Eyeon:Manual/Fusion 6/Tweaks Preferences

Tweaks Preferences

This section contains more advanced settings that should be left alone unless specific problems are encountered.

Network

Maximum Missed Heartbeats

Heartbeats are the signals or pings that the Render Master sends to the render slaves to check that they are still functioning. If no response is received, the render slave is either not available (power off, crashed, Fusion closed), or too busy to respond (usually because of excessive swap file usage).

This control determines how many heartbeats in a row can be missed by a slave before the Render Master assumes that the slave will no longer be available for additional rendering. If a slave becomes unavailable, it will be removed from the list for the current render and any frames assigned to it will be reassigned to the other machines in the Slave List.

Heartbeat Interval

The Heartbeat Interval refers to the amount of time in milliseconds that passes between each heartbeat sent by the Render Master.

Load Composition timeout

The value of this control determines how many seconds the Render Master should wait before assuming that a remote slave failed to successfully load a flow. If the render log indicates that slaves are being dropped from a render because of a packet 3 timeout, try increasing this value on the render slave to give the flow more time to load.

Last Slave Restart Timeout

This control determines the amount of time a Render Master will wait after all of the slaves listed have become unavailable before aborting the render. This gives the slaves time to restart and rejoin the render in the case of a localized power outage or temporary network connection loss.

File I/O

Enable I/O Cancelling

This checkbox enables I/O Cancelling, an experimental feature in Fusion. When a file-read operation is aborted, such as will occur when changing frames before an interactive render is complete, there may still be data queued up for transfer from disk. This occurs because Fusion reads ahead on disk, anticipating the data load for the next operation.

I/O Cancelling enables a feature of the operating system that allows these queued operations to be cancelled when the function that requested them is aborted. This can improve the responsiveness of the software, particularly when loading large images over a network.

Enabling this option will specifically affect the performance of Fusion while loading and accessing TIFF, VideoPump and other formats that perform a large amount of seeking.

This option should only be enabled with the understanding that it has not been completely tested with all hardware and OS configurations. Never enable it without thorough testing of drive loads from both local disks and network shares. If the system behaves normally, by all means enable the checkbox.

Enable Direct Reads

This checkbox enables Direct Reads of data from the drives into memory, using a method that is more efficient when loading a large chunk of contiguous data. The advantage is that the CPU load is reduced somewhat for I/O operations. The disadvantage is that this feature employs an undocumented ability of the operating system. As such, it may have other effects that are unknown.

Read Ahead Buffers

This slider determines the number of 64K buffers Fusion will use to read ahead in a file I/O operation. The more buffers, the more efficient Fusion is likely to be at loading frames from disk, but the less responsive it will be to changes that require disk access interactively.

Area Sampling

Automatic Memory Usage

This checkbox determines how Area Sampling uses available memory. Area Sampling is used for Merges and Transforms. When the checkbox is enabled (default), Fusion will detect available RAM when processing the tool and determine the appropriate trade off between speed and memory.

If less RAM is available, Fusion will use a higher proxy level internally and take longer to render. The quality of the image is not compromised in any way, just the amount of time it takes to render. In flows that deal with very large images, 4K+, it may be desirable to override the automatic scaling and fix the proxy scale manually. This can preserve RAM for future operations.

Pre-Calc Proxy Level

De-selecting the Automatic Memory will enable the Pre Calc Proxy Scale slider. Higher values will use less RAM, but take much longer to render.

Open GL

This section controls how Fusion makes use of your graphics card. Most settings may be left as they are, but since OpenGL hardware varies widely in capabilities and different driver revisions can sometimes introduce bugs, these tweaks can be useful if you are experiencing unwanted behavior.

Disable View LUT shaders

View LUTs can often be dramatically accelerated by OpenGL shaders, but this can occasionally involve small tradeoffs in accuracy. This setting will force Fusion to process LUTs at full accuracy with the CPU instead. Try activating this if View LUTs do not seem to be giving the desired result.

Use Float16 Textures

If your graphics hardware supports 16 bit floating-point textures, activating this option will force int16 and float32 images to be uploaded to the Display View as float16 instead, which may improve playback performance.

Texture Depth

Defines in what depth images are uploaded to the Display View.

Auto

The Auto option (recommended) lets Fusion choose the best balance of performance and capability.

int8

Similar to the Use Float16 Textures switch, this option can be used to force images to be uploaded to the Display View as int8, which can be faster but gives less range for View LUT correction.

Native

The Native option uploads images at their native depth, so no conversion is done.

Image Overlay

The Image Overlay is a display view control used with Merge and Transform tools, and displays a translucent overlay of the transformed image. This can be helpful in visualizing the transformation when it is outside the image bounds, but may reduce performance when selecting the tool, if cache memory is low.

None

This can reduce the need for background renders, in some cases, resulting in a speed up of the display.

Outside

This will display only those areas of the control that are outside the bounds of the image, which can reduce visual confusion.

All

Displays all overlays of all selected tools.

Smooth Resize

This tweak can automatically disable the Display View's Smooth Resize setting when displaying floating-point images. Some older graphics cards are not capable of filtering floating-point textures, or may be very slow. If Smooth Resize does not work well with float images, try setting this to flt16 or int.

Auto Detect Graphics Memory (MB)

Running Fusion alongside other OpenGL programs like e.g. 3D animation software can lead to a shortage of graphics memory. In those cases you can manually reduce the amount of memory Fusion is allowed to use on the card. Setting this too low or too high may cause performance loss or even crashes.

Use 10-10-10-2 framebuffer

If your graphics card and monitor support 30 bit color, this setting will render display views with 10 bits per primary accuracy, instead of 8 bits. Banding is greatly reduced when displaying 3D renders or images deeper than int8.