Resolve Studio: Fusion or Fusion Studio?

Hey All,

I'm fairly new to DaVinci Resolve and Fusion having transitioned over from After Effects. I don't do motion graphics and most of my work is 3D compositing over live action and VFX. That said, from a professional work-flow POV, is there an advantage to using either DaVinci Resolve Studio:Fusion vs. Fusion Studio (stand-alone)? From my limited experience thus far, they appear to be the same with regards to ability, though I do find Fusion Studio to be a bit snappier.

Any guidance you can send my way would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

In almost all respects, standalone Fusion serves my needs better. It's more stable, not having the rest of Resolve bogging it down; it gets better use of memory and is thus a bit faster; it's more easily automated; and versioning is much simpler when you have files on disk rather than entries in a black-box database. Also, I'm not really confident in Resolve's color management system. I prefer to have easy and explicit control over my color conversions with nodes right there in the comp instead of some behind-the-scenes voodoo. That's a personal thing; I'm sure others are much more familiar and comfortable with Resolve's color handling.

I think Resolve might have some use as a conform tool in a VFX pipeline (though I haven't taken the time to explore how easy it would be to build pipeline around it), but I wouldn't use it as the primary compositor.

In almost all respects, standalone Fusion serves my needs better. It's more stable, not having the rest of Resolve bogging it down; it gets better use of memory and is thus a bit faster; it's more easily automated; and versioning is much simpler when you have files on disk rather than entries in a black-box database. Also, I'm not really confident in Resolve's color management system. I prefer to have easy and explicit control over my color conversions with nodes right there in the comp instead of some behind-the-scenes voodoo. That's a personal thing; I'm sure others are much more familiar and comfortable with Resolve's color handling.

I think Resolve might have some use as a conform tool in a VFX pipeline (though I haven't taken the time to explore how easy it would be to build pipeline around it), but I wouldn't use it as the primary compositor.

Thank you, Bryan! I appreciate the reply and that's what I wanted to know. Cheers!

Having major difficulties at the moment in DV fusion tab.
I guess using the stand alone version will make my life much better
What would be a good workflow bringing the Fusion clip into Resolve without rendering it out?

Thanks Robert

If you use the VFX connect option, the round trip between Fusion and Davinci will be automatic,
This opens the clip from Resolve in Fusion standalone.

If you use the VFX connect option, the round trip between Fusion and Davinci will be automatic,
This opens the clip from Resolve in Fusion standalone.

Bedankt Sander... zeer gewaardeerd.

This seems to be a possible solution (how come I was not aware off this?) However if I output to DNxHR or DNxHD I get green footage back.... also I often see the warning "Warning: No usable GPU devices found." in the Fusion's console. I update the nvidia driver to the latest.

dnxhr.JPG (68.93 KiB) Viewed 608 times

What is the resolution/bit depth you're working with? Sometimes there's some weird stuff with rendering to these formats, but I haven't been able to reproduce it consistently enough to report it.

Or it could be (related to) the issue mentioned here:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=153992

try the workaround mentioned in there and see if it solves your problem.

Or it could be (related to) the issue mentioned here:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=153992

try the workaround mentioned in there and see if it solves your problem.

Thanks Sander.... Yes that post solved the green monster by using the recomended channel boolean
Unfortunately I will need to go back doing this in the fusion-Tab of DR; I have several essential smooth cuts in the timeline and using VFX connect breaks them
Need to find out why DR is having such a hard time with this project. I am working with 5K ProRes 422 LT files and using proxies, timeline is set on 2688*2016 (4;3 project) @24 fps.
This should not be a problem right?

I don't know why the VFX connects breaks the smooth cuts, since I don't use those.
If there's an overlap needed between clips to make the smooth cut work, then you probably need to do the VFX first and apply the smooth cuts later.

As for if the project should work, difficult to tell. Your specs appear to be on the low end of the spectrum for this kind of resolution. 3rd generation i7 means 7+ years old and a 1060 (which I'm also using btw) with 'only' 6GB isn't a lot of video memory for 5K footage. But without knowing more of the specifics it's difficult to pinpoint the culprit.

Prior to moving to my M1 machine, I used Fusion exclusively within Davinci Resolve. When I started having issues on the new machine in Resolve, I switched over to Fusion for Motion Graphic work and found that, as others have mentioned, Fusion Standalone is more stable and has less resource overhead. It's not trying to run a million other things that you don't need in the background.

I've also found it's much easier to diagnose/fix issues. If Resolve crashes on a render, it just freezes up/force quits. In Fusion Standalone, when a render gets stuck at a particular frame I've been able to stop the render and either restart the app or just simply restart the render from that point — it continues without issue, for the most part. I can also render out portions of my work more easily than in Resolve by setting Render Ranges (no jumping over to the Deliver Tab, setting in and out points, then checking all your export settings every time you want to render).

I do miss some of the features of Fusion in Resolve — the Waviness node, for instance* — but overall it's much more stable for me on an M1 machine. No H265 or ProRes Alpha channel exporting options on M1, for some reason though. Hopefully that gets fixed ASAP. There are still a few quirks with memory management and not performing quite as well as I'd hoped on the M1 architecture, but overall better than Fusion within Resolve.

*Anyone know of an easy alternative/workaround for achieving what Waviness does in Resolve in Fusion Standalone?