Agreed - lens distortion correction is one of the additional features in Studio … and would make a difference. Fusion eats resources before it gets out of bed whatever you’re using it for. So not really “Stuidio making better use”, just that a feature that is useful essential for M2P D-Log avoids using the identical Fusion module in both.
But - for performing the same editing there is no difference between the two.
A 25 sec Fusion project took 9 hours to render … only to find out I’d forgotten to turn a node back on after some tweaking.
The render time can half on studio though as it will use your GPU more than your CPU. In free studio it’s the reverse. Playback also will use more GPU than CPU in studio. This is what I was getting at by “using your spec” better. It’s more efficient. It doesn’t give you much increased functionality but it does give you a quicker output.
I’m not championing it, I use the free version and have done for some time but I get roughly 1 minute of 4k lens corrected output for every 20 minutes of render time. It really grinds my gears and once I’m working again (thank you covid) I’ll be going to studio.
An interesting phone-call with a very helpful guy at BlackMagic support in Knutsford …
Q. Same edit/render on same home computer … any speed advantages with Studio?
A. (summary) Overall, virtually none! … unless you have a multiple GPU configuration that is supported by Resolve.
So - when you get Studio, it will be interesting to see if your experience agrees.
Obviously there will be an advantage using the built in lens correction as opposed to using Fusion … but on this he said that the rendering of the Fusion clip will also be pretty much the same in Studio.
Resolve is very good at loading what it needs. Admittedly, these clips aren’t high bit-rate 1080, but it will play stright from the Edit tab @ 32x speed without many frame drops.
