Got the opportunity to get my hands on a baselight 6 system , price is enticing so I started looking at “the promised land” aka BLG workflow, or … openclips workflow as baselight supports openclips?
From what i gather the BLG plugin for flame is quiet… buggy, expensive and generally problematic.
The BLG render plugin for nuke is seemingly better? (and free) Again no idea… never used it.
Other than that it supports openclips, we use openclips… so in my twisted mind i can just plugin baselight into my openclip workflow and its all connected and nice?
So whats the current state, is it even all useable or is it all promised but shit?
Should I rather spend money teaching colorists to grade in flame ?
let me know what you think, happy to hear your thoughts before I write the check.
Back in another life we tried the blg workflow… and tried and tried and then put it back on the shelf. The speed was abysmal. So much so that it was easier, less error prone and a nicer workflow for all involved to round trip through BaseLight. We weren’t unmanaged back then so I can speak to the openclip workflow.
The Nuke plugin does work better, but I never tried it in Studio.
Admittedly that was a few years ago now. Things may have changed.
openclips should work but i cant find anyone running this workflow day-2-day.
colorists love baselight , many reasons for it, all our main colorists that we hire love it.
I asked my main clients if they would pay more for the luxury of grading their commercial on baselight they laughed at me .
i allready have a resolve renderfarm so I can crank out stuff like its nobodys business
so the only thing that would enhance my workflow in any meaningful way in having baselight is that I can version incomming comp clips like patterbrowsing
Even if clients don’t want to pay extra for BL, the one reason to still use it that you can get better results in less time. So the math works on the backend and for both client and colorist happiness meter. Especially with BL 6.
The bottomline may still be favorable.
Also depends on how much if your grades are just technical cleanup or how much look you impart.
Exactly. Same reason I would love a BL6 system, but can’t justify it. It’s a load factor problem.
One thing we have batted around is sharing a system between multiple colorists. While we individually don’t have enough use cases, as a group we might make the math work. Each one of us can keep using Resolve for the peanut butter jobs, and then jump into Baselight for those jobs where it will make difference.
That being said, I color most things in Flame, and it’s a decent middle ground. Don’t have the new color space and the X-grade operator. But it’s very efficient, plenty capable, and has fewer limitations.
We have multiple sessions per week and even then it’s still difficult pill to swallow. The ability to throw (even a fragment of) that cash at solving issues a single seat of BaseLight can’t solve in a financially feasible manner is where the value add of Resolve kicks into high gear.
Just the remote grading scenario alone not requiring your BL-at-Home and your main suite license simultaneously should be enough of a warning shot over the bow.
for some reason there was a reduced set of candidates who were exposed to this workflow - it was the same peculiar circumstance when people were exposed to the resolve ofx workflow.
we run blgs here alot - but we have made a tool to run them thru nuke on the farm. trying to move away fromthe buggier flame timeline blgs.
as for open clip - i had the same thought about publishing open clips - then simply updating grade with an OTIO edl so they can update the latest versions.
we used to have an open clip workflow and are considering moving back to it now - pattern browsing has become a tad sticky with our pipeline.
I’ve used BLGs in the Flame timeline quite a bit and not had many problems with it.
Main things to do are always use action and not resize in the timeline, put the BLG on before the action, check for duplicate timecodes and get the colourist to spit out one folder with all shots, and a separate one with per_shot subfolders, which the colourists didn’t moan too much about so I guess it’s not too much of a problem.
You always have to stop & restart the BLG renderer when starting this workflow but that should only take 20 secs.
All of this is based on using FLM 2023 and earlier - I think the new (to me) ability to apply BLG as a pre-process means you should be able to use regular timeline resizing on more recent versions of Flame.
BUT I work in commercials where I’m only doing a 90sec as my longest version so I can’t speak for longform etc. We also never do finals via BLG, only work in progress.
Wherever there has been a problem it’s always been fixable with the workflow above - and generally this is always faster than going back to colour for a regrade.
This is based on a few UK facilities I’ve worked at over the last few years.
?