Fusion Compositions render process at 1FPS

Hi guys,

newbie here who is fascinated by the possibillities resolve has to offer, but I think I need advice here.

At first, if relevant to the problem, I'm using the free version at the moment.

I want to work more with fusion compositions to do certain animations for my videos and I'm in the process of learning all the things one can do with this magical tool but I've got a problem.

It does not matter, how complex I set up my fusion animation, even the preview is somewhat ok while editing the fusion setup but the final render time gets hilarious when I want to have longer fusion clips.
In the final rendering process via the deliver page
, I'm facing the problem that every involved fusion section of the video is rendered at only 1FPS while every other section of the video renders at 20 to 25 FPS.

I'm delivering for YouTube at the following settings and hardware:

Sources: H264 MP4 - 3840x2160 - 59.94FPS - Progressive at 150Mbit/s and up to 8K Pictures (jpg & png)

Deliver: H264 MP4 - 3840x2160 - 59.94FPS - Progressive at 80Mbit/s peak rate.

System Setup:

AMD Ryzen 7 1700X @ 3.85Ghz
16GB 2933MHz DDR4 Dual Channel (2x 8GB) <- I know, it's a bottleneck, will get sorted soon...
AMD Readeon Vega64 8GB
Asus X370 Prime Pro
U-Phoria UMC404HD USB Audio Interface for monitoring (Headsphones) and microphone Recording

Fusion Comp:



I'm basicaslly arranging some Image Planes to position different pictures and video clips in the 3D Room and to finalize, I'm key-framing the position changes, mainly the camera path itself but sometimes the position of the planes itself.
As described above, whenever a fusion comp has to be rendered in the final delivering, the rendering performance is down to 0.5 - 1 FPS and back to normal at 22-25 FPS when the fusion comp is done and normal video shown. The render performance of the fusion clip even is down to 1 FPS when no animations habben and the camera just shows a "still" for some time.

It doesn't seem to affect the performance if it's rendering an animation or a still in the 3D room. It even does not matter if i have a still or a 4K video file on the plane, performance is always at exactly between 0.5 and 1FPS.

While this happens, system load goes down. I'm permanently monitoring all relevant clocks, memory usages etc. of my system and noticed, that while rendering a fusion comp, the load on CPU AND GPU goes down. On normal szenes I'm at around 85 - 90 % CPU load and even the GPU has some bits to do (thinking of some effects/transitions?) but as soon as a fusion clip gets involved, system usage goes down to 20-30% CPU load and GPU Load even goes down. Also the H246 encoding engine of the Vega chip isn't under noticable load.

Can you guys give me some hints to some specific settings or things i can change in the way I've build the compositions to get the performance up a bit? For my next videos I plan more of these animations but this will end up in rendering time I don't really want to afford (It would be days...).

If you guys need more specific Information about my composition, please ask, I'll be glad to give you any information you need to give me some advice how I might be able to get the performance up a bit.

Thank you guys.

Greets,
VPG Danny

I would start by reducing the length and complexity of the composition and then slowly increase complexity to see how that affects performance.

Having just read your post, I decided to run a quick test by doing the following:

1. 1080p29.97 timeline
2. New Fusion Comp - 5 seconds long - add to timeline and then go to the Fusion page
3. Import a JPEG 3840x2160 image node
4. Attach it to an image plan
5. Add 3D camera, 3D merge, 3D Renderer and attach to out
6. Introduce slight camera animation (tilt from 0.5 seconds to 4.5 seconds)
7. Save project, purge cache on Fusion page, switch to Deliver page
8. Select 'single clips' and put an In/Out around the 5 second fusion clip (I had other things on my timeline so I wanted to render just the Fusion clip from the above steps)
9. I happened to render DNxHR in an MXF OP1A container w/alpha so this probably slowed things down a bit
10. The render took 26 seconds (for a 5 second clip)

I tried removing the camera animation but this really didn't have much affect.

I wonder if you tried to scale things down a bit - could be the size of your images affecting the render performance so you could try with UHD or HD sized images to see how this affects things.

I was surprised that in my simple test the rendering speed was so slow (not a slow as yours, but far slower than real-time for such a simple comp).

During rendering all cores were busy but total CPU registered at about 26% utilization across 28 cores - memory usage is at 47 GB (RAM) and the memory usage on my GPU jumped to over 6 GB of the 8 GB available. Resolve is a pig

Maybe Resolve is running out of resources on your system - what's your memory usage like?

Hey Steve, thanks for your tests.

It does not matter how complex the scene is. Even just a camera (without any animation) looking at a image plane with a picture in 1920x1080 gives me a render performance around 1.5 FPS when delivering.

System resources are indeed a concern, I've got easily 7.5GB (8GB available) on VRAM on the GPU and 15 (of 16GB available) occupied even with just 2-3 clips + 1 fusion clip on the timeline and also while rendering.

The thing is, cause of zoom in camera paths, I can't go lower with the resolution of some images cause nothing would be looking good anymore. For some future Projects I need them at least 3840x2160 to fit the quality of the recorded footage.

It wouldn't look good at all when I have 1080p or even 720p animations going on between good 4K video material in the final Video.

Might it be useful to change some Limits for memory usage in the settings? I thought it would be best to give Rersolve as many resources as possible and let the software manage itself. Is the fusion tab considered a seperate running piece of software even at final delivering which is suffering from DaVinci taking up all memory resources?

I also should add: The system can cache to a Samsung evo 970 NVME PCIe SSD with 3.5GB/s read and 3.2GB/s write when System RAM is full.

Hi Danny,

Not sure why your render speed is so slow but even mine was 1/5 real time (which is 6 fps on my 30 fps timeline) ... Maybe someone else will chime-in with some ideas or at least a comparison.

Cheers

Even just a camera (without any animation) looking at a image plane with a picture in 1920x1080 gives me a render performance around 1.5 FPS when delivering.

Without being able to see your settings, it's hard to tell what might be causing this.
One thing to remember though is that rendering a camera without animation isn't any faster than with animation, because the Renderer3D still has to render the whole frame again. It's not like the 2D tools that can cache if nothing changes, because for the Renderer the scene is new every frame.

Thanks agin for your replies. Infact, I'll just need the fusion comps for the transition animations between the footage shown on the planes in the 3D Scene, so I can do just these and replace the scenes where no camera movement happens with 2D keyframe Animations in the same perspective.

Do you guys think this is a logical workflow? I'm new to all this animation stuff (besides some 2D keyframing coming from Vegas...). Thing is, until now, I've used some Blender 3D scenes but they are not that easy to implement and changes can only be done with re-rendering the whole scene. This is the main reason I switched to DaVinci/Fusion so I'm able to make adjustments to the scene "live" at every moment in the editing process.

Greets and thanks for your efforts,

Danny