Baselight on Flame

im thinking of getting the BLG software for flame as im working more and more with baselight graders again - seems to be a swing back to that. anyone using the BLG workflow?

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Iā€™ve used it years agoā€¦ it workedā€¦ if the colorist hadnā€™t used external mattes, plugins or otherwise ā€˜weirdā€™ stuff. Maybe that has improved by now, but back then it made us stop using it. Iā€™d make sure to test various scenarios like that before purchasing it for Flame.

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Still has the same limitation as @Ton mentioned, so no external mattes/grain/images other than the plate itself obviously.

The other caveat is itā€™ll only be able to render the frames/timecode that it knows so if the grader didnā€™t expand the handles when they exported the BLG then itā€™ll error out on those frames.

Finally, itā€™s beyond slow and acts like a little princess. Sometimes it takes quite a few tries of stopping/starting the renderer, reloading the BLG, F1, F4, rinse and repeat before it decides it wants to play nice and start, you know, actually applying a grade.

ā€¦buuuuut it sure is nice to be able to just apply a grade or see a comp in context.

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We last tested it maybe like three or four years ago. Never mind weird stuff, it didnā€™t even work carrying over basic tracked shapes (weirdly aka power windows) for us, which stopped us using it.
Which is a shame, as virtually all our high-end jobs are a Baselight/Flame collab.

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$0.02 - Itā€™s less problematic to exploit a flame centric open clip publish and subscribe workflow, and have the graded material just be a version.

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Hi Jon, we are regularly using BLGā€™s here, they work pretty well now although no matte inputs etc and yes the rendering is a bit slow but fine.

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Yeah, there was a bug some time ago where the shape wouldnā€™t track if you either selected a single BLG or had it find the BLG from a folder (forget which one). As far as I recall, thatā€™s been fixed.

doesnā€™t sound like its worth it. its 2k a year. just for a glorified LUT! I will skip!

The Resolve OFX plug in seems to be working pretty well on the tests Iā€™ve done so far

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Thatā€™s because youā€™re on Flameā€¦ for anything elseā€¦ itā€™s freeā€¦

It doesā€¦ except you have to manually load each grade per shot, no?

yes, you do have to load them one at a time

Thereā€™s a resolve plug in???

yep

fell free to DM or call

Aā€¦ too bad. I had hoped I overlooked something. Hope they address that in the near future, would be awesome.

itā€™s an improvement on the first version where you had to cut and paste the file location into the comments field!!!

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The difference though is if you are solving a pipeline issue (get non-LUT grades from colorist) vs. you just donā€™t like Flame color and want to do color in a different app. Different scenarios.

The Resolve OFX is obviously undergoing more active development than the knee-capped BLG plugin. But it too may have some issues - namely around tracked masked and how they translate in terms of TC. And presumably will have the same issues with external mattes, etc. though I donā€™t have specific test results.

Any headless plugin is facing an uphill battle. With BLE for Avid & Nuke, at least you get the full Baselight tool (minus a few features like grain/paint/etc) and can fix things that didnā€™t come across.

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It cant deal with ā€œtimeā€ so any animated mattes arent going to lineup,

a bunch of other stuff isnt working as well, its more like a tech demo.

@finnjaeger - yep, sorry about that. I quit before it was finished. Evidently it still isnā€™t finished. Too bad - it could have been a good thing.

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