How often do we talk about how we need to get the next generation of talent interested in Flame (and Flare)? Just sharing some personal experience and feedback. I have talked to a few junior to mid Nuke Artists over the past year that have heard of Flame but don’t know much about it. Off their own backs said they did some research on Flame and were interested enough to have a play but wanted to know where the learning edition was. A limited time 30 day free trial wasn’t something they could get their heads around if they did want to learn Flame. It is such a roadblock to fresh talent when you have the non-commercial version of Nuke (as well as Nuke Indie) and Fusion for free within Resolve but they are limited to a 30 day free trial for Flame which has a steep learning curve. I know we’re not the only Australian VFX vendor who would like to cultivate new Flame/Flare talent but I don’t think any of us can afford to purchase extra licenses to give someone the opportunity to have a play in their own time. No Windows version makes it a tad trickier (not suggesting Flame needs a Windows version here) but lots of these folks have Macs of some description.
Know this has all been discussed before on here but what a wasted opportunity to grow the user base. It’s so frustrating and disappointing. The financial incentive to offer learning editions is surely a no-brainer? Just limit resolutions and even add a burn-in on output if necessary.
Learning Edition is badly needed. I am running trial now, but after that, I have to commit or just leave it there. It is too big app to get familiar in that short time.
Totally agree, and the solutions (resolution limit or burn-in) are super simple technically.
The other angle I’ve been talking about a lot (including ADSK @ NAB and ADSK market research interviews) is that they should change the pricing of tokens. Right now token pricing is optimized for spot licenses for larger shops, but are missing the glaring opportunity of occasional user. If you do the math, if you bought Flame on tokens for 50 weeks of use (essentially full year) it’s 260% of the annual license. That’s way too much of a mark-up for no good reason, pure greed. If they made it 120% or something that would still be more than fair.
Even if the next round of artists learns Flame on an education license, in today’s environment where so many folks freelance, you really only learn the ropes on Flame on real jobs, which at the beginning will be here or there. So there needs to be an affordable option to continue your journey that doesn’t look like Flame every day of the year.
It would also make Flame more accessible to multi-app users, allowing people to move some jobs to Flame where it makes sense without betting the farm.
And they could look at what Filmlight is doing with Baselight subscriptions. From what we can tell at least some of it was motivated by keeping existing clients. As big shops go under and talent resurfaces at new smaller shops, they don’t always have the means to buy super expensive licenses and may opt for cheaper alternatives. That could lead to a net-loss of Flame licenses if there aren’t more affordable options. The $6K/yr license is ok for full-time users, not wanting to change that. It’s the rest that needs choices.
Fair point. With upscale a resolution limit is less meaningful.
Output would only be required for school projects.
For professional training, if the render option is disabled, I’m sure folks would be quite happy.
Also, Nuke Indie projects are encrypted. So you can’t use Nuke Indie as the assist farm and copy over to full license to render. That’s another aspect to consider.
So would an appropriate Learning Edition be, setups encrypted (no loading in normal version), export, broadcast out, NDI out disabled? Maybe even random dot watermark?
And wasn’t there basically this type of Learning Edition awhile back for a few years, then it switched to the time trial?
Right - it seems like a version has renders disabled, and some sort of encryption or tagging that prevents projects from being imported into a full version of Flame would meet the requirements? Might need some water mark on the broadcast monitor / 2nd monitor so nobody just screen records.
It would allow people to practice and learn Flame beyond 30 days if they aren’t attached to a school.
And then maybe rationalize token pricing so freelancers can ease into Flame with paying jobs that require rendering, but aren’t full-time yet.
Why? You just need to have a viewer that shows you the frame. You don’t need it as a file. At least while you’re figuring out nodes and workflows, following learning channel videos, etc.
It’s about whether the pixels look right. If you cache slow nodes, your playback should be good enough.
One other restriction of Nuke Indie - OFX plugins must be on a whitelist. So you can’t run Mocha and then export from there. Or just disable all of OFX.
I know this sounds odd to have to lock down things like that. But people will abuse it if you don’t.
This is meant to give you time to practice core workflows and tools of Flame, not do every conceivable job which may require all kinds of plugins or other interchange.
OFX limitation would hurt those who want to experiment full potential of Flame or Flare. These days you really need Mocha, Silhouette and other tools inside Nuke or Flame to do your work efficiently. Disabling those key additional tools does not allow you to experience true potential.
I am currently in that position as Nuke Indie user. I have Mocha and Silhouette OFX plugins and what I need to do is only replace Nuke Indie with Flare. To get good comparison I really need to use those plugins inside Flame to be sure I can replace Nuke with Flame or Flame.
Understandable desire. But if that gets in the way of getting such a training edition launched, you may need to compromise on that.
You could use the training edition to learn all of Flame’s tools and workflows. If you have Mocha Standalone and/or Silhouette standalone you can still import mattes, but not run as inline plugin.
If you need to test the plugins as one final step, get 100 tokens, which would unlock the full feature set for a few days of enhanced testing.
I think the Baselight Look is a great example. Formerly known as Baselight Student, now renamed as Baselight Look, it can only output H.264 and jpeg encoding format. The Projects database is different from the full version of Baselight and cannot be opened by Baselight. Perhaps’ Flame Student ‘…’ Flame Look '… is a good solution. Openness can win more users, while closure can easily block the vast majority of people outside the door!
Flame has good paint tool - better than Nuke, not quite as good as Silhouette. It also has a good planar tracker. Not as sophisticated as Mocha, but gets you very far. You should definitely learn both of them.
You’re an anomaly in many ways my friend. To quote Hunter S. Thompson…
There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
