oh wow these are great. so cool to see how others are working. @Sinan i’m with you on the hotkeys! i loved SHIFT+Page Up since the day it came out. I’m curious why you want to go down to the bottom however? to view an offline? if so why not put the offline in the secondary track and toggle back and forth with the Print Screen or Scroll Lock buttons?
i also love the versioning revolution idea!
thats sooo dope ! Just submitted mine as well quick little thing but arnold in flame anyone? 
@ALan, I saw your video and my “trick” is to paint a color over the object–any color and transfer mode will do–and batch paint makes the matte. Is there something that desktop paint does that’s better than this?
Screen record and share.
video is still processing but it should be done in about an hour (so 5:30 PST, Nov 22, 2023)
Yep. Do this all the time.
I like it… pretty good solution. Suppose that is a near analog, just not a single button. I wonder if multiple strokes over the same area will keep making the “matte preview” dark and dark, which isn’t great, but also not horrible.
About to start uploading. Mine went over 3 minutes… Sorry?
and it’s done. Uploaded the slides as well.
received.
Just submitted three things that have been on my mind for a while…
received.
@allklier Thank you for the mockup of the ColorWarper. There is this little gem of an application with even more UI examples. It is an OFX that unfortunately doesn’t work with Flame as the host. I have this on my wishlist for a while, but wanted to keep my requests to minimal stuff… But, oh boy, I would love this…
thanks
Thx @Sinan. Yes, familiar with 3D LUT Creator. It’s the beginning of the lineage of this UI as far as I know. The oldest version. After it came Nobe ColorRemap (same folks as OmniScope), and then BlackMagic took those tools a step further to what is in Resolve these days. There is another, not quite as comprehensive implementation in Mistika as a UI skin on top of their quite good color vector tool. These quickly have become the standard for hue/sat corrections and largely replaced the various curves.
It would be a bit of a lift to implement it I’m sure. But there are options. I had reached out to Tom a few months ago to see if he would be interested in porting it to Flame via OFX. And he was open to the idea if there is enough interest. ADSK getting in on that discussion could help move it along. Of course, ADSK coming up with with their own version would be most welcome too. Having it right inside MasterGrade is much more convenient than yet another OFX tool, not the least because then it would be in the image tool set for everyone doing color on the timeline, and could be added to each selective.
I do know off people that are specifically staying with Resolve instead of moving to Flame because they must have this feature for their work.
I totally agree that we need a better UI approach to color modification. The curves in the master grade are powerful, but while I use them I keep looking at the waveform monitor / vector scope and just need to reach in there and drag colors on top of it.
Going slightly off-topic here…
Flame as always been a compositing/retouch tool first and a reluctant color tool second. As evidenced in another thread we just had where folks commented ‘don’t overcomplicate it, if it works, just keep doing it that way’. Which is totally fair.
On the other side, colorists have primarily stuck to their core color apps, primarily Resolve but also some others. In recent years the disciplines have had more overlap though. Today’s colorists are expected to do a decent amount of fixing/retouching, not just moving colors around. While Fusion has been part of Resolve for a while, particularly in the last two years we’ve seen an explosion of colorists learning Fusion and the corresponding flood of tutorials on how to do this or that fix in Fusion, along with the expected frustration that this tool while very good, is barely good enough (in comparison, and depending on your bar).
Flame adopting a forward looking approach to color and the latest color toolsets could be one of the puzzle pieces of maintaining or even growing the user base as a real alternative to colorists particularly in the commercial space.
I’m curious if Flame artists have seen an increase in expectation that they do color as well, or how much they have to do in color compared to before? Has there been a shift in the number of jobs where there were separate artists for color and Flame work - towards a more slimmer, more consolidated setup? The rise in freelancers would make me think at least in the part of the market that would be the case.
For the last five years I’ve gone from finishing/cleanup to doing all of the color, vfx, cleanup, etc. in the same client session. I think it’s mostly due to time constraints. Once the offline is approved they want the final product immediately.
The actual coloring tools in flame are great. I use Image on the timeline, and any cleanup that needs more work is done in BFX on the same segment.
What needs help is the management of color workflow. Like exporting color graded shots has some hoops to jump through. It’s not as easy as Resolve. Keeping track of color ‘versions’ is completely manual and you have to stay on top of naming and organizing. Connected segments can easily be broken. A pair of shots that should be the same source are not because you imported them separately. Things like that are the tedious management I wish was better.
Great insight. Thanks.
And agreed, the color tools as they are, are perfectly serviceable and I’m doing same workflow of using the timeline, Image and BFX, whether it starts as retouch project or a color project, because invariably you end up with both.
And yes, there is room for improvement on a few axis. The version management isn’t actually all that much worse than Resolve, as it’s just shot based there as well. There are no timeline wide versions for color, which is what would be the real game changer. I just duplicate the sequence and include a version number in the sequence name (that is outside of connected conform though - gets more complicated with that in the mix).
