[Fusion] UltraSplitter
Certain large scale projects intended for large format and high resolution displays require very specific delivery specs. Most commonly a client requires you to deliver the final asset split up into individual smaller screens that will be fed into a content management system. For example one of my clients commonly needed animations for a 5760x6480 display. The CMS required multiple 1920x1080 videos that would be displayed simultaneously.
For one screen it is no issue to have a single template project file, however this becomes increasingly cumbersome as the variety of layouts required increases. Displays that we were required to deliver for ranged from 3x3 1920x1080 arrays to 12x1 superwide arrays.
With Blackmagic Fusion’s memory efficiency and multi-threading, as well as it’s ability to render multiple outputs at once it was an ideal tool to automate the final spit and render process in. This tool is a fast and efficient way to set up fusion comps to render all necessary outputs at once. Simply enter the destination folder, name prefix, desired file format, and sub-screen resolution and this tool will fill out the fusion comp with everything needed to hit “render“ immediately. The naming convention used adds a suffix with an identifier for the screen index; 0_0 being the top left screen, 0_1 being leftmost column, second row, 1_0 being second column, first row, etc. This tool gains efficiency as the screens scale as the source file only needs to be loaded once for all the outputs, as opposed to alternate solutions such as NLEs or After Effects that only render one output at once and load the source file for each and every output task. The script also has support for resizing the input sequence in case the animation was built at non-native resolution, as well as a check for screen rotation in the instance that the final display screens are mounted in portrait orientation but still require landscape oriented renders.
Utilizing the fusion comp generated with this tool along side a renderfarm manager I was able to increase the speed of final file preparation by many orders of magnitude, saving render wranglers and QC checkers hundreds of hours of work over the course of a few projects.
