Is Fusion broken now?

Hi There,

I've been shadowing a Premiere/AE job to test Resolve/Fusion but Fusion seems broken:
- Random crashes disconnecting nodes
- Random crashes previewing nodes
- Weird colour management workarounds between Resolve and Fusion
- OFX tools not found when opening projects in Fusion Studio
- Crashes when rendering from Fusion Studio or simply no render at all

I'm trying to produce 3D titles with textures etc so could be pushing the MBP test machine - 2019 8-Core Intel, 64GB, 5600M, OSX 11.6.8, Resolve/Fusion 18.1. However, most of the node-based crashes occurred with tiny test projects (4-5 nodes, 30sec Prores clip in Resolve timeline).

If this experience isn't normal, please let me know so I can persevere. Any pointers much appreciated.

You won't find OFX plugins from Resolve in Fusion Studio. They simply don't exist. It is a real pain if you want to export comps for use in a standalone system - which a lot of us do. You won't find the latest goodies such as Surface tracker or Depth matte in there either.

Also, yes, I've been hearing some reports that Fusion 18 seems to have some rather serious stability and behavior issues. I can't verify myself because I'm not using it daily any more. I don't know if or how much your hardware might contribute, but I've heard similar things from some Windows users, too.

You might try stepping back to Fu17 to see if things improve.

I’m using fusion 18 daily in production and there are a couple of things like the multi buttons and the faster render node that actually help. But on old(ish) hardware, which I am currently working on, I had to disable GPU processing in the settings.
With F17 I only did it on a node by node basis.
I already did it for all merges because for some reason Fusion doesn’t reliably cache frames to RAM if it’s enabled but there were a lot more issues like screen tearing and generally sluggish performance.
This is happening on a setup with gtx 1080 and 2x 1070ti.
On my workstation at home with one RTX 3070 it’s not as bad but I also disable GPU processing on a node by node basis. For newer hardware it seems to be better in 18 than previous versions. The render times don’t spike from 10 seconds to 2 minutes when the VRAM gets full with previous frames.
But we’re still at a point where the small initial speed gain of GPU tools doesn’t help much if it can’t maintain that speed and causes instabilities.

And I know that I am repeating myself but soo much weirdness in fusion seems to be related to GPU tools.

In short: Fusion 18 can be stable but it depends.

My experiences have been very good with this version for Win 10, but I have noticed running multiple heavy apps at the same time (e.g. Resolve, Blender, Premiere Pro ...) have been a cause of issues. I also suspect this is due to GPU overloading (Most likely memory) as I recently moved to a 3090 with 24GB and things have been much better. It used to be a great CPU and lots of Ram was the ticket for Fusion, but I am starting to think that now a stronger GPU (with lots of Ram) is the way to go. Fusion really feels faster in V18 but this could just be my imagination as I've not run any tests.

About the speed of 18. It seems like it has a Macro bug where some macros takes ages much longer to render.
I did a test with a refine-edge macro and a refine-edge fuse in both 17 and 18. These were the results:

F18:
Macro:
- Render Time: 16m and 1sec
- Avg. Render Frame: 9.29sec
Fuse:
- Render Time: 2min and 52sec
- Avg. Render Frame: 1.86sec

F17.4.6:
Macro:
- Render Time: 8min and 1sec
- Avg. Render Frame: 5.17sec
Fuse:
- Render Time: 3min and 58sec
- Avg. Render Frame: 2.56sec

Hey,

First, a gentle joke ... Even a bit broken, I think I'd force myself to get used to it to be sure to avoid AE

Ok, sorry...

I personally didn't notice such stability issues as stated above, this on a daily basis work time. In 18, I saw an unexpected quit only once, and that's all. These times I'm on seriously huge projects and honestly, I'm rather impressed by the speed of launches.
But hey, I had been waiting so long for Fusion to fix its broken support of ProRes 4444 alpha channel that it's the less that could be done huh ?

Just a couple of very disconnected things : I find it a lot harder to "throw" nodes on a viewer to be displayed on it. I'm changing my behavior to using 1 and 2 for that reason, and this is since 17 I think.
Other never ending request : finding - in Fusion standalone, that's what I use daily - nodes such as surface tracker (well, anyway I use Mocha powermesh I admit), depthMap, MagicMask, detectedges for those I recall now...

But about stability, I must give a better opinion than yours to be honest, and I'm glad it happens obviously

You can use a time stretcher and animate between the two frames and then in the spline Editor use the ping pong function while having your keyframes selected.

I am brand new to DaVinci Resolve, but this is strange. Trying to import 174mb Fbx, and it crashes every time.
I'm on Mac and can switch to Windows if required. Mac Pro, 96gb Ram, Radeon 5700 16gb ram...seems odd.
I've been experimenting with lots of other things, but fbx import in fusion is a hard crash.