Best Workflow for Resolve Version

So I've made a number of motion graphic animations now in Fusion (using the Resolve version) and I've noticed something:

The more nodes I have, the slower everything goes, in spite of many of those nodes not actively doing anything at that part of the timeline. It seems like it's processing every node whether it's "active" or not.

With this most recent animation, I split it up into several separate Fusion clips on the timeline and used transitions to hide the cuts between them. I noticed that not only did it render WAY faster this way, but also the program as a whole was far more responsive and less bogged down.

Is there a better way to do this other than spitting the clips? I'd prefer to have everything as one clip with one node tree but it just seems to bog the system down way too much. Is this an issue for the standalone version?

This is just one person's perspective but when I've done super long motion graphics pieces in Fusion, I tend to split off branch clusters and do the Saver/Loader then disable all the nodes before it. It's not as elegant as what happens in After Effects but it does the job.

There are some jobs where the caches just will not stick. Things with heavy GPU use tend to not use their caches so you have to make the plate and then flatten the branch with a Saver/Loader combo. The new bookmark feature is helpful for doing things like that.

If you have particles, you have to pay close attention to your caches for both the pRender and the Render3D. They both need caching and attaching a Saver/Loader to you Render3D is the most stable way to speed up your flow.

Once you do that it becomes a more traditional timeline flow like what you'd see in Ae. As long as you start with a Background node as your base layer that goes the entire length of your comp, you can treat each Merge node much like clips. Set In and Outs etc...

I'm sure you know about most of this but figured I would just cover it for people browsing.

Oh interesting. I only learned and started using Fusion after the Resolve integration and never used the standalone version so I was unfamiliar with the Saver and Loader nodes. I'm looked into both and they seem like a real help and time saver! Thanks for the info!

I'm not sure how well Saver/Loader works in the ReFu. I had "Media Offline" issue when I tried loading footage straight into a comp with a Loader.

If I recall correctly Loaders in the Fusion page only support a couple of formats, EXRS and some others, but not video formats. Fusion standalone's Loaders support more formats. Which is confusing, but what are you gonna do about it?

If that's the case with the Loader and Saver nodes in Resolve, I suppose the workflow that the developers have in mind is maybe closer to what I did with separate clips on the timeline instead of one long Fusion composition. Still, that makes it hard to integrate these clips together.

I wish there was a way to preview your final timeline view in the Fusion viewer other than just the MediaOut. So, for example, if I had one Fusion clip on Track 1 with animated background elements and then have a second Fusion Clip on top (Track 2) with other effects but be able to preview the entire effect of both tracks.

If we could do that, we'd be able to separate the processing of the elements, but still be able to preview everything together.

Ive recently finished a similar project.

It was 1:30 minutes long motion graphic Hi-res sequence, 10 shots showing how a kind of painting grows from clear canvas to finished work.

My final setup was like this:

A 6k timeline with a full-lenght fusion comp where everything is animated and composed.

In that comp I also have 10 cameras, each one with the needed render range (Cam1 renders 0-230, CAM2 renders 200-300...), rendered at 4k (or whatever is your project resolution) and saved to exr.

After I make any change in the animation, I activate only savers for affected cameras and "Render all savers". This generates my ten 4k exr sequences, one for each shot.

Then, another timeline, with you normal project setting, feeded with those exr sequences, where I made final edit, sound and music, final color and delivery.

This worked pretty fine until the 6k animation got really big, with dozens of 6k layers, a couple of massive particle systems, an element with >100 animated masks...

I started to have more and more frequent crashes and became a nightmare, so I decided to take that comp out of Resolve and continue it with Fusion standalone. It took me a while to re-assign all inputs, but seamless since then.

You essentially described what happens to most people when they try and do extensive comps in Resolve Fu. It just happened to me last week. Major recomposite with a couple hundred nodes for two 4 second shots. I got really far in Resolve and was happy to be in one piece of software but it got unstable towards the end with Media Offline and caches failing. I use a Loader area with wireless instances for footage distribution to different parts of the comp so I just had to transfer five or six Media In tools to Loaders once I copied everything into Fusion Standalone.

That being said, I only started to use ReFu for big stuff in the Re17 beta. This was probably a bad test of capabilities since, you know, IT'S A BETA! But after reading around the forums, it doesn't seem like the problems I were having were centered around the beta nature of the program. I'll try it out again on the next big ask. It's pretty trivial to transfer projects back and forth and if it means I start in ReFu and block things out, then finish in Fu Standalone, I'm ok with that flow.

I think the general consensus is that Fu Standalone has better memory management and doesn't have to share with Resolve? Now that ReFu is farther along we'll have to see what happens. I really like Resolve as a replacement for a Flame. It's got everything there to finish with really nice results. I've had one client come back for the past three commercials they've produced to do clean up/ color/ finishing with me that would have been handled by a team of three before now.