Blackmagic Forum

Acquire (or partner with) Cavalry. Then integrate it into Resolve while still having a stand-alone app (like Fusion Studio)

* Please act fast. Maxon just acquired Autograph. 2D MoGraph is Resolve’s greatest weakness.
* Create a motion graphics (Cavalry) page or Fusion workspace with a hybrid layer-based panel

Improve keyframe functionality for 2D animation

* Add the ability to custom reorder the display of nodes with animation (to reduce scrolling)

* Maybe add an optional visual cue/indicator/icon in the node graph for nodes that have animated properties

* Provide preset easing options and a user customizable easing library

Optimize importing SVGs, Affinity files, .eps, (and Adobe Illustrator files).

* Partner with Affinity/Serif/Canva for better interoperability when importing and updating files imported from Affinity Photo or Designer similar to Adobe Dynamic Link

+100

Honestly, just hire Ian Waters to be the product manager for Fusion. He created MASH for Maya and saved the program from an early grave and he created Calvary. That guy knows how to make point based relationship systems in both a node based and layer based environment. He could turn Fusion into a Houdini type system that would be amazing. Freaking amazing developer.

bentheanimator wrote:Honestly, just hire Ian Waters to be the product manager for Fusion. He created MASH for Maya and saved the program from an early grave and he created Calvary. That guy knows how to make point based relationship systems in both a node based and layer based environment. He could turn Fusion into a Houdini type system that would be amazing. Freaking amazing developer.

Oh yes!

@Blackmagic
Here are his contacts:
https://about.me/ianw

Has Cavalry updated their foundation to support complex projects? When I last tried it (admittedly a couple of years back), the thing would fall apart (even on a high-end machine) if you tried to work with just 2 or 3 high resolution images.

That's not even taking into account the seemingly endless stream of flow-breaking bugs and inconsistencies throughout the app. It's a very cool app for creating simple stuff and I was tremendously excited at the prospect of using it to replace After Effects, but the second I tried to do anything even remotely complicated with it, it always crumbled. I was literally spending more time figuring out what was going on only to realise it was yet another bug (and then reporting those bugs) than doing actual work with it.

It definitely wasn't production-ready back then and the devs' focus seemed to lean towards adding more and more "wow" tools to it than actually beefing up the base. Hopefully it's in better shape today. I would love to finally scrap Ae.

Autograph showed significantly more promise as an actual production-ready app and also supported Linux from the get-go. Shame about its acquisition.

Cavalry will likely need a ton of work to port it to Linux, on top of the ton of work to rework it to fit into Resolve.

+1 for the dedicated mograph page, though. People keep insisting that Fusion is a mograph tool, but they clearly have never needed to do mograph work that involves a ton of images and/or individual graphic elements.

Fusion can be a mograph beast but to do that, it would need to have a manageable keyframe editor. The organizational abilities are so anemic for fast work. You have to have things like selection sets for rapid selection of particular node. Keyboard shortcuts for certain property viewing. Better hierarchy layouts. Usage shortcuts.

And most importantly, the ability to have a layer start and stop without breaking the flow. Using Dissolve nodes or Opacity keyframes are a poor excuse for being ably to rapidly sequence a series of layers with offsets in the Keyframe editor.

I like the idea of a mograph page but I speak from experience with the travesty known as Maya and the beauty which is Houdini, that it is FAR better to have a unified working toolset with additional windows to parse data/keyframes than it is to have 5 or 6 different interfaces that will all have their own issues.

If you learn a workflow in Houdini, it works everywhere. In Maya, you had the Node editor, MASH, Bifrost Graph, Material Graph Editor, and more that I never touched. It was a nightmare to keep track of and buggy as hell.

Creating a better Keyframe editor with the functionality of Calvary would be my go to. Let it have the ability to create and edit nodes as you do things. If you add a point replicator to the layer in the timeline it would be cool if it would build the node tree and change the appropriate settings. That way you could tweak and build if you wanted to custom roll better tools off of the layer's build?