For the past few days I've had my head down into a "new" piece of software. Black Magic Fusion. For me it's the equivalent of a gamer getting a new game that they're really into.
Fusion is a fully featured VFX software for compositing. It's not the industry standard, that's Nuke, but it probably has like 90% of the functionality of Nuke for a fraction of the price, with one version being completely FREE. The free version comes as a part of a larger piece of software, DaVinci Resolve, which has been a widely used Color Grading software for film for years.
It seems that Resolve is looking to expand its base and eat into the editing titans market. So that's Premiere and Final Cut Pro. Resolve is totally free now which is insane because it's a super legit video editor, compositing software, audio production software, and of course color grading software.
For the longest time, I've wanted an alternative to Adobe because they have a sort of soft monopoly on these sorts of software and they abuse that in the worst way by never innovating, only offering subscription plans and tiny crappy updates, but for certain types of work, they're practically the only game in town. Until now apparently and that's what I've been up to for the past few days.
One of the holes in my process has been the lack of a legit node based compositing software. As I mentioned, the industry standard is Nuke, but Nuke costs around $7k last time I checked. The paid version for Fusion is only $300 and I'd been meaning to get into it, but in previous versions it just felt really clunky. Well not anymore, there's a new version out and so far I'm really liking it. There's just so much you can do in software like this and I can't wait to get more familiar with all the tools.
That's what I've been up to. Hopefully this weekend I'll have time to get into some more complete art. Until then, see you all in the next post.
