Am I being stupid (as always with render formats)?

Flame Flame Questions
1

I am having some fun with my Blackmagic camera and a motion control rig and am back with a problem that I used to have back in the day, and I thought that this was a thing of the past.

Back in the day on Smoke, when I was using it on my ye olde worlde laptop it was hell on earth as all it would save to the framestore was raw, whatever footage you were working on.

Then came newer versions and you could choose your codec.

I am importing and working on BMRaw, but as I am on my laptop, and only having an informal play, I don’t want any EXR whatsoever. I am happy with crappy quality, as I’m only having a “kick-about” (soccer reference).

So, I have 200GB available on my internal, and then all of a sudden I have run out of space, because the setting is ProResLT/EXR(PIZ). So, that is bad enough as I don’t want any EXR deposited as each from is 40-ish MB each. I just want teeny crappy ProRes files for my kick about, so I can play play play.

On top of that, I also have that problem of not having deleted files be totally or very much disappeared when I flush the timeline after a kick about. Thus my framestore is filling up and I am finding it very hard to release space that I don’t even want to be using.

I know that any image that is 16 or 32-bit needs to be in that, but why can’t they live in memory and so the “render” format be what is rendering out to the timeline.

Why can’t there, also, perhaps, be an option to flush the background work and leave only the rendered timeline in the framestore. This, again, is especially the case as I am having a kick-about and so am going to be going back in to make changes.

Cheers
Tony

2

Totally valid point. I don’t think there is a solution now with the internal processing of files.

But there is a workflow sloution I can suggest if it fits your pipeline. Instead of ingesting/caching to Flame, transcode the files to ProresLT or even ProresProxy and don’t cache them. That’s how I work on my on set Flame rig which doesn’t have an internal storage.

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3

I totally get your point Sinan in terms of caching, but I was not caching but working from the original BMRaw files and then the caching is happening in Batch/FX as it makes its way through Action, Images, etc. I am choosing “ProRes” but still many EXR files are being deposited in the frame store. Guess it’s not for laptop friendliness, and need a SSD attached for this kicking about?

Cheers
Tony

4

I believe that when in the media hub or in flame in the pre-processing tab, set the bit-depth to 12 or 10bit and you will get your prores for the framestore instead of EXR’s.
Probably will want to select a log format or even Rec709 since you’ll loss float for linear as you most likely know.

5

You may be able to do this in the RAW setting, even.

6

Have you looked into a workflow using DWAA or DWAB compression?
Then use write nodes instead or render nodes in batch?

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7

Yea inwould just switch it to dwab compression .

As soon as you render anything 16b float or 32b float it will end up as a exr.

You can also just take eveything down yo 12bit log and render/cache thats

or yea even better is to stop using render nodes, writefiles are the way to go

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8

Thanks for the advice Finn!

Cheers
Tony

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