Any Idea on the next Fusion Studio update?

I have a fairly small comp I'm working on in Fusion Studio 20. Randomly, the Console will turn red and the comp doesn't update. When I check the Console, it has a bunch of Loaders failing to load, and Parameters that it can't get for other nodes. If I clear it out and try again, it might work, it might not. I'm really hoping the stability is fixed in an upcoming release.

This is usually a codec issue. What kind of footage are you working with?

Some is h.264, others are ProRes 422 and 444. It's stuff from old VideoCopilot tutorials that I've had to transcode just to get it in Fusion. Would an image sequence be better?

Image sequences are always better, since a lot of modern codecs don't store image per frame, but differential frames. So to see frame 25 it has to go back to frame 1 and then 'play back' all the differences from frame to frame to deliver your image. This isn't a problem with editing software usually, since there's a lot of playing in a linear fashion i.e. start to finish, while Fusion by its very nature, is always trying to achieve the best - and consistent - quality. So exactly reproducable base material is a definite plus for that.

I'll do that. I've gotten into that practice in Nuke so it makes sense. I've been messing with following old videocopilot tutorials in Fusion, so I've just been using what assets I download from Andrew's website.

Absolutely agree — stability in Fusion Studio has become a major pain point lately. In most of my projects, the console regularly freezes, especially when working with a large number of nodes, which really slows down the entire workflow. I’ve noticed that switching to image sequences somewhat improves the situation and helps avoid crashes, but it’s not always convenient due to the large file sizes and extra steps involved in the process. It would be awesome if the developers added more advanced diagnostic tools or detailed logs in upcoming updates to help quickly identify and fix these issues, as well as optimize codec handling and overall console stability. Right now, this is seriously holding back productivity, especially on bigger and more complex projects. Hopefully, they take this feedback into account and make Fusion more reliable and user-friendly moving forward.

Absolutely agree — stability in Fusion Studio has become a major pain point lately. In most of my projects, the console regularly freezes, especially when working with a large number of nodes, which really slows down the entire workflow. I’ve noticed that switching to image sequences somewhat improves the situation and helps avoid crashes, but it’s not always convenient due to the large file sizes and extra steps involved in the process. It would be awesome if the developers added more advanced diagnostic tools or detailed logs in upcoming updates to help quickly identify and fix these issues, as well as optimize codec handling and overall console stability. Right now, this is seriously holding back productivity, especially on bigger and more complex projects. Hopefully, they take this feedback into account and make Fusion more reliable and user-friendly moving forward.

Agreed. I was hoping to maybe switch my workflow over to Fusion from Nuke completely on my next feature (I do the VFX myself), but right now I'm not confident in that approach.

The (partial) fix is converting to image sequences for the reason I mentioned. Fusion is built for image fidelity so working with highly compressed source material will always cause issues.

Image sequance also helps with clearing cache, while video can stay in cache leading up to filling of available VRAM and than the only solution is pretty much restart of fusion. With image sequance you can clear up cache as you work. And there are tones of other optimization things you can do if you are familiar with the application and how it work. The idea that Nuke or some other apps is differnt in this context, is absurd. They all have their quirks and dos and dont's. Its up to the user to know what the best practices are. Brute force won't do much good. Smart workflows will do a lot more.

Fusion doesn't cache videos, only images (in this context, of course all outputs are cached, but there's no video output). So the LD might require a chunk of memory to convert the video to images, but once it does, that memory is cleared and only the image is cached, regardless of the source.