Tue Oct 20, 2020 9:13 am
Yeah, the Fusion interface has many features that it doesn't do a great job of advertising.
Pro-tip: try right-clicking EVERYWHERE.
You'll find key functionality you might have missed, like important context menus in the Viewers, both for the viewers themselves and, from the bottom of the viewer context menu, for the currently active tool as well (as you found in this example.) Likewise Modifiers, a really powerful feature, which can only be added by right-clicking on a given property in the Inspector. Connect To and Publish are also available in this same right-click context menu in the Inspector. And you can access a given node's context menu (the same menu you'd get if you right-clicked on that node in the flow) from the Inspector, Spline Editor and Keyframes pane, by right-clicking on the name of that node in those panes.
There's also hidden menus in a few places. For example, right-clicking on the memory display in the very bottom right of the UI will bring up a small menu with the option to Purge Cache, Re-Render Current Frame, and, reload FBX Meshes. And in Resolve's Fusion page, they even hid away the option to enable/disable proxy and auto-proxy behind a right-click menu on the playback bar (where the stop/start/next frame/etc buttons are). These options are all globally applicable and IMHO really should be (additionally) in the main menus, not hidden away in obscure context locations. But that's where they currently are.
Oh, and while I'm listing functionality that's easily missed: when dragging a connection from one node to another, if you hold down Alt (Option on macOS) when releasing the mouse button, you get a very useful little pop-up menu indicating the available input connections on the target node. This is a great help when making connections to nodes that have many inputs, eg finding the Garbage Matte input on a Delta Keyer. Alt/Option is also used for making pipe routers (little boxes that split up connections between nodes, making it easier to organise your flow and avoid connections crossing each other) - hold Alt/Option and click on any existing connection between nodes, and a pipe router will be created there.
Finally, do read the manual when you can, or at least flip through it. Since Resolve 16.2.7 it's now fairly complete and up-to-date for Fusion 16. Given the tendency to hide functionality away, it's perhaps more important to read the docs than it is with other software. Tutorials are great too of course, and there's a growing number on YouTube. But it can take a lot longer to find every feature from watching tutorials alone.
Resolve Studio 17.4.3 and Fusion Studio 17.4.3 on macOS 11.6.1
Hackintosh:: X299, Intel i9-10980XE, 128GB DDR4, AMD 6900XT 16GB
Monitors: 1 x 3840x2160 & 3 x 1920x1200
Disk: 2TB NVMe + 4TB RAID0 NVMe; NAS: 36TB RAID6
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