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Eyeon Fusion - What do you think?

AquariunGuru

AquariunGuru

Happy New Year!

What's the word on eyeon Fusion? It looks pretty dam impressive. Anyone that uses it could you please offer your thoughts on what kinds of things you are using it for, if you like it, etc. I am looking at filming a feature length horror where I need some astral and spirit world visual effects among other things.

T.
 
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Fusion has a pretty impressive pedigree of movies that use it, there must be a reason it is used over After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc for compositing and keying/tracking and such. (300, Batman Begins, Memoirs of a Geisha, Pirates of the Caribbean, Oliver Twist, Superman Returns, lots more).

I downloaded the learning edition and have been playing with it, also bought a DVD with tutorials on Fusion (sky replacement, etc). Here is a pretty cool demo of some things Fusion can do:
http://eyeonline.com/web/eyeonweb/marketing/21reasons/21reasons.aspx

Will Vincent said:
Fusion is pretty darn spiffy, though it can't do anything that you couldn't do with after effects or any other fairly mature compositing package.
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Thanks guys for your info. I tried some m2t format (It's what Vegas brings your footage in as format) into Fusion and it didn't work?

I pulled this off another forum DMN: "Cineform is - a Lossless Intermediate format. Use the Cineform codec for all lossless formats to move between software apps. So build keyed sequences in AE (using Cineform captured/transcoded files) render out as Cineform again from AE (CF is lossless over scores of generations) to bring to Vegas for editing as Cienform files."

My question is this: What format should I digitize my footage in from my Xh A1 into vegas (or not) for use in Fusion? The M2T format does not appear to be supported by Fusion so I am looking for something else to digitize it into. I am going to try cinform and see what that does. Any ideas anyone?
 
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Joe999 said:
there must be a reason it is used over After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Avid, etc for compositing and keying/tracking and such.
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It's preference, and depends on what company is hired for the work. essentially they all do the same thing. After Effects still has the most power overall though, but a lot of effect artists don't like it because it's timeline based. Until recently AE was all that was used at the Orphanage, they recently added another platform (Nuke I think, or possibly Fusion I don't recall).

AquariunGuru said:
I tried some m2t format
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You would NEVER want to use mpeg files in a compositing package, even if it managed to open them for you.. They're not frame accurate.

Export a clip from your NLE as an image sequence (tiff or tga) or uncompressed (and deinterlaced) video, then bring that into the compositing program.
 
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Okay, here's what a noob I am: Question: I am using Sony Vegas as my NLE. So I understand correctly that I should do my editing first, save it and then import the footage into Fusion? What format is best for the clip to be saved as and then imported into fusion? You are saying NO to the mpeg (In Vegas its mpeg layer 2 aka m2T format) which is the native digitizing format when you bring footage into vegas from what I understand? And then I assume I work on it in Fusion and then I am able to export it as a rendered clip and then reincorporate it onto my time line in my NLE?
 
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AquariunGuru said:
Okay, here's what a noob I am: Question: I am using Sony Vegas as my NLE. So I understand correctly that I should do my editing first, save it and then import the footage into Fusion? What format is best for the clip to be saved as and then imported into fusion? You are saying NO to the mpeg (In Vegas its mpeg layer 2 aka m2T format) which is the native digitizing format when you bring footage into vegas from what I understand? And then I assume I work on it in Fusion and then I am able to export it as a rendered clip and then reincorporate it onto my time line in my NLE?
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Yes and no.. I wouldn't do the full edit necessarily. Like I said, an image sequence, or uncompressed video that's been deinterlaced would be the best format to bring into fusion. m2t is the format that is stored on tape when you shoot hdv, which is why by default when you capture footage it's saved as mpeg 2 (m2t) files.

Finally, yes. You do whatever you are doing with the clip in fusion, export it, then bring that back into the NLE for the final edit.
 
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I have yet to figure it out myself-- very confusing, all the codecs and containers for video and audio. mpeg2, mpeg4, quicktime, ragtime, Hammer time... lions and tigers and bears, oh my :lol: Is there a good book or website dedicated to explaining all the container/codec stuff to get a handle on it all? :huh:

Will Vincent said:
Yes and no.. I wouldn't do the full edit necessarily. Like I said, an image sequence, or uncompressed video that's been deinterlaced would be the best format to bring into fusion. m2t is the format that is stored on tape when you shoot hdv, which is why by default when you capture footage it's saved as mpeg 2 (m2t) files.

Finally, yes. You do whatever you are doing with the clip in fusion, export it, then bring that back into the NLE for the final edit.
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Basically all you need to know is that you want to preserve the quality of your footage as much as possible, so the less compression you use throughout the process the better. Ideally working with uncompressed footage through the whole pipeline would yield the best results, but that's kind of impractical, as the disk space requirements (not to mention data bandwidth) needed are pretty massive.

Your best bet, especially with HD/HDV footage is to do your edit with low resolution proxy files.. so you can get real time playback during the edit, then you replace those with full resolution low/no compression version of your footage for the final render. Adding compositing to the workflow complicates things.
 
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A lossless codec is ok, but lagarith or huffyuv would be a much better choice than cineform -- for compositing work anyway. Cineform is much different in the way it works. Ideally though, for comp work you should still be working with the best quality possible.
 
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Here is what Mike Jones said on this matter, " It depends on which order you want to work. most of the time you'll want to build 'fx shots' and special sequences in After Effects/Combustion/Fusion etc and then export them to bring into the main editing timeline (vegas etc)

Thats much more common, and tends to make more sense, than exporting sequences from the editing system to the compositing and back again. Unless you need to do a lot of editing on those clips before they are ready for Compositing, in which case a quick pre-edit in vegas and then out to the Compositor.

In either case the process is simple - its about understanding lossy and lossless compression formats. What you don't want to do is throw away data on the way out of one software into another; you want to keep it lossless.

Broadly speaking this means using a CODEC that is either Totally Lossless or Visually Lossless. Totally Lossless generally means Uncompressed but the big drawback with this is the files are absolutely massive and you get virtually no real-time performance unless you're running a super-computer. So the better option most often is a Visually Lossless codec - this means that whilst there is technically a small amount of compression going on this compression is considered undetectable to the human eye.

There are a few very common Lossless video formats used for moving a project between one software and another. Some are free, some are extras.. We've been talking about Cineform in this thread and its is a superb visually lossless codec. But the 3 other common ones to try which are freely available are:

- Quicktime 'Component Video' - 422 YUV codec. generic part of Quciktime. This is a great universal codec that can be used by any software system that can access quciktime (which is everyone).

- Blackmagic - 8bit and 10bit 422 and 444 codecs available for free from, http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/software/
These codecs are superb quality and can be used by anyone so long as they download and install them. They're free so thats easy and they use MOV or AVI wrappers. But they do make HUGE files and are somewhat inefficient.

- Sony YUV - 422 codec. 8bit and 10bit. Installed with Vegas. This is a codec unique to Vegas but which uses a generic AVI wrapper and can be used in any software that has access to the codec. So if you're working on the same machine where you have Vegas installed you're good to go.

All four - QT Component Vid, Cineform, BlackMagic and SonyYUV - are perfect for moving projects between systems without generation loss. Cineform and Sony YUV will give the best performance in Vegas; The other two are more universal."

I am trying to try these and still working on it. Any ideas or help on codec and which ones to use when handling footage from canon xh a1 using Sony Vegas Pro 8 would be appreciated.
 
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Digging up some ol dirt, but since the topic of intermediate codec came here
I wanna ask you guys, whether editing native AVCHD format files from Sony cameras in CS 5.5 (with it mercury playback and cuda support and all that jazz) ok? or would you still in 2011, recommend an intermediate codec? or rather render out tiff sequence after rough edit?

thanks
 
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You can get more HD file formats converting software for Windows to make Vegas more compatible with uncompressed HD formats too.

Vegas does compositing. It does not create 3D rendering animation. But, it can do some animation with digital pans and zooms. Vegas also does greenscreen. It's all technique.
 
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I have the RayLight plug in for Vegas. I can render files as HD avi to export or use in any Windows video application program.

When I used After Effects on a Mac, Quicktime was the best format to export from Final Cut.

So, I'd convert the M2T Sony files by rendering them as HD avi file to import into an After Effects like program. The plug-in costs $200.
 
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