Hi all - I’ll never complain about flame again. just had to deliver some after effects editable files after a job I finished. bloody hell - that program is utterly rubbish. full of bugs. all over the place. might be good for agency deliverables but thats about it. only thing I liked is the auto auto key thing like resolve. so if you mark a keyframe on a channel then auto key remains on for that channel. very good. otherwise its pants.
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Yeah, AE seems ready for a gut job as they would say in real estate….
I’ll hold you to that Jon!
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haha - too late. updated to 2026-1- converted a projected and all the g masks now render at half horizontal size!! Jesus
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Hi John,
Do you more details about what is happening? Resolution? Is it also happening on new project?
Thanks.
Francis.
just hazarding a guess but perhaps the aspect ratio value was not honored when the project migration took place.
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We have to “toolkit” a particular client in AE so they can make worldwide versions. It’s a nightmare.
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Last time I had to make international tool kits, we left the AE work up to them. I provided my US comp as a ref, the plate with a blank phone or generic picture, a matte for the phone screen which included holdouts for anything that crossed in front of it, and tracking marks that I put in place of the phone screen content. This way, they could create the AE project on their own terms with no baggage and we didn’t need to have our AE guy tied up for DAYS rebuilding my work. And I spoke with the guy in Europe and he was happy to have it that way. I think his entire job was making international versions and he had his own way of doing things.
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Storyteq is the worst thing since 9:16
I don’t think After Effects is bad software at all. When two completely different programs have to share projects, it’s always going to be a nightmare, and that’s not anyone’s fault.
As we all know, After Effects is the king of motion graphics, and in that bussiness, there are hundreds of stuff it does much better than any other software, including Flame. Others, it doesn’t, sure.
Another matter is bugs and issues. After Effects hasn’t been updated in 20 years and has a GUI from the 90s that could definitely be improved. Or colour management.
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I use AE regularly (have to) and have numerous plugins to make it more tolerable. I also get AE files form other artists that make you scratch your head. Yes, very different software, and with enough patience you can make everything work. You can retouch video in Photoshop (have done that), and you can edit in Premiere (tongue in cheek).
But the way keyframes work in AE is aggravating. The fact that you need a 3rd script to duplicate a comp that has precomps in them is odd. And that everything is a wedding cake of epic proportions that is hard to keep track off.
There are some other MoGraph tools. Several years back I used https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/ for a while, and it had a nice fresh approach. Probably has overcome it’s growing pains by now.
For some MoGraph you can also use C4D. Especially if you need anything with 3D, you’re probably better off there. For a really basic LT3 AE will be faster though.
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I also use AE regularly and can maneuver around the keyframe system much easier and faster than in Flame - AE’s easing, tangent angles, speed curves vs value curves, easing + lots of scripts that make it even more nimble. Not saying all this to be a contrarian - am I missing something in Flame? Seems to me like the curves are impossible to work with
I dunno guys. You sound like a bunch of grumps! Or rather you sound like me when I had to learn Flame… After Effects is only dumb if you expect it to be Flame and vice versa.
In it’s defence:
- AE had fully integrated OCIO before Flame… Yes it has too many places to go hunting for the colour management and it’s clunky. But it’s all there and it does work if you insist on using it for compositing (which you should only do when you are 12 and haven’t learned other irritating software for that task)
- AE actually had a complete 2D rendering engine rebuild a while back and they’ve been steadily improving on it since. For what it’s used for it’s plenty fast.
- It has a cool render time diagnostic tool, so does Nuke actually…
- The Advanced 3D render engine is steadily improving, and looks like they’ve finally cracked it after some missteps with ProRender and C4D engines.
- It has a UI that doesn’t look like an alien landscape. You can also explain to someone else what to do, “Click on the little stop watch”! Flame artists are constantly saying, “Ummmm. I’ll have to show you”. Then they click a bunch of too-similar looking grey boxes with obscure text labels way too fast and press a bunch of shortcuts and say, “yeah so I usually do it like that.” Thanks man.
- Last one: if you google “what is a Solid” you get a million 12 year olds explaining it too you. If I google Flame I get a bunch of images of Portuguese chicken burgers and burning forests.
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im not sure I want 12 year olds to explain it to me. its more the bugs and crashes I wasn’t keen on. also I did a side by side of a full on render in flame and one in AE and the AE one was soft
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I don’t have a problem being called an old grump. It does come with some earned and valuable credits 
Joke aside, yes, we can always find this or that aspect of a software better than another. And I’ve called out Flame’s user interface for being overly complicated and hard to learn many times before.
Too much of ‘we’re improving a feature, we have a new button, let’s find some empty space on the screen to stick it’. Some definite inconsistency in design patterns (grown over 30 years), and non-intuitive naming (mux instead of frame-hold).
The solid is well named for being a color source. It being the primary way of using an axis or null at the same time, is in the same category of the mux in Flame. So no win there….
At the end of the day, it’s whether you can learn to navigate a quirky UI (AE or Flame), and whether it’s worth it. Both take some time to learn. Depends on what you need it for, and whether that is a good use of time and reasonably enjoyable.
I recently had a job where 3 AE artists took a stab at something, until one told the client ‘you need to call a Flame guy’. There’s that.
Of course you can probably hire 2-3 AE guys before you pay for the Flame guy. And that’s a good chunk of the market right there.
Having learned both Flame and AE, Flame makes me smile quite often. Can’t say that for AE. YMMV.
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Just a note- the Mux does much more than frame-hold.
I came up on AFX, but that was early to mid-90’s. I started when CoSa owned it. I’ve continued to use it throughout my career. Some years more than other. Flame’s UI may seem alien and convoluted, but in the end, it is great for speed. AFX has too too many tiny-fiddly buttons and icons that can be clicked Too many small targets (if you can find them) to be fast and nimble. That said, AFX is very flexible and versatile. For a lot of mograph stuff- especially type and basic “creative” image comp it’s great. You can rough a style frame out in Photoshop and bring that into AFX and swap in your moving footage.
I’m not sure what Bugs @Jonhollis ran into, but no doubt AFX has it’s share. Prior to flame getting some python, i built a number of tools and scripts to automate things in AFX- slates, network CTA’s, etc.
What @Nils said is correct- they have been re-writing portions of it from the UI to the image engines (2d and 3d)
In the end… for the most part, it is the right too for the right job in the right hands….
good luck to us all.
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This reminds me of a 911 paint fix I worked on about five years ago. The company who reached out to me said they tried four different After Effects Artists over the span of three weeks with no results.
The 360 drone footage was 16K. I realized the patch they needed could fit in a 4K frame so after cropping I did the usual denoise, planar stabilize, paint, unstabilize, regrain paint patch, dropped 4K paint fix back into 16K plate and called it a day.
So within 5 hours it was done. Assuming they probably put in a minimum of 120 hours with the four After Effects Artists. I found that kind of crazy.
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Exactly.
Totally. But that’s the point. It does several things the name doesn’t give away. That’s not helpful to new users. In Nuke you can search framehold and find a solution. In Flame you will not find a hint, you have to find a tutorial.
mux is is great for being a multi-input mux as the name indicates.
You can even do basic time warping with it.
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