timeline without realising it by brushing past them- if they were more 'sticky', so that you had to actually hold and move before a time change would save an enormous amount of pain! The same goes for scrubbing through values - foro example, changing the position of a clip in it's transition ppg, by sliding the value, it often leaps by a large increment as you release the pen - making it unusable.
A
background process monitor would be really useful (as per FCP) - See what's rendering and what progress - I found it helped be adjust my workflow in FCP to make things run smother - and you know when to just hang on and let it finish processing for a couple of minutes, before diving back in.
The ability to
switch the viewer to display any stage in the pipeline you choose allowing you to see the output of a specific stage, whilst making changes in another. So I could be looking at the output of glow node my fusion comp, or even in a sub comp nested under that, whilst colour correcting one of the layers, or changing the timing of a layer in the fusion compound clip whilst viewing the final output - this would be superbly powerful. (In a similar way that, in after effects, you can lock the viewer to a certain comp, and change underlying comps, with the results of changes being seen in context of the locked view)
More flexible UI layout editing. Some of the layouts are really counter intuitive for me. More flexible/customisable layout PLEASE!!!! It can be infuriating. Dual layout Fusion is probably the worst case, with the occasionally used animation curve editor taking up almost half the screen space, whilst the viewer, nodes and timeline are squashed into the other half - Flexibility with the layout (as per AE/Nuke etc) would be ideal, but if not, then make the viewer larger (it's pretty important in compositing), and give the nodes more space - some comps can get pretty big. Every view should have the option to have the timeline spanning both screens of a dual screen layout etc
FUSION REQUEST:
Support for distributing rendering across a render-farm - I use 3D animation, AE etc all of which can be sent to my renderfarm - the massive bottleneck in the pipeline is resolve at the moment - even though it's the main workhorse! Command line rendering would mean that I could finally get projects rendering through render management software like Deadline!
Bring the
fusion timeline (as you open in edit) into the fusion interface, so that changes to the timings on layers can be done within fusion. Exactly the same workflow as exists, but with a reduced version of the timeline accessible within the fusion interface - simply a mirror of the timeline you get when you go back into the compound fusion clip in edit. This would be very, very powerful.
Add the option of a
Pre-Fusion Colour correction, in the same way you have pre-clip, clip, post clip and timeline grades. Not least because the ability to use the superior noise reduction and clean up capabilities of the Colour page before keying would be extremely, extremely useful.
More options and control on the saver nodes - timing, offsets, frame padding, output formats etc - something like the write node in Nuke! - Nuke also has the ability to simultaneously output a proxy/rescaled etc version from the same node, which can be very handy. - Also a render-queue for the saver nodes, as sometimes you may only need render one stage of a comp, not the entire tree, or you may want to stack up multiple servers to render in one batch whilst you go down the pub... (although the renderfarm bit would help here)
Clone fusion nodes - (Also as per Nuke) - Instead of having numerous copies of, say, a blur node that you may need to adjust, have the ability to clone a node - simply a copy of the node whose controls are all linked to each other - so if you adjust the blur level in one node, it changes across all the cloned instances (this could even be expanded to aadd a 'shared node'. that acts in the same way as the shared nodes do in colour, allowing the changes to happen across multiple fusion comps.
The ability to simple add a midway point on the connector lines in the node view, to allow you to organise the node layout more effectively - again, as Nuke does - so instead of having connectors at angles all over the window, you can 'break' the line into sections with pivot point, so you can make the line a right angle etc (It may sound basic, but it makes a huge difference). These 'break' points can also be used as basic connector points (much like having multiple outputs from a node - I Haven't got nuke here but . will try to post image)
FUSION: Bugs
When using 'Saver' nodes, i often (almost always) get write errors if i just go to render them out, usually on the first frame or so. They only succeed if I first play/cache the timeline - then itt writes out, otherwise, I get an error (Warning! Render did not complete!). In general the saver/read workflow needs a good overhaul.
EDIT - The bug still persists, but seems to be linked to having a 'media out' node downstream. If you disconnect the media out node from the end of the tree, the sequences appear to render out (Not ideal, as sometimes both are required)
When copying/pasting fusion comps, the media in nodes do not update or refresh automatically, and truncates or misses the media (I think it's retains the in/out from the previous comp instead of looking at the media in the current comp) - often I have delete and create new ones. It's a major pain as instead of a quick copy and paste, you end up rebuilding.
Similarly Saver nodes don't copy/paste (often you want to copy/paste sections of a comp, and then just change an increment in the saver)
Disable node - some nodes appear to still process even if disabled (it doesn;t pipe the result through, but seems to process)
There appears to be some instability with copy and paste in general. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Using a mask leaves a line represnting it's edge in the alpha (see the thread in the main forum)
GENERAL ISSUES
I have still had occasions where the message about not being able to write out frames crops up. Also I've had other instances where output has been inconsistent (Black frames, random lines etc).
I'm relatively new to Resolve, so some of these may have been implemented, but I haven't discovered them yet!
(on Mac pro 2013, BTW)