Has anyone messed around with Fusion? When I was in college I messed around with it a little bit and it's a very robust program that I don't yet grasp. There's a lot of hierarchy involved and making node connections, but it works really well if you want to do advanced video editing. It must be good enough for my college professors to teach it in the upper level video editing classes.

http://www.eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWeb/Products/fusion5/fusion5.aspx

All I know is that it is the real deal if you want to rock the world. It will take ANYTHING... you can mix 8bit with 32bit and do insane 3d stuff. Seems overkill for stringing and correcting timelapse to me!

Yeah probably. But Fusion is good stuff if a person wanted to get into hardcore compositing, rotoscoping, and madness.

I haven't opportunity to try Fusion, but I saw it compared many times to Apple Shake, which is a really good thing, as Shake is one of the most incredible render engine ever made.

As Jay said, it is probably oversized for timelapse work, but in another way, Photoshop is never seen like a oversized image processing tool, while people usually don't use more than 10% of its features...

What is really a big difference in Shake, and so I guess in Fusion, is the node based composition. It allows you to choose the exact order of manipulations, where for example AE just force you to use its own inner render pipeline, unless tricky precomping. That means you can easily choose to crop before scaling, which is far more logical (get rid of parts I don't want, THEN scale down) than the opposite (AE of course scales down your whole layer regardless to the masks you may have set up). I feel my example is not really demonstrative, but believe me : I will never switch back to AE since I've tasted Shake. Fusion is certainly a piece of software that many of us should have a look to...