Professional Nuke Artist Tries FUSION 👀

Get the files from my videos on my Patreon!

Join the community discord to show your work and talk about it!

📸 Follow Me On Instagram!

♫ My Music Channel!

My Gear!

Liked the music in this video? Use this link to get a 30 day free trial of Epidemic Sounds and help support this channel!

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - INTRO
1:30 - The Plan
1:42 - Nuke
3:32 - Fusion
8:35 - My Thoughts...

#vfx #fusion #davinciresolve

[AlfieVaughan]

I've just made an update to this video! After a year of seeing all the comments and feedback on this one, I took that onboard and did things like installing reactor and getting the layout working better to give Fusion a better chance second time round. Give it a watch here!

[NonStopMixaTron]

Fusion has the Reactor plug in which is a lot like Nukepedia. I'm always finding new stuff in there. Xglow does the multi step blur/glow effect you needed.

[judeng]

For young people just entering the post production industry, it's good practice to know what the dominant software is used. It reduces the things you need to learn and improves your chances of getting work.

[cryptsFX]

Good on you for giving our side a go! Fusion is intimidating especially with the lack of tutorials, but you did phenomenal for your first try. Excellent video!

[PatrickStirling]

incredible breakdown! one reason I'm excited about the future of fusion is exactly for the new artists who might otherwise have started by paying for AE before having to learn Nuke from scratch. If students get good at Fusion and want to go pro in Nuke I'd imaging they'd have a pretty decent leg-up 🤘

[manylearn]

Really good to see this video! Lots of AE vs fusion videos out there, but fusion vs nuke is obviously more appropriate

I'd love to see a follow up with Reactor installed - basically, it's a plugin/gizmo manager for fusion and IMO basically a prerequisite for doing real work in fusion - It has things like a lightwrap node, a nuke style grade node and even a full set of scripts for adapting fusion to be more nuke-ey (Though I've not tried it)

I've been using Fusion a ton recently and my takeaways vs Nuke pretty much boil down to:

- Fusion is absolutely kickass for motion graphics
- The way fusion treats premult is inconsistent and kind of annoying - I see why the nuke way would put people off, but it's just a fundamentally better approach. In fusion I think the expectation is "Don't worry about manual premult, it'll all be fine" which I think would boil the blood of basically any nuke artist
- There's not arbitrary channels in fusion, which is probably the biggest difference and weakness - though there is a reactor script for mapping channels, still a bit rubbish though
- Channel booleans absolutely suck compared to shuffling
- Fusions viewport performance poops all over nuke, it's way more interactive most of the time (Especially in fusion standalone)
- Fusion particles are fantastic

The lack of tutorials is rubbish, fusion is waaay better than people expect and honestly, it should be eating After Effects' lunch. I've been tempted to do a bunch of "Translated" nuke comp tutorials for fusion. Could be interesting. It's miles away from nuke and BMD isn't massively interested in putting in the resources to challenge nuke, positioning fusion as a thing for doing quick comps in resolve, which is a shame.

Anyway, enough waffle, good stuff! I'd like to see more!

[simbee]

Really interesting to hear your professional input. One issue you did not mention was the price comparison. For us non-professionals, the difference between Nuke's €5, 240 per year subscription, and Resolve Studio's €350 one-off price (or indeed that about 60% of it is available free), is the deciding factor.

[SpencerMagnusson]

I just started Fusion recently and ran into several of the issues you did (I used to work as a compositor for a while). I agree that I love how Nuke's input types (values vs color wheel vs RGB) are diverse yet all in one line - makes operations like the grade node very straightforward to use. Appreciate you sharing!

[Zaqariyah]

New Davinci resolve 18.5 added new nodes like Multimerge, and it's a huge step to simplify compositing especially 2d motion design.

[tiradmiral]

Building vertical nodeflow is quite easy. You just have to to dock node to the left or go Window > View Layouts > Left Flow and set your flow to vertical in Preferences

[ubuyuwo]

I learned CG compositing in Fusion and also tried Nuke for some basic work but some how my mind is not accepting nuke so i still stick to my fusion workflow and no matter how outdated version i use but still I love working in fusion itself...

[jensgeumann]

You can Change the Fusion UI in the Workspace menu /LayoutPresets/FusionPresets

[danielsonderhoff]

👍🏾 I find that you have demonstrated your points in this comparison very objectively, neutrally, and clearly. At the end, you left the option that Fusion could also do good work in your area. There are only a few professionals on YouTube who can present things so cleanly and objectively. I envy your skills in this area and also admire your knowledge. It’s not enough to just know an app; you definitely have to understand the technology behind it as well.

[swissswiss]

This was a great video and you did brilliantly picking up Fusion. I work professionally as a vfx compositor on major movies and I have used AE a little, shake, Nuke and Fusion. For sure if you spent more time with Fusion I think that you'd find it as efficient as Nuke for your example comp. You'd find that there's a really neat way to string multiple masks or keys together and each node can subtract, multiply, add, min, max etc . The tracker has that odd bonus of being a merge too ... I never use it - so set the tracker to foreground only and merge it in a merge. I'd say that if you are working at the very most demanding edge of compositing .. then Nuke is the tool, but for most composites and I include major big budget features, then yes Fusion competes. One thing that you have not included is multitasking. I find the Davinci editor great, the colour page good, even audio is pretty handy. So for the trade off you can edit, grade, mix, vfx, graphics, make multiple versions - which you can tweak individually if needed & export all in one app, which makes archiving a breeze. Add to that, even Studio costs next to nothing and rolls out a new version every couple of months .. Makes the Davinci package pretty compelling, even if Nuke is at the sharpest point for compositing.

[jamied]

Pre-mult tripped me up a lot at first - the Matte control is very handy and it's on the default tool bar. Great video, really nicely done!

[JaimeAndresMedia]

You are not wrong at all, and this is very valuable for those of us who are not VFX professionals but want to dive into creating realistic-looking effects. I recently started to use Fusion to mix 3D objects with footage and it is definitely a steep learning curve. I stopped using Premier a few years back, used FCPX for a while, and decided to settle for Resolve as my editing tool of choice, so it only seemed natural to use Fusion for the times I want to composite something. One thing I learned from your video is that Fusion is actually more powerful than I thought, sure it is not as efficient as Nuke for a professional VFX artist, but for a filmmaker that wants to wow his/her audience (or clients) with a few well-done effects here and there then it's perfect. Thank you for sharing your insights as a professional, great content!!

[mfjae]

You should try the krokodove tools for fusion? Might have those 3rd party built in tools you could use maybe?

[havok]

Super interesting to see a professional using Nuke and fusion side by side! I use fusion and aftereffects because the workflow on the studio that i work on, it's so practical to change takes and just enter to fusion tab. Also its important to say, Nuke is expensive for us on Brasil, will use only if you need to work in the bigs studios. I hope start learn someday! Informative video.

[PeeJ_ENT]

How’s it going, I know the Reactor plug in was mentioned as something close to nukepedia but I’m not sure about if the following was mentioned: something worth noting from there is that there is a tool on it called “nuke2fusion” (something close to that) that adds renamed versions of stock fusion nodes with the names that are from Nuke, may be something to look into if you use Fusion again

Also I would love to know which video resources were missing for figuring out how to composite?

Sincerely, someone from the DaVinci Resolve/Fusion tutorial community

Also Jake Wipp, Nomad R Productions, Pirate of Confusion, and Millolab Tuts are the people I think of when compositing in fusion (the latter two for super in depth breakdowns) which are worth checking out

Great vid! I’d love to see a more complex scene for comparison to see if Fusion could meet your expectations

[jordanhwang]

I only learned this recently. This helps give you more vertical space if you're trying to setup your nodes like Nuke.
Fusion > Workspace > Layout Presets > Fusion Presets > Mid Flow