Bug: 20+ savers and only a few render at random

This is on the latest beta of Fusion Studio, in macOS Sequiooiaeaua.

I'm trying to do a "breakdown" showcase for the compositing of my NCC1701 project, so I set about 27 savers in several places of the tree, like coming out of diffuse direct, indirect, color, etc.

Because I want to render these to PNG and Fusion defaults to EXR on new savers, I created the first saver, changed all the parameters I wanted, then copied it and pasted it on the next node I wanted to create a saver for, then just changed the file name for it. I did that about 26 times give or take. I also had done it on other Fusion Studio projects that I used for the main project, each of them the render from one camera. I had this problem with them as well, so it's not restricted to this Fusion project.

The bug happens like this. I will click the Render button, or go to file > Render all savers, and it will only render 1 or more savers, but not all of them. The very first time it can render just one random saver; then if you keep clicking on Render over and over, it will start rendering a few more at a time, and totally random ones, without any rhyme or reason.

There's something else that's weird. If I deselect every node in the tree, it will keep on rendering just one saver, which I believe it's the last one. As far as I know, a saver doesn't have to be selected to be rendered, it just has to be enabled. So as long as all 27 savers are enabled (and they are), it should render all of them. But not having any node of any kind keeps on rendering just the last one.

Now, if I start selecting some savers, it will render more, but it won't be those selected savers. That doesn't make any sense at all. But the way to finally get them all to render (and I'm talking about just one frame), is to select all the savers, and start clicking on Render. This renders some frames. When it shows the finished dialog, close it and then click on Render again. After several times of doing this, finally it renders all the savers. But obviously this is bug, especially given the randomness of it all. If I selected some savers and only those rendered, I would assume that savers have to be selected to be rendered, but clearly that's not the case, since selecting more savers renders more of them, but not even the ones I selected.

I'm not sure if this is a new bug or if it was in Fusion Studio 19 as well. When I was using that version, I only had one saver at the very end and that was it. And now I only have 20 beta 3 installed on both my Mac and my PC.

How are you originally naming the files you are exporting via the Savers?
If the files names end in a number followed by the extension, ie Text_01.png, Text_02.png etc, then Fusion will understand that as number padding and overwrite all your files into a single sequence called 'Text' with files sequentially numbered as 01, 02, 03 etc.

If I'm writing a sequence out via a Saver, I find it always best to write the file name follow by 2 '..' then the file extension. This will ensure the frame padding is written between the two '..' and the files are exported correctly, so for the example above, in the saver label the file export names as

Text_01..png
Text_02..png

in the saver before hitting render, and everything should write out OK.

How are you originally naming the files you are exporting via the Savers?
If the files names end in a number followed by the extension, ie Text_01.png, Text_02.png etc, then Fusion will understand that as number padding and overwrite all your files into a single sequence called 'Text' with files sequentially numbered as 01, 02, 03 etc.

If I'm writing a sequence out via a Saver, I find it always best to write the file name follow by 2 '..' then the file extension. This will ensure the frame padding is written between the two '..' and the files are exported correctly, so for the example above, in the saver label the file export names as

Text_01..png
Text_02..png

in the saver before hitting render, and everything should write out OK.

I'm not talking about the savers rendering a sequence. Each saver is named something like this:

01 Diffuse DIR.png
02 Diffuse IND.png
03 Diffuse Color.png
And so on.

If I was on my Mac at the moment I could just select all the files in the Finder, copy them, and paste all the names here as text, but well, I'm currently on my PC.

In the end I realized that renaming the saver itself (not the file name, that was already named), helped untangle the mess, but it's still a bug because each saver had a unique name, it's just that it starts with Saver2, then copy and paste that one ends up in Saver2_2, then do that several times and it's "Saver2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2_2" and it gets messed up.

But if you change the names of the first few savers to like saver1, saver2, saver3 and saver4, that renders all of them fine, even if most of them have the long name like I described.

I just think that Fusion should have a preference to set the saver to whatever format you want by default, in which case, I wouldn't have done copy and paste 26 times.

This sounds like a bug to me. A workaround could possibly be to enable Simplified Node Names (or whatever it’s called in the settings).
That will increment the number after the first „_“

So Saver1_1 when copied won’t turn into Saver1_1_1 but Saver1_2

I personally would prefer this to work like in Houdini where copying a node simply increments the number without underscores. So Saver1 when copied would turn into Saver2 (just like adding another node). But there are benefits to both.