[Community Project] - Creating the ultimate Fusion default setup

[cinewrangler]

and maybe finally someone can make sense of the "tweaks" dialog Enable I/O canceling or not Direct read?
I did my tests but still its not consistent and never found out what would be the best settings for exr files. (exr side of things of course)

The "I/O canceling" is a feature that file loaders can use... basically Fusion might load/prefetch frames before they are actually needed. This can end up in a situation where while the frame is still being "loaded" you skip to another frame and Fusion realizes that the already scheduled frame will not be needed anymore. A file reader can thus check inside it's loading routine whether it is still supposed to continue reading that frame. For example, if you have compressed frames the loader might first load the compressed data from the file and then, before starting to decompress it, check whether it should still go on. So basically by enabling that option you allow Fusion to "cancel" frame loading half-way through. I honestly have no idea why you would even want to switch that feature off (unless you're a developer trying to find the cause of a crash).

The Direct reads will bypass the operating systems disk cache. Normally when a file is read the OS reads it into memory (RAM) and the app reading the file gets it from there. This has the advantage that when an app reads the same file twice there is a chance that the OS still has the copy in RAM and can deliver the data from there instead of reading it from disk again.

In case of working with EXR files it would depend on how exactly the EXR loader is written whether these two settings make a difference or not. In case it is just using the more or less high-level reading routines from the OpenEXR SDK then these settings will probably have no effect anyway.

Whether Direct reads are good for you or not depends on the usage pattern. For final rendering I'd say use Direct reads, since Fusion will probably need to read every frame only once anyway, so no need to waste RAM by keeping a copy of that frame in there. For scrubbing around in a comp. and changing paremeters on nodes it might be faster to have it off. Fusion has it's own caching, but that cache gets invalidated once you change parameters on the nodes. So a loader might have to "load" a frame again because you changed any of the loaders parameters. With Direct reads disabled there is a chance that it will get the file data from RAM instead of having to read from disk again. But with fast SSDs that difference is a lot less noticable now, of course.

[gez]

Personally I find showing all the nodes in the timeline cumbersome. Having the selected nodes there only is a better default in my opinion.

Another thing I do is to set the default frame format to 16f and make all the loaders' depth the default frame format instead of the source format.
It works for me because it means basically promote to half-floats all the display-referred sRGB sources I usually use as starting point for my motion graphics work.
My EXRs are usually 16f, already rendered from Blender, so that works there too.
Although I can see it can be a problem if your sources are 32f exrs and you don't remember to change your composite's frame format to full floats, so I'm not sure it's a great default for general use (for instance, a wide-dynamic range HDR environment will be unadvertedly clipped to half floats and that would suck).

But that's something that can happen already if you choose the wrong frame format and your loader is not the first node in the chain, so I'm not sure. What do you think? Loaders to default depth or not?

[SirEdric]

Oh...and of course re-mapping the default frame forward/back keys for non-US keyboards in the user.fu.

Code: Select all

{
	Hotkeys {
		Target = "FuFrame",
		O_DIAERESIS = "Time_Step_Back",
		A_DIAERESIS = "Time_Step_Forward",
		ALT_O_DIAERESIS = "Time_Step_PrevKey",
		ALT_A_DIAERESIS = "Time_Step_NextKey"
	},
}

[SecondMan]

Loaders to default depth or not?

Personally, I think not.

The reason you mention alone would be enough. But also, I find the control you have over bit depth in Fusion one of its best core features, and equally important is that as a user you are aware of it, just as you are aware of resolution and colour space. You may stumble over it a few times at first, but I find that "promoting" everything to a single bit depth falls into the dumbing down category.

Added in 2 minutes 3 seconds:
What I do - strongly - agree with is setting the default bit depth to at least 16 bit float.

[jedmitchell]

What I do - strongly - agree with is setting the default bit depth to at least 16 bit float.

This would be great. I'm constantly forgetting to set the bit depth of incoming 8 bit textures or graphics files which then set the downstream bit depth of everything incorrectly, causing all sorts of artifacts. I guess this is really more of a "me" problem than Fusion...

Would there be any way to do a check for bit depth when a Loader is read and then set to 16b it if it's below but leave it as Default Format otherwise?

[gez]

What I do - strongly - agree with is setting the default bit depth to at least 16 bit float.

This would be great. I'm constantly forgetting to set the bit depth of incoming 8 bit textures or graphics files which then set the downstream bit depth of everything incorrectly, causing all sorts of artifacts. I guess this is really more of a "me" problem than Fusion...

Would there be any way to do a check for bit depth when a Loader is read and then set to 16b it if it's below but leave it as Default Format otherwise?

It would be a great feature in my opinion if you had a setting in the prefs to auto-promote loaders to the default processing bit depth.
There is a preference that allows setting the loaders to the default depth but that works in both directions, making high bitdepth images to be domoted to lower depths if your default depth is lower.
But if it was only in the direction of the higher bitdepth it would be certainly useful. As an option at least (and I would used that option by default

[SirEdric]

Hmmm....I think Loaders with higher bit depth normally come in that depth for a reason.
Think WPP or the like which requires ultimate precision.
While working in default 16Float on the rest of your project, you wouldn't enjoy automatic reduction of higher depths as in the above example...

[gez]

Hmmm....I think Loaders with higher bit depth normally come in that depth for a reason.
Think WPP or the like which requires ultimate precision.
While working in default 16Float on the rest of your project, you wouldn't enjoy automatic reduction of higher depths as in the above example...

No, I meant only promoting lower bit depth loaders to the default. If the source has already a larger bit depth than the default, don't change it.