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Still image animation
Hello,
I am a seasoned Avid, FCP 7 & Premiere (and After Effects) editor. Trying Resolve for the first time on a real project. I’m having problems with creating a simple “Ken Burns” effect on a still image with ease-out and ease-in, which is apparently a known problem with Resolve (it looks pretty weird and out of control, doesn’t correspond to anything achievable in other programs in 10 seconds). So I’ve learned the basics of Fusion and managed to get it done properly there, with my still image node being merged with a “merge” node onto a “background” generator node set to 1920×1080. The easing out and in, splines, everything looks fine.
Problem is, this works with small images (1000 pixels). If I use a real-life final image (5000 pixels), the program grinds to a halt playing this. Also, the green line in Fusion which shows the number of frames in memory is significantly shorter, as if Resolve is keeping the entire image in memory at every frame, instead of just saving the 1920×1080 frame each time. That green line is much longer (corresponding to a much longer playable range) if I use a smaller image.
I’ve tried playing with auto-domain and RoI but it didn’t help. I feel like I’m missing a really small step here, very close to my goal after struggling with timeline-based animation for weeks.
Any ideas are welcome. Thanks a lot.
P.S. iMac 5K 2015 i7 4Ghz 24 Gb RAM Radeon R9 M395 2GB on which After Effects or Premiere eat 5000 pixels for breakfast without blinking.
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10 Replies
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Add a crop node right before the media out and see if that helps.
You can also try just rendering out from fusion and importing the new clip into the media pool. -
Thank you. The “crop” node doesn’t have any apparent effect. I still have only a dozen green (playable) frames at any one time. As Resolve calculates the next one, the green line starts eliminating frames from its beginning, keeping the playable range extremely short. This make rendering out from Fusion unfeasable because I can’t even see what my output will look like (I’m talking about a 10-second simple zoom here…) Playback is at 2.3 frames/sec and memory never goes above 50%.
BTW, if I use the exact same image file and just put it on a 1920×1080 timeline and turn on Dynamic Zoom, it plays silky smooth. But that option gives me very little control on keyframes. So it’s not a memory/graphics problem it seems.
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I know that in Resolve 15 there have been a lot of issues reported with Fusion playback and with the cache but most of this is fixed or in the process of being fixed in 16 beta.
If you are working in Resovle 15 you can also ‘try’ right-clicking on the media out node on the fusion page and selecting “cache to disk”.
I just tried a similar setup to what you described with a much larger image in Resolve 16 beta and it seems smooth and caches the entire comp to memory. -
Can’t use “cache to disk” I’m afraid as I’m not using the “Studio” version (although I probably will later if I get through this project alive).
BTW I’m on the current 16 beta (16.0.0B.033).
Thanks again.
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It’s weird but it seems that if I do this then Resolve behaves, but I don’t understand why:
MediaIn > Letterbox (1920×1080) > DVE > MediaOut
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That’s great. I’d have to see the setups before and after to see exactly what’s going on in the flow. It may be that you’ve discovered a bug.
If you can reproduce it multiple times while starting fresh then I’d suggest submitting a bug report to BMD. -
False alarm. It’s *not* improving with the DVE+Letterbox setup, I think I had a false positive there. Used RAM rarely goes above 20% but previews are slow as hell to calculate, moving the playhead around is very sluggish and Fusion never manages to hold more than 40 frames in memory. You have to reduce the render range to make it stop going in loops over itself, calculting frames that were cleared from RAM on the last pass… I must be doing something wrong here. It can’t be *that* complicated.
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I use the studio version and an NVIDIA GPU with more grunt and particularly more RAM. 2 gig is lean for a GPU. Regardless, it should work.
Do you have Playback>Render Cache>smart on? If not it will quickly render what it needs so you can see smooth playback. Select your render codec and render drive in Settings (little cog icon bottom right) 16Beta4 is the latest and it keeps getting better. I think you are on Beta3
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Render Cache was set to User, I set it to Smart but it didn’t help.
Just look at this preview progress. It takes around 30 seconds to get there (which is a lot compared to After Effects), then it starts unloading frames from the beginning. It’s impossible to get any preview of your animation (100 frames in my case).
Just did “Check for Updates” and didn’t see any, but I see that Beta 4 is out. Will download that and try again.
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I *was* on Beta 4 already… 16.0.0B.033 is the proper name for it, as I found out after reinstalling.
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