30 years of Flame = 30 Autodesk swag bundles to give away! 🎂🎁

[mikeparsons]

When we bought out first flame it came on an sgi 4d70GT as the onyx did not yet exist.

It was also before discreet logic so Gary Tregaskis flew to Malaysia and did the install himself. This is before real-time capture and Sirius cards so you captured footage by transferring shots to the abekas a-60 then transferring to flame over Ethernet. 10 base T Ethernet as this is before even 100 never mind gigabit.

This took time and was a pain in the ass so we asked could we use the a-64 instead as it had double the storage. Gary agreed but found his a-60 drivers didn’t work so he went and sat on a personal iris we had in the 3D room and wrote a new driver. Then we took the disk off the a-60 and tried to add that to the a-64 as well but for some reason it never worked.

Fast forward about 5 years and we have a visit from Peter Barber and Andy Stanton to tell us something like ‘hey you guys are killing it you should buy a flame’ to which I said ‘we already have one’.

This caused a lot of consternation and we were basically accused of having a cracked flame we had a receipt to Gary but what really proved it was the photos of Gary doing the install and his hotel and flight bills. Apparently we got lost in the sale to discreet logic and the ensuing legal shuffles with animal etc.

At this point we realised we hadnt had any software updates in like 3 years as they had abandoned the 4d70GT as a host and were writing for onyx and Sirius. They had also moved from iris gl to open gl as their main reason for dropping support. This became relevant as we found we were still paying annual support to someone.

Peter and I had worked together at VHQ in Singapore and Andy Stanton was ex Abekas and had sold me the a-64 and a whole abekas suite in Hong Kong as well as the a-64, a-60s in Malaysia and everyone felt bad. So we bought a new flame running on a massive onyx with everything installed, even got the rack of stream audio stuff that never worked. I had to lie to my girlfriend about how much we paid for it all as it remains the most expensive thing I ever bought mostly I remember the bill for 50,000 usd for 2 gig of dual interleaved ram. Even the 1x CD player cost over a grand.

It’s a fun memory of a time when the flame was like the future. Running on an onyx 2 with infinite reality and 8 150mhz mips chips when the macs next doors were running at 16 was the equivalent of light speed. A year later we swapped all the processors to 300mhz and I think that cost over 100 grand too.

I can get the same computer on eBay today for less than 100 bucks. The only thing stopping me is it’s collection only…

[mikeparsons]

Tony Morias film editing company in Hong Kong was PPS post production shop. He later setup video post where we bought the first Harry’s in Asia.

[paul_round]

So many memories,
My first ever Flame job, using the tracker for the first time, magic!
I remember laying stuff off to tape, with no clip management, I would put together a long clip with paper slates for each shot, then playing out to D1.
Using batch for the first time on 12 Monkeys, (1994), very flaky, but it showed the future.
Having to hard partition the stone for different resolutions.
Getting the Modular keyer on Inferno on the Onyx, but not on Flame on the Octane.
Many more, too many to mention.
And now it’s available on a laptop!!

Incredible times, many people throughout the years have said “Flame won’t last”
But here we are, 30 years on and still Flaming!!

[mikeparsons]

The annual should I stop paying for maintenance and buy a Mac with shake instead…

[TimC]

wow Britt! spanning the generations with Flame! epic! Tell mr Yoon i say hi!

FLAME ON

[MindyD]

I can vividly remember getting a VHS tape with a demo of the modular keyer and watching it with the crew as if we were watching a space shuttle launch.

Also, a career moment around the same time when I was working on the opening sequence for SNL with the NBC runner standing at my office door waiting to run the actual TAPE over to the studio by 11 PM before it aired that night. And still a regret that I was too frkn tired to make it to the party that night.

Also when the courtroom clerk at jury duty wanted to clarify that I was a fire thrower in a circus. And when Linkedin listed my skills as “flame retardancy.”

[chq]

Favorite memory of Flame over the last 30 years…. How do you pick your favorite child? It could be learning from Russel Weaver while he built from scratch the storage raid that hung off the original VGXT at Click3x. Maybe it could be the feeling of watching clients faces as you played down a final days ahead of schedule after pulling off what they thought would be a re-shoot. It could the sense of satisfaction of watching your students and/or assistants really get it and start to pass information along to the next gen of artists. Could it be the sound of your client truely expressing their gratitude for whatever impossible task you just pulled off. I think I can narrow it down to two. First, the memory of the excitement I still get with a new release providing more and better tools to create the visual solutions to problems we haven’t even thought could occur. Second, and probably the favorite memory is the feeling of being able to do what I love for a living and as an artist because of the tools available to me in flame. That you discreet. Thank you autodesk

[dave]

My favorite flame memory would have to be the first time I ever saw a flame suite.
I was getting a tour of avenue edit in Chicago durning collage and they showed us this big room with someone working on beer spots and had one of the biggest wacom tablets I ever saw in person.

It all seemed so cool.

That was 20 years ago and I never managed to get my hands working with flame until recent years where it’s become so much more accessible.

Seeing artists do their thing on it always seemed like magic. Especially compared to how fast they could work vs me and my after effects.

[hBomb42]

Did it have a big aircraft aluminum sculpture over the desk? If so, that was Monty’s room. Shame what happened to that company.

[dave]

I don’t remember if the room had that or not. I was geeking out on all the tech in room. not to mention the refrigerator size computers in the machine room

[schmagen]

I was a Shake compositor. My first Flame session with clients I probably had no business running. I was at a tiny shop and everyone but me was out on a production. Something happened and the Flame went down. I got Autodesk Support (circa 2008) on the phone and they saved my hide. With the tower in the machine room, I could run out to wipe the sweat from my brow unseen. In the room, I was comping on my laptop with Shake trying to play it cool with the client like everything was fine until the Flame was back up. Rendered those puppies out, ingested them into the revived Flame, and played them down; total smoke and mirrors. That day I learned the value of a good producer, how wonderful the unsung heroes of Autodesk Support were, and that “fake it ’til you make it” can work. I never saw that creative director again, but Flame has been by my side ever since.

[Swn]

What’s up? I never post here but this feed is awesome. Actually just a few weeks ago flame saved me. I’ve been fortunate to have been working on an immersive interactive experience for the past few months. One of the chapters we were working on was really falling short creatively. After spending weeks in houdini and xparticles to get the look we wanted and dealing with crazy long render render times I finally decided to give it a try in Flame. For those that know me I’m not a mega expert at flame particles but I definitely know more than most. I had it looking good in less than a day!!! I rendered out the 8K square 4200 frame sequence @8 samples in - - - less than 2 hours - - - on my imac pro!!! (no motion blur) GTFU. It look longer to export the sequence than render. I then ran it through gigapixel because I needed 15k for the venue and it held up perfectly. Then into after effects to fit it to the space and each projector UV. Flame to the rescue - again!

Also I’ve been Flaming since 1995, to put things into perspective.

-Randie Swanberg

Check it out. https://f.io/iKt3luta

[MindyD]

I also very fondly remember the “Charles Quinn trick of the day” back when I was on nights 150 years ago. Thanks for those @chq

[Sinan]

• Waiting for the Discreet Logic Technical Bulletin to fall into the backwaters that we were in.
• Having the first version upgade from v4.0 to v4.4 on a DAT tape and with it came the particle system.
• Trying to make sense of the “bagel thread” on flame-news.
• Trying to find the entrance to Dean St. 10, Discreet Logic HQ, London.
• Feeling woozy when a trick of mine was published on fxguide.com

[Bjorn_Benckert]

I been on discreet boxes atleast monday to friday since 1997 and one of the better memories are from last week when I found out we had won a VFX Clio Silver award for a film we did not even know was submitted.

Clio Awards – Silver Winner Vfx 2022 – Servpro – Syndicate

[chq]

Are you calling me old?

[gizmorivera]

When i was a assistant editor…i went to drop off some digibetas…and saw a henry and a flame…i fell in love with the flame UI.

[DanCullen]

Back in 1997 sitting down in front of a Flint and slowly working out how to use it through trial and error and eventually watching my first station ident being broadcast on St Patricks Day
Those were the days of all nighters and sleeping under the desk to get the renders off the Accom in time to get to air.

[Codekayne]

Ok here’s mine, pretty recent but honestly, you guys and this community made me the very very young flame artist that I am today (still a complete newbie).

It’s 2015, I hear about flame for the first time in my life from a friend. He’s like : “man, it’s crazy, it’s a big room, cozy, big computer, fancy screens, one artist and it’s black magic, I swear to god we can’t compete!”
I was shoked by how excited he was talking about it. At the time I was like : “ok, obscure software, big pay, not for me, I don’t have the brain for it”.

Fast forward to 2019, I’m head of post production at your typical ad agency and I meet and work for the first time with a flame artist. He’s like: “Yeah flame, here in Paris we are maybe 10, 15 people tops, more or less, you know that soft used to cost like 500k, heck, there was only ONE flame (inferno) in Paris at the beginning”.
I’m excited, I want in, I’m attracted by the speed, the wacom tablet, all these gestures, it is black magic.
Plus, he always had stories and bits of “how it was” in the 90s/00s and it captivated me every single time, I was always asking for more.

Comes COVID here in France, my workload is unbearable and I’m post producing 15 commercials per month, crazy rythm. I’m thinking, that’s it, I quit. I’ll be a flame artist now!

All the old timers that I know here in Paris are incredibly supportive and motivates me to go on an official training and so I did in January 2022! The trainer told me all the good old stories, the passion, the very small community, the story of discreet, man I felt like I was joining the Avengers for real.

We are now in April, I’m of course still learning and struggling but I have a mentor to guide me and I already have calls from shops that want to test me and give me work.

This is really all thanks to you, you are a living library, museum and incredibly skilled artists and I hope that one day i’ll have like 50% of your talent!

Greetings from Paris, France.

[randy]

@Codekayne

We are now in April, I’m of course still learning and struggling but I have a mentor to guide me and I already have calls from shops that want to test me and give me work.

Le Dude!!! Magnifique!!! Keep us posted and keep going!!!