Digital Fusion 4.0: Eyeon upgrades its compositing program.(Digital Fusion 4.0)(Brief Article)

The new version of Digital Fusion, the compositing program from eyeon Software, is fully resolution independent and can work in either 8-, 16-, or 32-bit floating-point color processing, all within the same project. It is now also fully multithreaded.

The first noticeable change over previous versions is the interface, for which eyeon has used a dark, gray tone, which gives the user a more streamlined environment in which to work. More important, though, is the change from one small display window in Version 3.1 to two large side-by-side displays. There are actually four basic modes in which you can set your display windows, and you can modify these by dragging the corner of a display to the desired size.

I have always enjoyed working with Digital Fusion, partly because the workflow for setting up composites and complex effect shots is intuitive and quick. One of the drawbacks has been the inability to view a compositing project in the same `real-time' playback that you can with an editing project. This has changed in Fusion 4 with the addition of RAM caching. This caching `remembers' frames previously rendered, and holds them in RAM for immediate playback and processing. This will give any compositor great performance gains, because you can view a project in real time by clicking the play button on the transport controls. Yon can play your scene backward and forward and even navigate through time using the enhanced playback buttons found in the time ruler.

What makes RAM caching even more significant is that it can be used to accelerate final rendering as well. Fusion will only re-render the frames that have changed since that last time you cached a scene. To set up the RAM cache, you first define a render range of frames in the timeline, then turn on the loop button in the transport controls, then push Play. Fusion will run through the selected range of frames and store them to cache. A green line appears along the bottom of the timeline, showing you the frames that have been cached.

Eyeon has worked hard to make the rendering of effects easier and quicker. Along with the RAM caching enhancement, Fusion 4 includes a completely redesigned Render Manager, which allows the computers on your network, or slaves, to be organized into groups. Flows are sent to one or more groups, and any slave that is a member of a group will immediately start rendering the flow. Slaves can be members of more than one group, with groups being ...