Fusion Studio 16 vs Fusion Tab in DaVinci Resolve - Which is Better?

shall I use Fusion Studio as a standalone application or should I use fusion inside DaVinci Resolve or is there even a reason to do both I got this question quite a few times especially since Blackmagic has now aligned the interfaces for fusion between fusion studio 16 and that when she resolved 16 so the question really came up why are there still two software packages for basically the same fusion functionality so I decided to record my thoughts and insights on this and share with you to answer the question in short if you are 100% focused on editing and every now and then you need like a lower third or a title effect or something like this then the Vinci resolve is fully sufficient you don't need the standalone version on the opposite end of the spectrum if you're a hundred percent focused on compositing you don't do any editing you don't do any color grading then fusion studio is completely sufficient you don't need to learn the extra stuff of DaVinci Resolve and you can stick to this version now I suspect many people are somewhere in between and this is why I created this video so in this video I want to talk about three parts I want to talk about differences in the workflow between standalone and resolve and the organization of your compositing scripts I want to talk a bit about stability and performance which may be a deciding factor for many people and I want to talk about what are the actual feature differences and at the end I might give you a few quick tips about how you can move between both applications if you are using both before I get started one quick little note on this little thing if you have the fusion dongle of any recent Blackmagic fusion version you can use Fusion Studio up to version 60 and possibly beyond and you can also use the same dongle with DaVinci Resolve studio on the other hand if you have the resolve dongle you can use fusion Studio 16 it's now supported but previous versions of fusion did not support the DaVinci Resolve dongle if you have the license key installation of the Vinci resolve I believe you are still out of luck it is not supported in fusion as per my knowledge so if you have any dongle you should be fine so let me plug it in and let's jump right in now from a workflow perspective the fusion stand-alone version works pretty much like a file editor yes so you have your media on your file system you have your fusion comp files where you are you're saving your fusion work in the file system wherever you like and you can directly access it from the file system for example here I have a fusion comp which I have added it here I can save it to disk I can save it somewhere else my my work itself the name of this fusion composition is just the fine aim and that's it if I want to switch I can have multiple tabs here and can switch between them if I remember something I did two weeks ago I can maybe find it still on the recent files and I just opened the fusion comp the way I open a file inside the comp I have my loader sequences where I I load the media from from the disk and I have at the end of my comp this one doesn't have one but assuming I want to render it to disk I I put a saver note at the end and then I can click on render at the end render to disk that's it so it's pretty much like like opening a text editor yeah there are ways to manage projects there's the bin directory there's the studio player especially for collaborative works that is available but from a basic principle you can use it just open your fusion file save your fusion file that's it nothing else to worry about on the other hand in DaVinci Resolve the whole thing is a bit capsule tin so if I look into a resolved project I have my media pool where I have loaded all the media into DaVinci Resolve I can use my optimized media etc and to all the media management inside DaVinci Resolve then I can create my timelines and in my timeline I can then go to my specific fusion clip and open that clip inside the fusion tab of DaVinci Resolve and then I have opened that particular clip directly from resolve and where it's on the file system I don't care about actually I don't even know about it so the fusion comp itself is stored together with the project settings of that particular resolve project so if I'm editing the advantage is of course I can look into my clips and can jump between clips the way they are in the timeline I have everything organized the way it is organized from an editing perspective from a pure compositing perspective if I suddenly remember something cool I did like two weeks ago or so on another project I think I can reuse something I will have to reopen that project and so I have to go via the project manager in DaVinci Resolve and find that project again and go there I can't just like in fusion standalone open a few clips in parallel a few sorry fusion comes in parallel and compare them side-by-side now I can here go by a right-click look at different compositions from one clip I can change the clips and so on but the whole way I go into my fusion area and the way it's saved and organized is all linked to that edit project now for compatibility and speaking about going from one to the other I can export this I can copy and paste so one thing for example I can here just copy my flow control see and then go over to fusion create a new fusion control V and it complains about the media in media out nodes which don't exist in fusion standalone but otherwise I can copy the flow over now I have to replace my media in media out with loader and saver notes because fusion standalone doesn't know what media in and out is this is the part of resolve where I'm linking my resolve clips from the media pool in fusion standalone I have now replace the saber and loader but otherwise I can copy and paste back and forth also if I do want to have the fire the way I have it here from fusion standalone if I want this comp file for example for sharing I can just go to a file and use from the fusion page import and export fusion come which imports and exports this file so this simple compositing script the simple file from the standalone version it's still possible to get it from resolve but it's all hidden inside the edit methodology it's not as visible and directly accessible as from the fusion standalone by the way a quick side note maybe you know it maybe you don't this file here is nothing else but a text file if I want I can open it in a text editor and I can read my fusion prompt in text format so this is basically a scripting language if you want yeah and all the tools and the parameters and so on I can open in text format I'm don't use that very often but every once in a while I come across a scenario where for example I have multiple clips that I moved and I just want to change the file name or so and I can do a search and replace in this file so you can edit it in text format in principle this is also maybe useful in some cases there are people who want to combine fusion with other tools through some scripting on their own outside of fusion and so on so the way fusion is built here is really very modular accessible without too much around so I think advantage and disadvantage of these workflows are clear so advantage for an editor who has the whole project you can have it the way organized the way you actually use it in the Edit and you can jump around as per your timeline what you are familiar with advantage for the compositor if you are in the standalone version just open five six composites whatever project they are form don't worry about the whole level of organization around that that resolve brings by default so let me come to the point of stability and performance first of all stability now crashes while working are extremely annoying and I'm sorry to say they both still happen both in resolve and in fusion standalone but overall DaVinci Resolve got better in the stable versions of release 15 and the better version of reserve 16 I'm still having some problems but hopefully they're being sorted out all-in-all Fusion stand alone has less complexity around and I guess just less options for failure and has been running more stable I think that has been the common experience of many users of fusion 9 and I think even with 16 this may still be the case so now let's hope that someday soon we don't have to talk about stability anymore let's assume both run run perfectly fine still the question is their performance difference between resolve and fusion now if you just start both applications side by side you see that fusion studio users like a few hundred megabyte for the interface and resolve users may be twice as much now if you have 30 gigabyte of RAM or 60 gigabyte of RAM whether you GUI uses 100 megabyte more or less is probably not the issue now if I open my task manager I actually see that here I see fusion studio running with some 400 megabyte of memory I'm not doing any rendering at the moment so CPU and GPU are not really text so I see here a few hundred megabyte and Avenue resolved I see 37 gigabyte of RAM usage now why is that if I'm not doing anything well the Vinci resolved because of the way I have set up this project is automatically caching stuff right so it's automatically pre-rendering things from fusion and it's loading my caching from from the edit page which is coming or by default or automatically without me doing anything so I think that's the real difference it's not that whether the GUI uses a few hundred megabyte more or whether the GUI has you know loading it's loading a few functionalities more or less it's more about when you're loading your project do you have all this caching which is happening automatically by default or do you just like infusion open a text file basically right then fusion also once I start running it of course I can also cache things but I know and standalone I know I'm only within my comp I'm not doing anything else in the event she resolves I have to pay attention because by default I may be doing lots of other things as well now I propose that a similar logic may also apply to a file management and you may disagree with this I just put it out here so in resolve when I take things from the media pool I just drag and drop it over to fusion or I just go for my editing timeline over to fusion I have my media in note and everything else is by a default hidden from me I immediately start from my media in note in the standalone version I have to consciously add a loader or take a file sequence or file and load now when I do this loading by myself I think about what codec do I have and is that fine for what I'm about to do for example if I know that I'm doing something very complex and that the loader will read again and again I may not want to use a compressed format for example I may want to go to I don't want to use h.265 for something like this I may want to use a file sequence mmm in the standalone version because I'm taking the files from the disk use the loader note I'm thinking about this in resolve everything is in my edit page and maybe my h.265 is fine for editing if my machine can handle it but then when it comes to compositing and if my my composites get more complicated maybe I should think about it again and fusion standalone triggers me to do that thinking resolve may hide this from me now a last point of course are features and the reason why I'm mentioning it last is because I think it's no longer the primary concern you can look at the blackmagic design feature comparison and they're now comparing the features of fusion inside DaVinci Resolve 16 and fusion studio as the standalone version and you see that the features are mostly alike purely from a tool perspective I know that the primate Kia is not available in the Vinci resolve that's only available in the studio version but the other keying tools data Kia I track here and so on they're all there so I think also from a keying perspective you're very well equipped in DaVinci Resolve version the differences that you do see you see there's a resolution limit in DaVinci Resolve for 16k I think for most people that won't be a big issue you see that there's a big section on the studio player which is not available in DaVinci Resolve and the reason is it's not needed so the studio player is basically a tool for fusion studio to manage versions of coms and so on in a larger compositing pipeline so if you're working in a multi seed fusion environment for example you can do version management and can you review comps and so on in this studio player in DaVinci Resolve since everything is managed around the Edit and around the timelines and so on you have a different way of managing your console it doesn't really make sense there and you have different ways of collaboration based on your resolved project and now maybe with frame i/o you have these online collaborations which are coming out with resolve 16 so fusion just has a different way of managing and that's why they have this player now another big block of difference here is the render manager now infusions to do you have network rendering enabled and if I go into a fusion standalone here if I render something I have the option to say use Network and in this case whether or not I am actually in a network it's being sent to a render manager and if I file render manager if I open it here I see the comps in a queue and I can add comes into that queue and they're being then sent to the machines available now this is not available in DaVinci Resolve and it doesn't really fit into the direct editing workflow and going and jumping back and forth and so on but it fits into a compositing pipeline and especially if you're in a larger environment with multiple machines and so on this is definitely of interest now this is for rendering otherwise from a feature perspective I think it's worth noting that in the there's one difference from the GUI perspective which I find still very important in fusion studio you can still by a window open a new image view or new floating frame so you can get a dedicated window where you can assign either any component of the GUI basically and I frequently use that to have an additional viewer on a second monitor in resolve I can do it by a my Declan cut and I can get a pure grading output basically but sometimes I want to use my second monitor for example for rotoscoping or to have the 3d view or stuff like this and that does not work through a video output that works just by other graphics card second monitor connected that's it now what I can do is I can add my detached viewer to that second monitor or and can output whatever I want to output into that view or I can even put my spline editor there or flow the flow graph on a second monitor and so on so this way the GUI still has a bit more functionality even though it looks otherwise the same way as in resolve as far as I'm aware this is not yet possible in DaVinci Resolve otherwise from a GUI from the tool perspective and so on the two are now really close and I think there is not much difference anymore now if you decide to use both tools and combination maybe you use few and resolved for some simple things and if composites go more complex and you have long render times and so on perhaps you prefer the standalone version if that is the case one way you can export import Fusion comes what I have shown you before you can copy and paste except for maybe the media in media out and load are saver notes which is the one concept which is different which you can manually change but the most straightforward way is VFX connect just right-click on a clip VFX connect clip and then this clip or if you have a layout timeline multiple clips the video portion of it is being rendered out to disk typically DPX file to get started and then that sequence is being loaded into fusion standalone where you can do the rest of it I recently got a request to do a more detailed tutorial on VFX connect in particular if there is demand for this I think I can do this in one of the next days or weeks but otherwise just to get started look for that feature or just right click and try it out so this way you can go directly with a clip over into fusion standalone work there then render then go back into the Edit for me I typically do this when I know that it will get computationally intensive that I want to close everything from the Edit and I want to only focus then I I do that now last part I should probably mention about the free version with Fusion studio 16 there is no free fusion 16 at the moment and I'm not sure if this is because they don't want to do better testing with a free version and excluded it from the better or if they have discontinued it time will tell so as of now for fusion 16 you have the standalone versions for the free version you can still get the fusion 9 free version and of course DaVinci Resolve ok I hope you enjoyed this quick overview so to summarize I think for me it's not so much the features why I'm using one or the it's more like the intentionality of the workflow so when I am in the Edit and just need a quick fix of course I like to stay in resolve if I'm just trying something out like motion graphics design or something and I don't need to add it I go to the fusion studio by default if I'm in the edit but I want to do something more complex then I prefer to render it out go over to fusion close my edit close everything that's distracting and then I can spend the next two three hours or two or three days or whatever it is on that composite and render back when I'm done so this is a bit how I approach this I hope you find this useful if you want to learn a bit more about VFX connect or about anything else I touch based on in this video please let me know in the comment I may come up with some tutorials dedicated to this in the next days weeks or so if there's interest otherwise subscribe for more to come and see you next week thanks for watching

Channel: VFXstudy

Views: 52,795

Keywords: compositing, VFX, VFXstudy, visual effects, Blackmagicdesign, Blackmagic, Motion Graphics, DaVinci Resolve, Davinci Resolve 16, Fusion Studio 16, Blackmagic Fusion, Fusion Tab, Fusion Page

Id: JBX2fjasHJ8

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2019