Could someone give basic info about DFX?

#1

This is a Newbie question>
I have being doing mostly still but getting more and more into motion projects.
I may be interested in getting DFX from Eyeon, if this would make sense to me.
If someone could answer some basic questions for me, or give me some basic info about DFXto help me understand the capacities of the tool, I would really appreciate it.

1. As I understand it DXF is a modular version of Fusion limited to 8 bits, 
how does it compare to AfterFX?
  1. Can Fusion also handle large, still with multiple layers ( ie> work as a replacement for photoshop for compositing projects?) -I may be completely off here…

3 What kind of system is recommended to run DFX?
I have a couple of workstations, x4200 dual core based, nvidia 6800GT and Radeon x800pro VGA, 2 gigs ram, XP…
Any hardware issue?

thanks in advance
#2

  1. DF vs AE
    Digital Fusion suits better for classical compositing jobs like keying, rotoscoping, color correction. AE is a more alround software, but mainly for motion graphics work. The main difference between DF and AE is the workflow/user interface. AE is layer based like Photoshop. DF is completly node based. It depends very much on your personal preference which concept fits in your needs. My experience was that DF is a bit faster than AE while interacting and rendering. The node based interface feels more comfortable if you are working with 3D software also because most of them have similiar concepts for materials or particle systems for example. If you plan to use many AE plugins, AE might be the better choice, but that depends on the individual plugin. Most of them work via the AE plugin Adapter.

  2. Hardware? A dual cpu with 2GB of RAM at least. Fusion 5 needs an workstation OpenGL card so far I know. Depending on the footage you will use, but sometimes a fast harddrive speed up the performance.

Hope that helps so far.

#3

hi Julius,
thanks for the info,

#4

… DF is more like a labor… you can experiment with the nodes in way, you
can hard imagine in a layerbased system.
You can connect nearly all parameters to almost every node and do things you
can’t explain in the first …
Another big + for fusion are the mask… it’s so easy to use them and in compositing, that’s a big subject…
The simple Audio Features has been implemented in the year 1632 and didn’t change
until today… that’s much better in After Effects.

Node Based is very open and flexible
Layer Based is more structured

#5

DF is the most unstable soft I’ve ever worked with…

#6

I think that probably has more to do with your hardware than DF’s shortcomings. I’ve probably had one crash in two months with DF4 - DF5 will be arriving in a few weeks after I get around to ordering the upgrade! :slight_smile:

#7

I think dual xeons are okay. Timeline bugs are well known…
Sometimes I work with flows with ~100 nodes, imagine a crash that brokes your flow so you cannot open it anymore because opening that file=crash and your deadline is short :}
I see hunders of fixes in 5.01 so maybe It’s more stable now.

Still It’s very impressive software. I like it’s workflow very much.BUt it handles 2k far slower than NUKE or Shake.

#8

I’d agree that if your going to be doing 2k work I’d at least try some other apps. I was quite disappointed to find that fusion 5 hadn’t implemented some basic speed enhancements - tbh things that should have been coded first time round anyway.

For example, when applying expensive effects such as blurs, fusion calculates the blur for the entire 2k frame, even in areas where the node is masked off… so a moderate blur over a handful of pixels takes as long as bluring the entire comp.

Painting suffers from the same thing - after every stroke fusion updates every pixel (nearly 2.5 million in a hd comp) resulting in horrible redraw performance. Its pretty trivial to compute a bound, or better still multiple bounds, of pixels that need redrawing based on the brush size and stroke info. I have to say developers skipping stuff like this really drives me nuts.

However, fusion is an excellent program in most other respects. The transition to 3d has been implemented very nicely, even if it is still a bit rough around the edges.

With regards to AE, I’d go as far to say that they’re for totally different uses, and if anything, use them both. If you have fusion, you wont need AE pro, so in the great scheme of things the investment isn’t a whole lot different.

T

#9

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