Blackmagic Forum

Hello all,

I have recently discovered Fusion and I would absolutely love to learn everything there is to it. However, there is one rather large problem I'm having with it!

For whatever reason, I can only preview clips when I have selected it, and it only previews when I press the play button in the loader options. If I enable the Left/Right view on the clip itself in the flow view, I get nothing - just grey. When I hit the play button under the flow control, it acts like it will play but the timeline head doesn't move forward at all, and the program will occasionally freeze.

What could be causing this? I've been Googling around all day and cannot find a solution. I'm running a fairly decent setup - AMD GPU (R9 280x) and CPU (FX-8350), with 8GB of RAM and all of my drivers are updated to the latest version.

I really hope it's something obvious I'm missing and not a bug!

There are 2 sets of transport controls. When you select a loader, you get a preview play controls on the right side under the tool control area.
That will only play the clip for review purposes, it does not advance or render the comp.
To get out of preview mode, once you've played the clip, click the flow area.
Now the view should clear out. Re-select clip and press 1 or 2 and it should go to the views.

Now the transport controls on the timeruller under the flow will control comp playback.

To play back the loader/comp you will need to view it and set render ranges using the render start and render end fields on either side of the timeruler.

Let me know if that did it.

Unfortunately that seems to do nothing, I'm still having the same issues.

I have gathered a few images demonstrating my problem, perhaps they will help!

Forgive the handwriting on them, first time I've used my Wacom Tablet in several months!

This is what happens when I first load in a clip through a newly created Loader Tool:


This is what happens when I deselect the clip (left over footage from the Van Damme contest!), the image from the Loader Preview will stay on the frame I stopped at, and even after setting render ranges hitting the play button does nothing!


Adding a tool such as Primatte into the flow and enabling the Right View still does not offer any kind of preview, and playback still does not occur.


I'm certain I've missed a step somewhere, but the problem is every tutorial I look at just assumes you know how to load clips and play them back already. The manual is not much help, either!

EDIT:

Oh goodness, I figured it out I believe!

I had (as you can see in the images) Selective Update set to "None", I must have accidentally clicked it when I first launched the program and tried to learn it and it remembered that state? That REALLY should be mentioned in the manual! It *must* be set to anything other than "None"

Anyway, here's photographic proof!

Jeremy Gardner wrote:That REALLY should be mentioned in the manual! It *must* be set to anything other than "None"

Page 97. What's not mentioned in the manual is that Scroll Lock toggles between Some and None.

Unrelated, but what's with this trend of fake greenscreens? I've seen 4 of them in the past year, one on a professional project. Like someone keys or rotos out some footage, then comps it over green and tosses the alpha. It's... bizarre.

Chad Capeland wrote:

Jeremy Gardner wrote:That REALLY should be mentioned in the manual! It *must* be set to anything other than "None"

Page 97. What's not mentioned in the manual is that Scroll Lock toggles between Some and None.

Oh, that explains all of my troubles then. My keyboard is a backlit keyboard that uses the scroll lock key to toggle between lights on and lights off. I like to keep the lights on because otherwise the keys are very dark and hard to read. As soon as I discovered what it was that was causing my issues I held the cursor over the button and saw that scroll lock is the hotkey, so I knew it would shut my lights off.

Chad Capeland wrote:Unrelated, but what's with this trend of fake greenscreens? I've seen 4 of them in the past year, one on a professional project. Like someone keys or rotos out some footage, then comps it over green and tosses the alpha. It's... bizarre.

I have noticed this too, and have found it rather infuriating. I think Van Damme did it that way so that most everybody would be able to pull a decent key with something like Corel or Magix Movie Edit Pro, since they don't offer advanced options such as Primatte, so that it would be easier on the more amateur users for that contest.

Sadly when they did this a LOT of detail was lost, so I've discovered this clip sucks to use as a test for Primatte! Perhaps I should find some bad green screen footage elsewhere and see what I can do with that.

Perhaps I should find some bad green screen footage elsewhere and see what I can do with that. [/quote]

you could take a look at the footage from the last blender open movie project. thats not bad green screens, but real ones. and you can get it in uncompressed 4k


https://media.xiph.org/tearsofsteel/