Monday, November 14th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Blackmagic Design releases Fusion Studio 18.1


Some of the new features in compositing software Fusion Studio 18.0, as covered in Blackmagic Design’s livestream on DaVinci Resolve 18.0, which features a version of the Fusion toolset.


Previously posted on 21 July 2022. Scroll down for news of the Fusion Studio 18.1 update.

Blackmagic Design has updated Fusion Studio, its compositing software.

New features in Fusion Studio 18.0 include a Custom Poly modifier for creating animatable masks, new blending modes, updates to the paint and duplicate tools, fractional UI scaling, and support for Python 3.

Released in parallel to the Fusion toolset inside Da Vinci Resolve
A version of the Fusion toolset is included in DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design’s colour grading, editing and visual effects software.

As a result, the feature descriptions on the What’s New page on Blackmagic’s website are written for the integrated version of the Fusion toolset within DaVinci Resolve, and include changes unique to it.

In addition, the page has not been updated for the new release, and lists features that were actually added in DaVinci Resolve 17.0 and Fusion Studio 17.0.

Updated 13 November 2022: This is still true on the release of Fusion Studio 18.1: the features listed on the ‘What’s New’ page are actually from Fusion 17.0.

New Custom Poly modifier and blend modes, updates to the paint and duplicate tools
The actual new features in Fusion Studio 18.0 itself include a Custom Poly modifier for creating masks and strokes, which can be animated via expressions.

The Merge node gets a number of new blending modes, shown in the video at the top of this story, and imported PSD files should also retain their blend modes.

The update also adds five new Merge operations, including Conjoint and Disjoint for combining alpha channels, and Mask and Stencil for combining mattes

The paint tool is now GPU-accelerated, and should generate smoother strokes; and the duplicate tool is also now faster, and gets “additional blur, glow and size controls”.

Workflow improvements include fractional UI scaling in Preferences; multi-button mode selection in the Inspector for “multiple tools”; and when working with text, the Text+ colour picker supports live previews.

Support for the current versions of OpenColorIO, OpenEXR and Python
Other updates include support for OpenColorIO 2.1.1 and OpenEXR 3.1.4, the versions of the colour management standard and EXR file format listed in the 2022 VFX Reference Platform specification.

Fusion Studio also now supports “all modern and future” versions of Python 3 for scripting.


Updated 13 November 2022: Blackmagic Design has released Fusion Studio 18.1.

New features include support for Magic Mask, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s AI-trained object isolation toolset, shown in the video above. In addition, the VariBlur and FilmGrain tools are now GPU-accelerated.

Workflow improvements include the option to search for nodes using keywords and categories.

Pricing and system requirements
Fusion Studio 18.1 is available for Windows 10+, macOS 11.0+ and CentOS 7.3+ Linux. New licences of Fusion Studio cost $295. The update is free to existing users.

The Fusion toolset in the free edition of DaVinci Resolve has a maximum image resolution of 16k x 16k and lacks network rendering and advanced playback capabilities. See a feature comparison table.


Read a full list of new features in Fusion Studio 18.1 in the online release notes

Read a full list of new features in Fusion Studio 18.0 in the online release notes