To that end, I think what you’ll find is that flame has a little bit of everything and it tends to be good when compared to most other packages, just not the best—the exceptions being the timeline which is easily best in class, and its performance which is a key pillar of the kit.
If the first to pillars of the Flame trifecta are the timeline and performance, then Batch is the Holy Goat of the trinity. Batch has a robust toolset for dealing with 2d material and doing so quickly and fluidly. As @allklier pointed out Paint is one of the better implementations. Fast point and planar tracking. A divisive garbage matting node which is very different from most other packages. Action, love it or hate it, is a force which you will adoringly praise when your needs fit neatly inside it, and curse wildly when you hit it’s ceiling—but it is fast and fluid and singular in it’s implementation. I don’t know of another package, living or dead, which ever combined compositing in 2d or 3d with a full compliment of masking tools, per pixel shaders, grading and more all in a single environment. It’s borderline stupid, but its prowess is the creative heart of Flame.
The interface is largely locked so you quickly develop muscle memory regarding function layout in each node/module which is very non-Nuke like. The kit is designed to be driven and not operated. One leans into swipes and hotkey combos the way one leans into a turn and finds their line through and out. You drive Flame with, well, zest. It harkens back to the the time honored tradition of one artist, one machine, one million dollars when a Flame bay (which could easily hit that cost for deployment) and an artist were the last line of defense for fixing everything that had gone wrong… including whatever the hell went down in the Henry Suite.
There are all kinds of tools, and all kinds of artists. There are the compers, and the painters, and the modelers and the riggers, and Resolve lovers and Premiere haters. They all have their tool belt and they get jobs done. Many of them also will say ‘that cannot be done’ or ‘this isn’t possible’.
The quint essential Flame artist will always answer ‘yes, of course’ and sometimes will be done before the clients finishes the phone call. This is as much about the artist as it is about the tool, but the two are symbiotic, which is very evident in this group of Flamers in particular.
There is no impossible job. Every job is a journey, and you never know the path when you step on it, except for the confidence that you will arrive on the other side and the client will have a smile on its face.
Flame is the ultimate Hail Mary tool, and it delivers every single f* time.
I learned on that. It was watermarked. I ran it on my laptop at home to practice when I left the office. Currently learning Nuke and using their non-commercial version and very happy it exists.
@fredwarren@slabrie There are some great comments on this thread. Agree that you can remove OFX (if a LE is meant for learning Flame, seeing if OFX works could be limited to the free trial where you can pretty quickly see that it works).
Seriously, not having a LE for Flame/Flare available is a major roadblock to using it as a compositing platform. We use a lot of contractors, giving work to a lot of senior Flame artists, but also getting juniors and mids in for projects. It is not cost effective for us to train these sort of people up on Flame when they already have knowledge in Nuke. It also makes time-poor people like myself reluctant to put a whole lot of time into training anyone showing an interest. If they can’t take what you have shown them outside of work to improve their skills then how do they get better without providing full access to software which is a hard cost in a user allocated license model.
I’ve now given quite a few folks their first opportunity in the industry. I know of other local vendors still using Flame. I’d happily also give some artists their first paid opportunity to work within Flame/Flare and spend the time with them to improve their skills (teaching them all my bad habits ). There are opportunities outside of our facility to encourage them to take the time to learn it. Flare is cheaper than Nuke, a lot cheaper than Nuke X but just as capable. I’d use it more as a platform if there were more that could use it. I’m sure that there would be plenty of others on here willing to provide a pathway towards more Flame artists if there was the software available to support this.
Please, for the love of Flame, can we find a LE solution that is usable enough for people to learn it whilst providing the protection Autodesk requires?
Second to this LE request. I would also strongly push for @SamE or @ChrZap Flame for Nuke Artists courses to be freely available. Keep all the advanced courses paid for but either of those courses would be enough educational carrot to get some of these junior to mid Nuke Artists interested in Flame and more people being able to use seats. More seats means more dev money too. More Artists could lead to more people subscribing to Logik Academy. Is there a financial way to incentivise this @andymilkis@randy to make the course free but take a small fee from each new person who joins Logik Academy to go to either/both of these courses. I haven’t looked at either personally as I don’t have the need but once again, if we are wanting to get more people onto the Flame/Flare platform then free educational opportunities, that are already readily available for Nuke & Fusion, need to have their Flame/Flare equivalent. As much as we need a Learning Edition of Flame, we need the educational resources to support it.
If it’s for students, and their teachers need to grade their work, yes. My son tried to get Flame into his school (AV / filmschool) went through the hoops and just simply did not get any reply whatsovever.. I’ve tried through personal contacts to get things moving but that didn’t help either. So.. he’s learning Resolve now. Idk what a kid has to do learn Flame… I also do not understand why making it hard for students to get into Flame helps growing the community and by extension, new business eventually… anyway… I’ll teach him when he finishes school (if he still wants it by then..)…
I’ve got the feeling there’s going to be a whole lot of young Fusion Artists out there who realised there were way too many people trying to be colourists…
). There are opportunities outside of our facility to encourage them to take the time to learn it. Flare is cheaper than Nuke, a lot cheaper than Nuke X but just as capable. I’d use it more as a platform if there were more that could use it. I’m sure that there would be plenty of others on here willing to provide a pathway towards more Flame artists if there was the software available to support this.