First a note to define what fusion really is, and what it is not. We are a professional application which was initially developed to be optimal for working with film and other large resolution formats. Elements such as audio, 3d spaces, and consumer level multi frame formats are rarely major concerns in the film market.
Having said that, Fusion has turned out to be extremely popular in the video markets, for reasons of speed and depth of features.
In response to your specific concerns I will provide what information I can at this time;
-3D Space with cameras, ( Gaia project is very poor)
Gaia is still in beta. If you are looking for something else 3D, check out Canoa as well.
- 3D object and scene import (Maya,Softimage,Lightwave etc.) with shading and lighting.
Again, Gaia is still in beta form, and may not even be feature complete at this point, but I have definitely imported meshes and lights with this system.
- Sound system in DF is very primitive and not usefull.
Noted. As mentioned above, Fusion support for audio currently extends only to the implementation of scratch track audio. Digital Fusion has always been a graphics application.
- Very few plugins. (It has the AE plugin but most filters do not work.
On the contrary, we have a number of plugin’s available. We are the only system to offer the 5D Monsters on WinNT (other than cyborg, 5D’s own turnkey system). We offer Ultimatte, Primatte, and ZBig for keying. We offer the Re:Vision FX moblur and twixtor. The Digital Fusion only “Krokodove” tools are also a great investment and provide a number of useful tools.
We have worked a great deal on the AE plugin adapter, and find many commercial applications work. If you find one that doesn’t, please send a request to us (request at eye on line dot com) and we will see what we can do. In the end, we are not AE, and we don’t plan to become AE anytime soon. So we can only implement AE support to the extent that their public SDK allows.
DFScript is also a useful tool for automating DF, useful for removing the human error factor from tedious things like renaming of clips after footage has been moved.
- Support in other Video capture systems like "Pinnacle except targa series "and better codec support *DV codec in AVI is not supported in DF
If Pinnacle wants to start letting companies develop for their boards without paying unnecessary development fees, we will be right there.
We currently support a number of professional display buffers; DPS, Targa 2000, Video Toaster, Matrox, DVS, and Viewgraphics. If you would like support for your particular board, contact the board manufacturer, as they have not sent us a board to develop on.
- Field handling changes every time there is an update.
This comment makes little sense to me. There was one patch where fields processing was broken, but it was promptly
fixed - current versions have no problems with fields.
I am sorry that as a long time user of our product you find the features you need are more powerful in other products, and perhaps you will find the next version of our software to be more to your liking. No carpenter owns only a hammer, because a hammer is not the perfect tool for every problem. Fusion is well designed for what it does, and it does that well (just like a hammer). If you find your project also requires the use of a screwdriver - well that doesn’t surprise us at all.
