WHAT GOOD IS IT TO HAVE POWERFUL HARDWARE...
...unless you’ve got software that will use it?

I set up my After Effects project, tweaked my keyframes and set it to render this simple composite consisting of about 12 layers. I hit render and After Effects tells me that it is going to take 20 hours! About a half-hour into this render, I come back and look at the estimated time to completion and although it has dropped a little, it still says something like 18 hours. I immediately call up Windows NT’s Task Manager to look at processor utilization performance. What I saw was no secret. We all know that After Effects for NT is just not optimized for the Dual Pentium II 300MHz (w/392 MB of RAM) it was running on. Still, I was hoping that such a fast machine was really going to crunch this composite. Our deadline was the next day…

DIGITAL FUSION TO THE RESCUE
Then, as if the angels of digital creation peered down at me with mercy, our copy of Digital Fusion arrived. After having heard incredible things about it from a compositor that was working with us on this project, we ordered it hoping that just some of his claims were accurate. After installation, we quickly set up our FLOW (as a project is called in Digital Fusion) and hit render.

Two hours later the project was done, and the entire time the Usage History graph in Task Manager was almost pegged at 100% for both processors. . (The dips in the CPU Usage History graph I've attached are attributed to the Reads + Writes over our painfully slow 100 Mbps LAN. Fibre Channel... take me away!)

POWERFUL COMPOSITING AND MATTE CREATION TOOL
DF has many features found in other "high-end" compositing software like Avid’s Media Illusion and Discreet Logic Flint and Flame. The ability to create and manipulate mattes has never been easier and more powerful on the NT platform.

Because Digital Fusion has an event based flow interface, you use LOADERS to load media (image sequences, AVIs, etc…) and MERGEs to composite your layers on top of each.

Let’s say you’ve got an Alpha Channel Matte that looks great except for that one object that you accidentally left in your 3D render. Instead of re-rendering the entire layer or running through some correction pass with another matte, just right click the preview window in DF, select EFFECT MASK and choose any number of methods of instantly modifying the Alpha Matte. In addition, you have multiple controls for that operation – Level, Edge Softening, Border Width, Paint Mode…

Or let's say you need to fine tune the Alpha Channel of a foreground element. Insert a Matte Controller in your FLOW and you instantly have many controls - Matte Blur, Matte Expand/Contract, Matte Gamma, Matte Threshold, Garbage Matte, Matte Combination and Operations...

... you start to get the idea that this is designed from the ground up to handle Alpha Channels and Compositing with industrial strength.

"INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH MAGIC"
This is the Digital Fusion tag line and it is very applicable. My own digital studio recently got a demo of Flame running on an SGI Octane. Granted, the dedicated graphics hardware made the real-time effects and composite previews on the monitor look real nice, but we found that when it came time to render final D1 quality output, Digital Fusion on a Dual Pentium II 300 MHz rendered faster. I don’t have any hardcore benchmark numbers or data to show you on this but it was our impression that this was the case. I talked directly to eyeon Software Inc. about this and they claim that these are the same results that other customers have echoed to them in direct testing with Digital Fusion against Flame.

This software has spline controls for all animatable parameters, a timeline to help layout temporal parameters for your layers and effects, versatile motion tracking capability, color correction controls, powerful Boolean CHOPS (channel operations), warps, motion blurs... the list goes on.

Digital Fusion also runs the same 5D Monster Plugins that run on Discreet Logic's Inferno system. These effects include all the ones you see in high end video and film production - Defocus, Crash Zoom, Variable Focus, Directional Blur, Velocity Blur, Sharpen, Clean, Trace, Dither, Lens Flares, Clouds, Smoke, Rain, Snow, Glass, Lightning, Kaleidoscope, Pool, Ripple, Puddle, Pixfly, Flames, Rover, Four types of Bubbles, Pixflo, Smear, Morpheus, Bleb, Candle, Fireball, Plip, Rainbow, Rays, SlowMo, Turbulo, Vortex, AntiBand, Jaws, JawsAnim, Movie, Shaky, TV, Typo, etc.

In addition, our copy of ULTIMATTE worked beautifully as an integrated plugin. With Ultimatte, DF's powerful Matte Controls and an artist who knows what he is doing, you will have the ability to pull the cleanest mattes.

Also, there is a Post version of DF that serves as the film resolution package. Though not reviewed here, it has features above and beyond those of the DF Version 2. These include 64 bit color fidelity, Ultimatte matting technology built in, 64 bit plugins, 10 bit YUV, and support for Film Formats. For more info click here.

YOU NEED THIS SOFTWARE
As an owner, Creative Director and artist for a very busy and growing digital studio, I can only say how important Digital Fusion has become to us. We just finished 15 minutes of pure CGI for an upcoming TV show with 4 artists in less than 2 months. I can honestly say that without Digital Fusion we would have NEVER made the deadline.

Here is a partial list of other studios you may have heard of that use Digital Fusion:

• Digital Domain
• Rezn.8
• Station X
• Digital Muse
• Computer Cafe
• Saban Entertainment
• Pyros Pictures
• Blur Studios
• Enigma Animation Productions
• Will Vinton Studios
• The Big Machine

THE FEW PROBLEMS WITH DIGITAL FUSION
There are times when Digital Fusion can be a little buggy, but its functionality and productivity far exceed the problems created by software crashes. The manual recommends not using image sequences over a network, but instead recommends using local striped drives for compositing. Because our recent project had over 100 GB of images sequences and layers on our server (running on a 100 Mbps network), it would have been time consuming to keep copying all of the necessary components to a local drive every time we wanted to do a comp. As long as we used UNC file path names, we minimized the problems with network latency. Windows NT native directory services will be much improved in NT 5.0 but that is in the future.

We are starting a wish list of things that we'd like to see in Digital Fusion in the future. Among these are the ability to accept image sequences that do not have padded names, standard spinners on parameter values, the ability to TAB through numeric value fields for quicker keyboard entry, and the ability to use Photoshop PSD files.

WHAT'S IN STORE FOR THE FUTURE
When I talked to eyeon Software about the future of Digital Fusion, they reinforced their commitment to integrate newer and faster features into the existing software. If you are serious about your compositing, matte creation and video/film image processing (and you don't already have this software), you need to have a good look at this package. Strong features, fast optimized code and an intuitive interface make this tool a must-have for today's Digital Studio.


Bryan Ierardi is one of the owners of Engram Digital, a Greater Los Angeles-based digital production studio. You can reach him at Bryan@EngramDigital.com.

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