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For those who don’t know the series: Fridays for Fusion explores the community tools that make Blackmagic Design Fusion more useful and its users marginally less sarcastic. Fusion is Blackmagic’s node-based compositing environment, available as Fusion Studio and within DaVinci Resolve. This week: three tools for getting the right images out of a comp, plus a small accomplice for bringing them back.
One problem, several enthusiastic Savers
Multiple Savers in one composition are useful. Alternative treatments, intermediate renders and final outputs can share the same upstream work. The compositing graph stays connected, everything looks organised, and for a brief moment you experience the dangerous sensation of being in control.
Then you press Render. Render All Savers takes its name rather literally: all active Savers participate, with the composition’s render range providing the starting point. Wanting just one output does not count as telling the software. It is merely a private hope.
The entertainment escalates when different outputs need different ranges. One branch needs frames 100 to 180, another needs 140 to 155, and the third is “just a quick test frame”. You are now the compositor, the render dispatcher and the person who must remember which box was unticked before lunch. Three community tools address different parts of this workflow tax.
Saver Manager: appoint an adult
Alexey Bogomolov’s Saver Manager 1.22 puts the administration of existing Savers into a small palette. Select all Savers, enable all of them, or disable the unselected ones. Solo Selected is the attraction: select the output you actually need and stop the others from helpfully volunteering. A button this mundane should not inspire gratitude. Here we are.
Saver IN and Saver OUT manage individual working ranges, including taking values from the current render range. The palette also provides access to an output’s folder and creates Loaders from Savers. This keeps routine output checks in one place instead of turning every render into a guided tour of the node graph.
The Reactor package is listed under Scripts/Comp and depends on Loader from Saver. Its script lives under Scripts/Comp/Saver Tools/Saver_Manager.lua. Look for a composition script rather than a new image-processing node. Even useful software occasionally expects us to read the label.
RangeSaver: this output, these frames
RangeSaver puts a frame range on the output itself, with a Solo control for rendering that node alone. The first branch can retain 100 to 180 while the second keeps 140 to 155. The test frame no longer requires changing the global range and making a solemn promise to restore it afterwards. Such promises rarely survive contact with a deadline.
For outputs that cover different sections of a comp, the practical advantage is persistence: the numbers live beside the output they describe. In our test, it worked without drama. That is a compliment. Render administration has enough opportunities for personal growth already.
RangeSaver in the Blackmagic Design forum
LifeSaver: EXR gets its own department
Andrew Hazelden’s LifeSaver replaces the output node rather than managing existing Savers. Version 3.0 uses EXRIO for multi-channel and multi-part OpenEXR output, with customisable compression.
Additional image inputs are added in the Channels tab. Enable the corresponding export part, give it a distinct layer name and connect the image. Disable unused parts; duplicate part names are something EXRIO objects to, with rather more justification than most production naming disputes. A preview selector chooses the input passed downstream, while the LifeSaver Selected script can insert the node and connect selected tools as inputs.
Versioning, UUIDs, output-directory creation and filename tokens handle more of the pipeline housekeeping. Tokens include ${COMP}, ${NODE}, ${VERSION}, ${DATE} and ${FRAME}. Render Current Frame, Render Selected, Render All and Network Render controls sit on the node. Rendering one frame should not feel like a luxury feature, but production has taught us to celebrate selectively.
LifeSaver writes EXR. It does not replace a normal Saver for every delivery format. If your job needs other formats, keep those Savers; if it needs multi-part EXRs with repeatable names, LifeSaver is addressing the relevant problem.
Bonus: bring the render back
Bogomolov’s Loader from Saver 1.66 creates Loaders beside their corresponding Savers and works with multiple outputs. It handles default sequence padding, scans existing files to suggest sequence numbering and preserves container filenames for MOV, AVI, MP4 and MXF. The package also includes conversion to Saver Plus and versioning buttons.
That suits the familiar “render this expensive branch, then load it back” routine. Rebuilding the path by hand immediately afterwards is a curiously ceremonial way to tell the computer something it already knows. Saver Manager lists this package as a dependency, so the two belong together.
For the other end of file management, our earlier Fridays for Fusion on Power Renamer 25 covers batch path and filename changes. Between naming files and rendering the correct ones, we are dangerously close to doing some compositing.
Choose your administrative relief
Saver Manager handles several ordinary Savers. RangeSaver gives outputs their own persistent frame ranges. LifeSaver expands EXR output itself. Loader from Saver closes the loop when the result needs to return to the comp. The Reactor tools are available through the community package manager, while RangeSaver is supplied through the linked forum thread.
Try them on a copy of a representative comp and check the output paths, active Savers, frame ranges and resulting files before committing a live job. A five-frame check is better than spending Saturday discovering the wrong branch rendered perfectly.
About the author
Manuel Kotulla works as a freelance Creative Director, Motion Designer, and 3D / VFX Artist in Hamburg. Previously, he spent many years as Creative Director for Animation & VFX at the Serviceplan Group. He has a passion for Houdini, cinematic lighting, and his Fuji camera.
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