Realizing I could download Smoke onto my laptop and teach myself how to transition from offline to online!
My favourite memory was switching from Quantel Henry onto Smoke!
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You just reminded me of that “Flame” song ( i think thats the name?) when someone did the lyrics all with nodes, etc in Flame…
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That video was done by @Jaime.
If I recall the conversation right. We were talking flame (like we do) and asked if he had ever seen that video of flame that was a music video in the flame interface to a song about flame. He said that that was his video. Jaw drop. I probably had twenty questions for him and had not seen the video in years.
Now we are best of friends and I told him to stop lurking and make an account so I can tag him as the creator of that iconic piece of flame history.
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Yeah I remember that which is so classic and the best ever OFOW IMHO…
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I started on Flame around 1998 or 99. I had no mentors, just the two-volume paper manual (later became three volumes). I learned all the tools reading that. Then, the first job given to me was to remove a wire and a reflection of camera crew in a glass door. I thought, “I don’t remember the chapter describing this task.” I worked it out, removed the reflection, removed the wire, and had my first of many “ah-ha” moments. Oh, and there was also the first time using Batch; that was great too. Too many wonderful memories.
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I realized that I could simply delete an Action node from the hierarchy and resurrect the rest of my large Batch script that constantly crashed Flame while opening it.
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I remember working on Ang Lee’s Hulk as a pipeline compositor in CompTime. I had a close up where Nick Nolte’s hand touches the Hulk’s face. Dennis Muren wanted the face to deform from the touch. The CG guys said it would take a week. I said I could do it in a day if I had a flame. The whole room called BS, because every compositor was trying to get into the ‘Sabre’ department. But Dennis looked over to the producer, and gave a little nod. I got a call an hour later, telling me what Flame I could use. The Sabre group was really nice, and showed me the ropes, and I finaled the shot the next morning. A week later I was moved over to the Sabre group, where I worked for the next 5 years.
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What sticks in my mind is being shown a demo of using the distort node to ‘shave’ off the spots on the side of a walking cheetah and replace them with a logo. Seeing the 2D tracker lock the track for each of the vertices so quickly and then come out to see the painted frame deform with the movement. I was just starting to learn Flame and its seemed like magic. But what really got me hooked was then being able to sit down straight after the demo and do it for myself - it wasn’t just a here’s something I prepared earlier. An easy track for sure but the possibilities were obvious.
Sadly I’ve never had to track any logos onto the sides of cheetahs since that demo - I guess those kind of shots are all being done in camera these days - but that was definitely the spark that got me thinking about all the possibilities.
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19 years on flame and this has build and developed my life than just being a livelihood.
Well now thats a journey I dont forget… all started for me in a Discreet Edit and Combustion Station, and i loved it but when went to see a Demo of Flame and Smoke i was .ohhhhhhhh now thats another world i want work on 
the ONE … After several years dreaming on getting to know the tools that the Flame Artists i have always rode about , went to work with Autodesk Smoke for several years and men that was a halfway road to that line…Then came Flame to me and to all of the world to learn, more acessible than ever before and with Logik Group and The Matchbox Shaders ( thanks to Ivar and Mark ) 
. Wtihout of course not forgetting Grant and Flame Learning Channel for its comprehensive tutorrials like videos…what i have to say… Could the world of Post and Finish and VFX exist without Flame/Smoke/INFERNO/Fire/Combustion/Edit*… it could but for sure not be the same …FLAME ON and rock and roll…and THANKS to ALL
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The fact that after 20+ years using Flame/Smoke, I was today years old when I learned the hotkey for toggling Auto Key on and off, saving me a bunch of extra pen clicks.
This software is so deep I’ll never reach the bottom of it…
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Wait! There’s a hot key for turning auto key on and off?
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HAHA! Yes! In Smoke Classic hotkeys it’s “]”
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If I am lucky 
enough to snag a bag I will give smoke hot keys a go for a full week. I’m sure we have a colourful keyboard around here somewhere
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2003 I was blessed to be Autodesk “AE” Application Engineer for Autodesk Venice, CA. The best sales team in the world. Dave Sampson, Mike Ogorik, Andrew Schneider, Chuck Bocan.
I showed the SGI Tezro at SIGGRAPH 2003. Our fantastic Engineer Suria was getting the box set up. The night before the show. She called me early in the morning just hour before the floor opened. Said it was ready to go. Loaded my material showed of 4k uncompressed playback. Funny, now I need to use RAM playback for 4k. On a cloud NVME storage. Then we did a DEMO DAY event after that. I showed Flame, Dean Shirm showed Smoke. I showed Lustre which was on a Windows box. I powered down the Tezro while I did the Lustre demo. It was running hot as the prototype. Demo was flawless and awesome. Many Tezro’s were sold.
I had just finished Castaway and What Lies Beneath on Inferno at Sony Pictures Imageworks. A great Flame shop with world class artists you all know. Lisa Deaner, Christian Budman, Doug, and many others. Proud to have just wrapped a bunch of Super Bowl commercials. And a network pilot. All with Flame on the Cloud. It works. I am all about Flame on the cloud!
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Ha, I’d offer to make a similar swap to Flame hotkeys, but am pretty certain my keyboard would wind up on the wrong side of my window after a few hours.
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Awesome. I’m in Wisconsin! Go Flame in the Fly Over states!
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The memory that sticks out for me was when I walked into the Kimmel Theater at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for the first time and said, “The show looks exactly like it did in Flame!” The 360 degree upper screens, circular floor projection, and 5-sided scrim projections all looked exactly as they had in the 3D environment in Action. Not only that, but every bit of the media had been edited and finished there as well. I was able to pre-vis the venue, while editing and finishing. At long last, I truly had the turnkey solution for unusual format work that I had been seeking.
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