Switching from Flame to Fusion

I'm considering moving from Flame to Fusion for high end commercial finishing.

Has anyone on here done that? And advice or pitfalls to consider?

TIA

I'm considering moving from Flame to Fusion for high end commercial finishing.

Has anyone on here done that? And advice or pitfalls to consider?

TIA

I have moved a lot of both autodesk and foundry compositing to fusion, from an economics viewpoint for low budget it makes a lot of sense. Also from a hardware viewpoint, the mac option with fusion has allowed newer machines to be used. For a transition to apple silicon mac, the prores alpha issues on fusion are pretty much a show stopper (you will need to switch to dnxhr). Most of the other transition stuff I have actually learned to like fusion better, there's some nuke to fusion guides that are usuful that even helped me off of autodesk. The only real thing I still struggle with is facial detailed roto's in fusion, i just have never felt comfortable in fusion doing this. Especially given how wonderful the flame roto process is, maybe someone else can pipe in on this? It seems that a lot of the nice roto stuff is still on the davinci/color tab, but I mainly work in fusion standalone since I prefer the composite files rather than the full davinci database.

I would do a feature comparison to make sure everything is covered. You're going to have to learn DaVinci to replace a Flame. The better features like AI depth map are only available in Resolve. It's part of the Fusion page as well as the Color page but they haven't posted it to stand alone yet. The other new feature is the object warp tracker but the technique can be assembled using the Optical Flow vector tracking technique the Milo made a YouTube about.

Outside of that, I think everything else should be straight forward. You can do some cool things like set up render nodes to handle renders too but I tend to use Deadline if it's a big off load.

I think you're going to need more RAM than a Flame would use because of the way Fusion eats it for breakfast. Also get used to manually caching like you do in Houdini with Savers and Loaders. The IO for a Flame equivalent box is going to be a lot. RAIDed NVMEs on an internal card can keep you flush for Caching. Really calculate what you average IO is going to be for a normal assembly.
Anything that you can think of that would be a hang up?

You'll generally find Fusion less responsive for client supervised work although they are improving the GPU processing with each new release. The whole Resolve app is a lot more straightforward to learn than Flame.

I have moved a lot of both autodesk and foundry compositing to fusion, from an economics viewpoint for low budget it makes a lot of sense. Also from a hardware viewpoint, the mac option with fusion has allowed newer machines to be used. For a transition to apple silicon mac, the prores alpha issues on fusion are pretty much a show stopper (you will need to switch to dnxhr). Most of the other transition stuff I have actually learned to like fusion better, there's some nuke to fusion guides that are usuful that even helped me off of autodesk. The only real thing I still struggle with is facial detailed roto's in fusion, i just have never felt comfortable in fusion doing this. Especially given how wonderful the flame roto process is, maybe someone else can pipe in on this? It seems that a lot of the nice roto stuff is still on the davinci/color tab, but I mainly work in fusion standalone since I prefer the composite files rather than the full davinci database.

I'd consider MochaPro plugin for roto and planar tracking.
Mocha is a very essential tool imho. It's a bit costly but you won't regret it.

The other new feature is the surface tracker but the technique can be assembled using the Optical Flow vector tracking technique the Milo made a YouTube about.

Feel like I'm obliged to respond to this, since I'm Millolab
The surface tracker and my "SmartVectors" technique are very different. Surface tracker is the same thing as Lockdown or Mocha's Mesh Warp. You can get nice results out of those tools and they are very useful... but the motion vectors approach gives you a vastly more precise result in terms of nuances it can capture.
So the bottom line is: not comparable.
Also... BMD should bring those tools in Fusion Studio.

Also... BMD should bring those tools in Fusion Studio.

You tell me...