263 flame artist world wide?

Flame Between Renders
105

That doesn’t make any sense.

That may be the case for freelancers who do only shot based work, but can’t be generalized to all freelancers.

Freelancers do use conform and also video i/o, and some will use connected conform as well.

Also Flare is only available via VARs. Yet VARs are a good fit for big accounts, but not 1-2 license freelancers. Have you tried working with a VAR as a freelancer? Good luck getting their attention, especially if you say no to all their various upsells, which would only negate any savings. VARs need to make money, they don’t do it with passing a license through, unless they can tack something else on. That’s why the’re called ‘Value Added Resellers’.

Having said all this - the distinctions between Flame and Flare on a feature basis for 50% of the price is curious. I think Nuke does a better job with its Indie subscription and what features you have available.

But the Flare feature set presumably is there to meet larger studio needs who need extra seats, it’s not there for small shops. Which also explains the availability of the licenses. For all intents it seems like a legacy product that continues to exist for specific customers, but is an even more odd duck in the already hard to find Flame in Autodesk software lineup.

106

Everyone makes their own choices for a their own reasons, and that’s ok.

To quote an old Scott ‘It’s a Scottish instrument that they’ve taken over, and that’s all right, as long as they play them well.’

I think in today’s market being an xyz artist is a bit of a concept of the past. Today’s tools are very different, today’s demands are very different, today’s environments are very different.

While many of these tools are 30+ years old, many have faced sudden extinction, and hitching your wagon to a singular player is risky. While Flame is hanging on pretty well, all it takes is a different CEO and a dip in the economy, and it’s the end of the road. We’ve seen this with countless other 30+ year old apps that had loyal artists.

While some of these tools do certain things better, easier, faster than others - overall there is significant amount of feature parity. So everyone is replaceable and it’s merely a matter of who can get the job done with the right quality, on time and on budget. Which was where this thread started - is Nuke too expensive to fit this formula? Flame is in that same canoe.

And relationships - people get hired on relationships, not which brand of tool they have in the bag.

The hardware we run on is very interchangeable. Pretty much anything can run on a stock Mac, Windows, or Linux system from the big OEMs. And they don’t have to be specialized. No more big SGI machines or other unique hardware that makes switching hard. Many of us run Flame & Nuke & Fusion on the same systems without any issue.

We all have preferences, or enjoy certain tools more than others. Sometimes this may have as little to do with the tool and more with the community that exists around it.

We also face risks from AI tools and people question if any of us are really needed going forward? Luckily there are still enough clients that say ‘yes’ and know the difference they get. But don’t take that for granted with a new generation of agencies, studios, and film makers.

Ignoring a competitors tool is something all of us would do at our own risk.

107

Definitely agree here. I’ll add some of my favorite ever comp tricks are things I’ve directly ripped off some incredible Nuke scripts I’ve seen and done my best to adapt them for flame. At the end of the day, the two softwares are exceedingly similar. A flame artist jumping to Nuke and Vice versa is not really all that complex of a leap. Regarding whether AI will make my job obsolete: if we’re at that level, there’s gonna be a lot bigger issues on a civilization level than how the vfx get down for Captain America 15 or whatever and to be honest there’s not a lot any of us can do about that. You can say “skill up” or whatever but eventually even the training of the models will be developed by different models and the fractal continues to spiral in and out. Best to just meet some deadlines before you die LOL

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109

If that works for you, totally fine.

I do a lot of color and need a reference display. So Video I/O is not optional. Seriously!

111

I don’t have one to test, going by the documentation:

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image1048×315 7.97 KB

So you have a BMD or AJA card in your system and are running Flare?

Not broadcast monitoring as in HDMI out, but as in SDI out to FSI Monitor.

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113

I prefer doing shot comps in Flare. Less distractions. I don’t even have a Flame license assigned to me.

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114

Funfact:
Just counted the Studio List out of curiosity and there already are almost 300 entries, without that list being finished.

115

I do wonder though, how many of those studios are a guy sitting in his undies working on a Mac mini.

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116

:person_raising_hand:
Hi!

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117

Because it’s the 21st century I’m wondering how many of those studios are a guy or girl sitting in somebody else’s undies that they bought in an auction from ebay, working on a hackintosh.

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