Preserve soft effects from timeline into Fusion

The Fusion Clip workflow is quite useful for getting material into Fusion in layers as received from editorial. At the moment, when you convert clips in the timeline to a Fusion clip, this creates another timeline that has all soft fx (eg transforms etc) matching original, and in Fusion these effects are already applied, with no simple way to get back to original media, other than modifying the clips in the Fusion clip timeline, outside Fusion. When the original media is higher res than the timeline, there's no elegant way to get the same material into Fusion at all (yes, you could create subclips of the original media, ain't nobody got time for that).

It would be much more useful if it was possible to get material into Fusion with access to original media, with soft effects such as transforms applied in the Fusion clip timeline replicated as nodes. Ideally this would include resize nodes as well, as applied when for example UHD material is laid into an HD timeline. It would be better yet if it allowed access to tails outside the bounds of the shots as cut.

This way, we'd end up with a Fusion comp that by default matches editorial positioning etc, but allows immediate access back to original media for changes of mind, keys from original resolution media etc. This is the way Flame works, and it's awesome.

I had a similar thought.

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=100656

Looks like no one else did, though.

This is such a great idea.

I spend so much time going from Fusion to Edit page and back just to step inside of the Fusion clip in order to change Edit page parameters on a clip.

Rather than replicating the Edit page parameters as nodes in Fusion, though, it would be my preference for all those Edit page parameters to simply appear in the Fusion Inspector panel when you click on the corresponding MediaIn node.

Personally, I think that would be a much cleaner way of giving access to Edit page parameters from the Fusion page while still allowing my Fusion node graph to be a "clean start" so to speak. It would give immediate access to the parameters while still keeping the two pages distinct.

@tyesamson, why do we need the pages "distinct". Integrated would absolutely be my preference. There's no overhead having additional nodes built for you, and it's all just there in the flow. The absolute integration of timeline effects and nodal effects in Flame is one of its core strengths. They're the same thing, and it should work like this in Resolve too. Every timeline effect in Flame, inc dissolves & wipes, becomes its nodal equivalent when promoted to Batch FX (nodal environment/Fusion equivalent). So simple but so good.

From BMD's perspective, it would be much easier to build these as nodal additions to Fusion, as it doesn't require reworking of the original Eyeon Fusion core code. The material already gets into Fusion from the Fusion clip as part of the Resolve code, it's just a matter of building a short node tree to automatically replicate soft effects in the timeline and it's done. Could do it myself in a long weekend (not really).

Yeah, I used to drive Smoke back when Flame didn't even have the timeline and I agree that the integration of the Smoke timeline into Flame was handled very well by Autodesk.

I guess the distinction in my head is the collaborative, multi-user environment that Resolve is moving towards VS Flame being a specialist, single-seat tool that only a VFX artist or high-end finishing artist is using.

I think about Smoke often while using Resolve because when Autodesk ported Smoke to Mac ~2011 or 2012 their intention was very much an attempt to turn Smoke into what Resolve has now become -- a one-stop app where editors and online editors could use the timeline and VFX artists could use Action and Batch. But it failed to make a dent and I couldn't even tell you if Autodesk still offers Smoke as an option? Fast forward a decade and Resolve has become what Smoke on Mac strived to be, but x1000.

In Resolve, if you're a VFX or finishing artist working by yourself then having no distinction between the pages in the same way as Flame absolutely makes sense.

But if you're in a multi-seat facility or even just using a shared cloud project with colab features, then I think a clear distinction between pages is actually very important. The editor owns the Edit page, the VFX artist or finishing artist owns the Fusion page etc.

Like I said in my original reply, I think the idea of having access to the Edit page parameters of clips inside of Fusion clips from within Fusion is a very good one! I just think that having access to them on the MediaIn node is a) tidier, in my opinion, and b) likely to be much easier for devs to implement.