It lacks some of advanced features like optical flow and the stereoscopic 3D toolset, along with support for OpenFX plugins, but you do get all of the keying, retiming and colour-management tools.
Network rendering is disabled, and output is limited to Ultra HD resolution, but it’s still a powerful piece of kit.
Price of the commercial edition slashed
Like DaVinci Resolve, the full version of the software – now renamed Fusion Studio – has itself been repriced at $995: a significant drop from its original $2,495, and a fraction of the cost of Nuke, its principal competitor.
In the past couple of years, Resolve has played a disruptive role in the grading market, with many smaller studios electing to build pipelines around the software instead of more expensive turnkey systems.
The parallels aren’t exact: although price is a common complaint for freelancers, Nuke is a fraction of the cost of a Quantel or SGO system, and The Foundry is taking steps to make it more accessible to students.
But still, making a powerful, movie-capable 3D compositing package available for under $1,000 is bound to shake up the market – as is making a version of that package available for free to students and freelancers.
It will be fascinating to see where Blackmagic takes Fusion next – and how The Foundry responds.
See a comparison chart for the free and $995 editions of Fusion 7
Download the free edition of Fusion 7 (Windows only)
