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- Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 6:20 pm
EDIT: Note that this thread is about the support of fusion, NOT about its development. Please stay on the topic of what BMD and Fusion users can do to improve the situation. (tutorials, user content, support staff on forums etc)
Heya,
Long term Fusioneer (from back in the DPS velocity and 4.04d days) and long term comper (from 5d/shake to Nuke). Been back in Fu land for the last two years building film vfx pipelines around it. And been doing some tutorials for Fusion. Beyond the fantastic work being done on porting it to other platforms (thank you for linux support!) and amazing work by the tiny dev team,
what is going on with Fusion's support?
* Support is entirely by volunteers on the forum
* BMD is visibly absent from the forums
* No official training material
* No communication / feedback process to talk about long term ideas
* No proper documentation (scripting SDK? Or just the regular SDK? Fixing all the mistakes in the current help PDFs?)
Right now the forums here are flooded with new potential users that are asking the basic questions that should have been answered by a Fusion product specialist. Instead its left for new comers (and some really heavy-weight compers too) to answer the questions between them.
Communities like https://www.steakunderwater.com/ have now made one of the biggest contributions to the Fu landscape in years in the form of Reactor (https://gitlab.com/WeSuckLess/Reactor) and this stuff should be promoted, endorsed, supported by BMD. Just look at Reactor's growing content; its clear there IS a community ready to develop, push fusion's envelope and work with you guys.
Just look at people like Andrew and Bryan and their responses to user questions https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=66377&p=373886&hilit=hazelden#p373886
If the bullet point list above is too negative, here's some positive remedies:
* Hire staff to answer basic support on the forums
* Hire product specialists that could support companies looking to integrate fusion
* Support (financially, or through the company structure) the communities.
* Official Training. (shoot content on BMD cameras and promote them in vfx tutorials)
* Partner/collaborate with content creators (Like Vito etc) on training material.
I like to use the comparison to Native Instruments tool called Reaktor (name no relevance here); its a node based tool for building musical instruments and effects. What's made that tool invaluable is not the program itself, but the 4000! available modules (like macros and fuses in Fu) various users have made over the years. People buy it regardless of its lackluster update policies, its value is almost exclusively derived from the user content you get access to when you buy it.
Fusion is a tremendously powerful tool that rivals and even surpasses the industry standard of Nuke in many ways.
But with Fusion's modern core, faster and more flexible 3d system, clever GPU usage makes very much relevant today; and tomorrow.
You're almost there; please don't drop the ball!
-ab
Heya,
Long term Fusioneer (from back in the DPS velocity and 4.04d days) and long term comper (from 5d/shake to Nuke). Been back in Fu land for the last two years building film vfx pipelines around it. And been doing some tutorials for Fusion. Beyond the fantastic work being done on porting it to other platforms (thank you for linux support!) and amazing work by the tiny dev team,
what is going on with Fusion's support?
* Support is entirely by volunteers on the forum
* BMD is visibly absent from the forums
* No official training material
* No communication / feedback process to talk about long term ideas
* No proper documentation (scripting SDK? Or just the regular SDK? Fixing all the mistakes in the current help PDFs?)
Right now the forums here are flooded with new potential users that are asking the basic questions that should have been answered by a Fusion product specialist. Instead its left for new comers (and some really heavy-weight compers too) to answer the questions between them.
Communities like https://www.steakunderwater.com/ have now made one of the biggest contributions to the Fu landscape in years in the form of Reactor (https://gitlab.com/WeSuckLess/Reactor) and this stuff should be promoted, endorsed, supported by BMD. Just look at Reactor's growing content; its clear there IS a community ready to develop, push fusion's envelope and work with you guys.
Just look at people like Andrew and Bryan and their responses to user questions https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=66377&p=373886&hilit=hazelden#p373886
If the bullet point list above is too negative, here's some positive remedies:
* Hire staff to answer basic support on the forums
* Hire product specialists that could support companies looking to integrate fusion
* Support (financially, or through the company structure) the communities.
* Official Training. (shoot content on BMD cameras and promote them in vfx tutorials)
* Partner/collaborate with content creators (Like Vito etc) on training material.
I like to use the comparison to Native Instruments tool called Reaktor (name no relevance here); its a node based tool for building musical instruments and effects. What's made that tool invaluable is not the program itself, but the 4000! available modules (like macros and fuses in Fu) various users have made over the years. People buy it regardless of its lackluster update policies, its value is almost exclusively derived from the user content you get access to when you buy it.
Fusion is a tremendously powerful tool that rivals and even surpasses the industry standard of Nuke in many ways.
But with Fusion's modern core, faster and more flexible 3d system, clever GPU usage makes very much relevant today; and tomorrow.
You're almost there; please don't drop the ball!
-ab
Last edited by alan bovine on Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:57 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Fusion video tutorials : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTCeDas53OEcWcRujkQiwLg/videos?view_as=subscriber
Fusion Tools : https://github.com/statixVFX/stx_tools
Nuke 2 Fusion nodes : https://github.com/statixVFX/nuke2fusion
Fusion Tools : https://github.com/statixVFX/stx_tools
Nuke 2 Fusion nodes : https://github.com/statixVFX/nuke2fusion