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I found this video by chance today... For those nostalgic and those who want to know how software was back then.

I used Fusion quite a bit at my last job. I was able to import whole scenes into Fusion and using the camera with the rendered AOVs I was able to do some additional compositing (lens flare, bloom, cryptomatte, etc). I also had built a full earth in Fusion (3D) with 16k textures. It worked pretty well. Back then the courses I relied on at the beginning were from CMIVFX (RIP Chris) and FXPHD. One youtuber used to post quite a bit of Fusion content but kind of disappeared for a while is Con-Fusion. https://www.youtube.com/@ConFusion/videos While I preferred Nuke when I was using it for some indie film work, Fusion is capable for this kind of stuff. We used Fusion Studio versus the FIR (Fusion in Resolve Studio) because it was more agile. You don't have to create a resolve project and go through that whole process just to dig right into a shot. Also some nodes weren't exposed in FIR versus the Fusion Studio at that time. I'm not sure about 18.5. Back then I thought if you buy Resolve Studio you get Fusion Studio for free as it's tied to the same key (but don't quote me on that.. check for yourself). I didn't try Natron as it seems like the project was side-lined for years and as many lawyers and bean counters Foundry has, I assumed Natron would be shut down eventually. Also, unless it gets more popular over the next few years, Nuke and Fusion have it beat for 3rd party support and scripts.

Davinci is truly great for editing and general post stuff. The Fusion page can certainly composite, but one thing I'm learning with all these various software mainstays and their alternatives - the ones you subscribe to, the ones you can buy, the ones that are free - is that you get whatever the respective feature set is, but you also then get, or don't get, whatever the tutorial ecosystem is that accompanies it. So, just on design and artwork, Adobe means you have to subscribe to the Cloud to get whichever software from them that you're after, but you also get thousands of tutorials and hundreds of good to excellent tutorial channels and courses with it. And for my purposes I'm starting to now see that as being nearly as important as what the software can do. Fusion can composite and there are a handful of courses or videos out there showing a few things, but you'lll then see long Reddit pages with various posters unhappy that it can't do whatever Nuke or (in some instances) AE can do, or you'll have some guidance from one guy on one channel, but not much more. Whereas if you say 'okay, I'll composite in AE' the big problem will be to decide which of the many tutorial guides to watch first. I've actually moved towards doubling-back and learning / relearning all the Adobe stuff I never really 100% knew, which will keep me busy for a while. This is a longwinded way of saying I recommend you do a rough mucking-around render-to-Davinci post experiment first, and see whether you end up going 'yeah, this looks fine', or whether the process makes you slap your forehead and pick AE instead. Here's a guy below doing some stuff in C4D with Arnold and then sending it to Fusion.

To add from my experiences with takes: It's very well suited to work with materials, that should propagate or change through different variations of a scene You can build super lean, super smart scene files, that cut your time by factor 10. I have set up a scene with 28 hi-res product scans in several environments, multiple camera angles, material variations and different screen rations. The team receiving this assets was completely flabbergasted how I could achieve this in the given timeframe. You can also build completely messed up scenes where you simple can't untangle the overrides anymore. As in: "Better start from scratch"-spaghetti-tangled. The difference is: You need to stay super organized in complex take-scene-files, and: Pay attention! If you make just a little misstep somewhere: Clean it up immediately, it has the seed of evil spaghetti in it 🙂 A life-saving feature: You can copy a take to a new document at every time. So there's always an exit-strategy out of takes-land. Chester's advice is also really good. Before tackling a huge job, start small first.

The great @everfreshonce gave me this advice for working with xrefs, and it has never failed me: " use xrefs. no files get ultimatively broken by them, if so it’s easily fixable. but you can avoid that trouble all together, if you obey the follwing rules: never ever tick the hierarchy tickbox in the xrefs options, and don’t mess with the hierarchy in your xrefs. only make hierarchy canges in the master file that gets referenced. untick the “relative file path” tickbox in the xrefs options in the file tab right from the get go. there’s a bug with relative file paths in xrefs, resulting in everything gets greyed out (easily fixable though by cutting the xref out and pasting it in again), but still, other weird things also can happen with relative paths, so better just use absolute paths… since you are not working in a team it doesn’t matter anyways. be aware that material changes don’t get stored, so make your material adjustments alsoin the original file. that’s it, if you follow these rules xrefs are perfectly stable and reliable. i have used them in every production since 8 years, never had a single show stopper. and it saves you a LOT of trouble in bigger productions. " Thanks again, everfresh! And good luck, Davetwo! :)