The thought floated through my mind of simply putting Flare at something closer to $100/mo. The lack of conform would definitely impose a ceiling on the kind of work one can do while still giving emerging artists who are determined and interested a chance to give it a shot and learn the ropes. But of course I check, and there’s not even a token option for Flare, only annual.
2 Likes
I have to conform on less than 10% of my work. Lack of conform is a localized limitation. Didn’t we hear on last week’s Logik Live there 14,000 different workflows on Flame? I might be mis-remembering the number, but it was 4 digits minimum. We should not assume that we know all the ways this app is driven by looking at our own experiences.
I was looking into this last week, and yes.
2 Likes
I had a film with over 300 beauty shots about 18 months ago that I did on my own, with a bit of hand roto on a dozen or so shots in less than a week. Client had very little money for it so it was definitely a get through as much as we can. Built a default setup with Flame’s ML masking and left all the shots rendering over the weekend. Around 50% of the shots on review were good as is. Went through with client and we dropped around half of the remaining shots then we just manually adjusted the remainder of the shots (around 60-70), did some additional roto where required and got them done in the next 3 days. The Beauty work was subtle enough (a combination of defocus, crok beauty and regrain to do some facial skin smoothing) that it did not need to be bespoke per shot. Flame was unbelievable for that!
It would be the sort of example that could get a Nuke Artist interested in Flame. Funnily enough, I’ve had a few Nuke Artists who had done a fair bit of copycat for Roto that I now have using Magic Mask in Fusion, which most of them had a play round at home with the free version of Resolve and decided for a lot of work, it was much faster and more reliable than copycat. Those same folks may do similar with Flame if they had the opportunity, just sayin’
3 Likes
Many similar experiences. We just finished a beauty job, that was subtle but sophisticated in techniques, which would take way longer in any other app I know (and I’ve tried many of them).
Some of the answer lies in subtle but powerful features in the gMask - like tracking a mask on lips of a speaking person over 900 frames without manual keyframes. Other parts are the rich library of matchbox shaders, both standard and community. Like removing veins on temple with Ls_Wireless. Or motion vector stabilization.
But then Flame always was the destination, not a stop-over for people doing beauty work.
2 Likes
I’m learning Nuke in a serious way finally, I’m starting to feel comfortable in it. It’s a great software, color me impressed! But for me, it’s something to just have in the toolbox for being able to take on complex cg work. It’s not replacing flame for me and I can tell you why quite quickly: it is much more sluggish than I even imagined (and I knew it was gonna be slower going than flame). I am growing used to this. But, I think for most people who have never touched flame and are in Nuke all day, when I say it’s fast, they don’t really take in what I’m saying. For almost all 2d shot work I do, there’s almost 100% no reason that I would crack open Nuke. I can’t see the advantage. Only more time spent on doing the same things the same way. I’m excited to dig into deep compositing workflows in Nuke, etc, and like I said it’s a beautiful software, but I think giving a Nuke artist a taste of flame, you’re gonna have some eye popping moments, like going from driving a Lamborghini to a Formula One car. Both are very very nice cars, but going 0-100 is gonna be a real different experience. Might not be built as much for comfort, you might miss your surround sound system, but when you need to go real real fast…
6 Likes
Fucking hilarious that the AI-driven anti-spam tool just flagged this post as being spam.
1 Like
I would love it if we could all agree to please not copy+paste walls of LLM-generated text. I come here to read what other brilliant, talented flame artists have to say, not ChatGPT.
7 Likes
Totally hear you — there is a difference between genuine craft and a flood of lazy copy/paste. But let’s not throw out the stylus with the paint thinner.
For some of us, ChatGPT is a tool, not a crutch — a way to draft ideas, tighten up a process, or speak clearly when time is tight and the day is long. Like a Flame preset, it’s not the final look — it’s what you do with it that matters.
If someone blindly pastes a wall of junk, call it out. But if they’re using it to spark something better, maybe that’s just another kind of talent.
Let’s not stifle creativity just because the brush has changed.
I’m more talking about the wall of analysis upthread than any sort of blanket ban. If I want to engage with said wall, I know I can’t trust as much as I could if it came directly from a poster’s brain. It sure looks pretty and well thought-out, but if I haven’t heard of all the AI tools it mentions (for example), how can I know it isn’t making a few of them up? It’s been caught doing that over and over, so when I see its output I tend to (perhaps foolishly) disregard it.
Re: ChatGPT as a tool in general: if you’re using it well, would anyone know?
2 Likes
This.
1 Like
Game recognize game.
1 Like
“The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why.
Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data. They do not — and cannot — decide what is true and what is false. Sometimes, they just make stuff up, a phenomenon some A.I. researchers call hallucinations. On one test, the hallucination rates of newer A.I. systems were as high as 79 percent.”
Touché
Seriously, man? I am disappoint.
+1 for having a flame non commercial version available. Having the 2014 learning edition was very formative for me - without it I’d most likely be pixel pushing in after effects or davinci or worse. Even when they discontinued it the old disk image worked for a couple of years until it finally didn’t. Some kind of export would be helpful for folks adding a practice shot to a reel or submitting something to Logik Academy Pro but something is better than nothing I suppose.
1 Like
I don’t know how I knew this was ai but I knew.