Fusion Practically Unusable for Me - Constant Crashes

Like the title states, Fusion is practically unusable for me, I have looked through the troubleshooting guides, I have the latest DR version, I have the latest NVIDIA GPU driver, I have CUDA GPU acceleration turned on, DR Studio, fast drives, 64GB of memory, 14 core CPU, yet Fusion crashes all the time on the simplest things. Simple title animations and it locks up, I get GPU errors all the time and constant crashes.

Today I just added a grid node so that I could align all of my titles properly and I got a stream of GPU errors in the error window until I removed the Grid from the Node path. My machine stutters all the time on even simple things even after creating ProRes proxies, is my 980TI GPU really not enough for simple Fusion title animations and video editing?

I used to dislike going to Fusion because I did not understand node editing, now I avoid it whenever possible because it crashes so much. I get the following error all the time, the only way to recover and continue using Fusion is to restart DR.

GPU_Failed.JPG (16.74 KiB) Viewed 918 times

With the grid node added I get the following errors, then Fusion locks up,


Warning: exception during GPU processing
Error: com.blackmagicdesign.resolvefx.Grid returned kOfxStatFailed from OfxImageEffectActionRender
MediaOut1 cannot get Parameter for Input at time 43
MediaOut1 failed at time 43
Warning: exception during GPU processing
Error: com.blackmagicdesign.resolvefx.Grid returned kOfxStatFailed from OfxImageEffectActionRender
MediaOut1 cannot get Parameter for Input at time 49
MediaOut1 failed at time 49

I just searched the NVIDIA site and I noticed that for my video card they do not offer studio drivers, only Game Ready drivers, is this important?

If you have DR studio you might want to try Fusion standalone which is MUCH more stable. You can use VFX connect to easily roundtrip between resolve and fusion.
I barely use the Fusion page in Resolve (as I am doing VFX work) but I definitely know about the issues you're having. Sometimes it works fine and other times it's constantly crashing. Even on a fairly good system on my part.
Fusion standalone on the other hand is pretty stable and you can set the auto save to something like 30 seconds and never loose a lot of work if it does crash.

If you have DR studio you might want to try Fusion standalone which is MUCH more stable. You can use VFX connect to easily roundtrip between resolve and fusion.
I barely use the Fusion page in Resolve (as I am doing VFX work) but I definitely know about the issues you're having. Sometimes it works fine and other times it's constantly crashing. Even on a fairly good system on my part.
Fusion standalone on the other hand is pretty stable and you can set the auto save to something like 30 seconds and never loose a lot of work if it does crash.

Not having to roundtrip was one of the things I liked about coming from Premier and AfterEffects, I would prefer to not have to go back to that. I am thinking about pulling the trigger on an NVIDIA RTX 2080TI, DR stutters even on the editing timeline and sometimes even when using Prores proxies, yet my CPU, memory, and GPU usage all look low when it is stuttering. I just don't get what could be wrong.

I'm on an RTX 2060 super which has 8GBs of VRAM and Resolve editing works fine but is not as snappy as Premiere or Avid (honestly nothing compares to Avid in terms of editing performance).
Resolve doesn't stutter while playback but it often takes a second or two when jumping around the timeline or sometimes it will play from the last position instead of the one I'm at which is quite annoying. Even with very low res optimized media.
I'm not saying a newer GPU won't do any good (because I'm sure I have a better time in Resolve than you do currently) but it probably won't fix all the issues, especially not the crashes in the Fusion page. The only pattern I could find in terms of crashes in the Fusion page is the mediain node that plays back fine for a few frames, then starts to take a long time for the next frame and ultimately crashes. But this also happens without viewing any other nodes and not every time either so it's difficult to write a reproduce-able bug report.

I'm on an RTX 2060 super which has 8GBs of VRAM and Resolve editing works fine but is not as snappy as Premiere or Avid (honestly nothing compares to Avid in terms of editing performance).
Resolve doesn't stutter while playback but it often takes a second or two when jumping around the timeline or sometimes it will play from the last position instead of the one I'm at which is quite annoying. Even with very low res optimized media.
I'm not saying a newer GPU won't do any good (because I'm sure I have a better time in Resolve than you do currently) but it probably won't fix all the issues, especially not the crashes in the Fusion page. The only pattern I could find in terms of crashes in the Fusion page is the mediain node that plays back fine for a few frames, then starts to take a long time for the next frame and ultimately crashes. But this also happens without viewing any other nodes and not every time either so it's difficult to write a reproduce-able bug report.

Thank you, that is helpful to know, Premier was worse when editing but After Effects was more stable than the Fusion page, probably as stable as the standalone version.

Most of my footage is LongGOP and I know how hard the NLE has to work to edit it, but come on....it seems like no amount of CPU and memory will let me edit without proxies.

I probably will pick up the 2080 TI because it has 11GB of VRAM, like you said it probably won't help Fusion but maybe it will help with timeline editing. The 2080TI is the current number 1 recommendation at Pugent Systems so that's good enough for me.

The Fusion page in DR crashes no matter what nodes I'm using so I've given up even trying to find a common denominator. I also have the playhead issue that you describe, it doesn't always start playing from the current playhead position.

I had one project that needed a lot of planar trackers, corner pins, and rectangle masks....it was a nightmare, I never knew what the project would look like until after it rendered.

Most of my footage is LongGOP and I know how hard the NLE has to work to edit it, but come on....it seems like no amount of CPU and memory will let me edit without proxies.

I'm not sure what differences there are between standalone Fusion and the Fusion page in Resolve in terms of media handling, but I generally recommend against using video containers as a source. Fusion doesn't get any benefit from the temporal compression—compositing apps are generally optimized for random access of individual frames, and a video container is optimized for smooth playback of continuous frames. So your source material and playback system are at odds with one another.

I don't know how much that has to do with stability problems—it could be a non-issue. But best practice for Fusion has in the past been to render your sources to image sequences, preferably DPX or EXR (Fusion seems to have a tough time decompressing PNG quickly, and that format comes with some additional alpha headaches).

Most of my footage is LongGOP and I know how hard the NLE has to work to edit it, but come on....it seems like no amount of CPU and memory will let me edit without proxies.

I'm not sure what differences there are between standalone Fusion and the Fusion page in Resolve in terms of media handling, but I generally recommend against using video containers as a source. Fusion doesn't get any benefit from the temporal compression—compositing apps are generally optimized for random access of individual frames, and a video container is optimized for smooth playback of continuous frames. So your source material and playback system are at odds with one another.

I don't know how much that has to do with stability problems—it could be a non-issue. But best practice for Fusion has in the past been to render your sources to image sequences, preferably DPX or EXR (Fusion seems to have a tough time decompressing PNG quickly, and that format comes with some additional alpha headaches).

Thanks Bryan, that sounds like a real pain considering the simple Fusion work that I do and the low budgets of my clients; I'm talking mostly just simple title animation and occasionally pinning some text or PIP to a tracker in the video. I don't know how AE works compared to Fusion, but I did the same things in AE....it was slow at times but I don't think it ever crashed.

I've decided to throw more hardware at it, so I ordered the 2080 TI. My VC has been the weakest link in my system for awhile now.

I hope that works for you! Fusion's really a great tool when it's stable, and I think the union with Resolve has a lot of potential, but I'm still not convinced that it's production-ready. But my complaints are well-documented elsewhere!

I hope that works for you! Fusion's really a great tool when it's stable, and I think the union with Resolve has a lot of potential, but I'm still not convinced that it's production-ready. But my complaints are well-documented elsewhere!

I do hope they keep improving the integration, Fusion really is great and I would love to do more with it and get better at node editing, but when it crashes so much the last thing I want to do is keep learning it. I'll report back if the 2080 TI makes a difference.

I've stuck with stand-alone Fusion (and Fu 9 at that because I prefer the UI). It's "stable enough" but still crashes several times an hour if I'm doing some stuff like tracking but the "round trip" between Resolve and Fusion is not a problem to me... it only takes a few short seconds, even with my modest hardware.

I threw more hardware at it in the form of the RTX 2080TI and the timeline editing difference is incredible; 4K60FPS H.265 GoPro footage can now be edited in real time with no proxies as can all of my drone footage and GH5 footage, I'm going to try C200 RAW footage next; I think I can finally say no more proxies unless I am working on a music video or other projects with 6 or 8 multicam tracks.

Fusion is better as well but I think I just kicked the can down the road. I still get errors using simple nodes like the grid but it does not crash...at least not yet. GPU memory jumps up to 9.8GB for simple title motion graphics work but I now have 11GB so I think that's why it has not crashed yet.