As many had speculated when Blackmagic Design acquired Eyeon Software, the Australian company has shaken the compositing market announcing the release of a free version of Fusion. The compositing software is now available for download, and the free version can be used for “both personal and commercial work” without restrictions. The only features missing are optical flow image analysis tools for retiming, stabilization and stereoscopic 3D work, support for third-party OpenFX plugins, unlimited distributed network rendering and multi user collaboration tools.
Also of note, the previously mentioned features are available in a pro “Studio” version of the software, which has been reduced significantly in price to $995.
Interestingly enough, it’s not only the compositing market that will be
affected. Blackmagic has chosen to avoid rental/subscription-only
licensing and in its press release shows that it intends to take
advantage of its competitors choice to implement it, in order
to gain new users. The company states that “unlike other
software, Fusion 7 Studio doesn’t require annual maintenance fees,
subscriptions, a connection to the cloud, or per node render license
costs. That means customers don’t get tricked into hidden or on going
costly payments for software they’ve already purchased.”
Blackmagic’s move will affect all major compositing software
developers, as
well as serve as a case study for how the rental licensing
model may function in the medium and long term for the
companies that implement it.
Also of note, the press release labels Fusion 7 as a “visual effects
and motion
graphics software”, which seems to point that they intend to further
develop it to compete
with After Effects, among other compositing software.
Quoting Blackmagic Design’s CEO Grant Petty: “Visual effects
software has been expensive for way too long and it’s time that this
changed. (…) Now, with the free version of Fusion, everyone from
individual artists to the biggest studios can create Hollywood caliber
visual effects and motion graphics! When combined with DaVinci Resolve
Lite, customers can get the world’s most advanced tools for editing,
grading, 3D compositing, visual effects and motion graphics, all
absolutely free!”
Read the press release, features comparison chart, download the free version of Fusion 7 and find out more on Blackmagic Design’s website.
As always BlackMagic is demonstrating how business has to be done, even if they put a price of, let’s say, 300€ instead of free, they made an awesome movement.
Finally deep compositing in an affordable (well… more than that) app for compositing… AWESOME!!!
Thanks BlackMagic!
We will acquire the studio version sooner or later, that is for sure!
Cheers.
Fusion does not yet support deep compositing 😉 You can use world position passes and map your footage on cards in 3d space, but that’s something different.
You are totally right, I was in a mistake, but it’s still cool 😀
Cheers.
Attention to translate teh word “deep compositing” from Nuke to Fusion world…absolutely not the same thing.
I recommend you to better understand how Fusion works with its depth tools.
Anyway, I hope that cool marketing runs on a par with capabilities…run Fusion, run 🙂
Sorry… I had to make a second comment:
AWESOME!
took me 10 seconds flat to download the free version when i saw this.
i was actually having a dilemma whether to go with nuke or fusion.
now both are to be had for 0 money.
amazing really.
Why do you say both?
Cheers.
foundry has announced an upcoming free version of nuke week or so back.
non-commercial version but still:
thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/non-commercial/
cheers,
But it is non commercial, so it’s a totally different thing, this can be taken seriously by the pros, meanwhile the Nuke is a useless version worth for learning it or as a hobby, but it’s not worth to invest time on it if you don’t have the grands to acquire it IMHO.
Cheers!
Still wondering if there is an upgrade for my fusion 6.4 license to the pro version. Can’t find any details about existing customers.
nice move, i wonder how it compared to apple motion which is also a very affordable app.
Nice to see that not everybody is following the Adobe-plan (sub/rental only). As said before: awesome…a clever move.
Karamba! I have been waiting for an opening blow on the market gridlocked in the $4000,- pandemonium… but i did not expect a such bold move.
Fusion is for us a main vfx software and i am looking forward of what is going to become of it in the future… thanks blackmagic so far for the fresh wind!
This is just too good. Great news after all the gloom about Autodesk and Adobe’s rental models. Bravo Blackmagic. The features of the free version are incredible.
Really happy to see they didn’t go the rental route but they still need to catch up with Nuke in a few areas. Fusion is awesome for some things, but lacks in other areas where Nuke really shines.
This is great news. Good move BMD.
Wow ! how cool is this, maybe I can stop using photoshop 🙂
awesome news!!
hope to see even more people on that software
it’s really well done especially for FX