Flare over Nuke Indie?

Flame Flame Questions
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1

Hi,

I have been long time Nuke Indie user, but as many might know it has silly resolution limitation so I cannot render out if work resolution is bit more than UHD. Many cameras captures more pixels than Nuke Indie can render out and I have been splitting image into half and combining them with Fusion Studio. Silly trick I know.

Fusion Studio is of course option for many, but as I have many times tried to abandon Nuke Indie and switch to Fusion Studio, I have always noticed its slowness. Slow to work and slow to process.

Nuke full version is €2,989/yr + VAT. It is indeed pricy.

Then I thought what about Flare? It is around €2,210/yr + VAT so bit less than Nuke.

Does anyone use here Flare or are all using Flame?
Any thoughts how Flare is compared with Nuke if there is someone who uses both apps.

I mostly do per shot based comping. Sometimes cleanups, sometime full CG. I also use Mocha and Silhouette as plugin inside Nuke and I think those plugins will work also with Flare.

I really appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks!

2

You can kind of think of it like this:

Flare is the Flame equivalent to Nuke X so sounds like what you are after. It has all the compositing tools that Flame does without the conform and full timeline toolset.

Flame has the additional conform and timeline tools so is the Nuke Studio equivalent.

Flame Assist is kind of the equivalent to Hiero, has the timeline and confirm tools but not the full compositing engine.

There are several people on here working on Flare.

3

One thing to consider though, both Flame/Flare and Fusion Studio are GPU optimised. What GPU are you running? I have played around in Fusion Studio a fair bit and speed has always been comparable to Flame. The reason I don’t use Fusion is that its tools for some simple tasks aren’t great so I find it more painful to do quick simple tasks. So when you say speed is an issue, are you talking render speed or the time it takes you to do a comp? As render speed I have found to be similar between Flame & Fusion on the same system.

Long and short of it is if you don’t have a decent GPU then the experience in Flare may not be great for you. What is your hardware? What OS are you running too?

4

Thank you so much for reply Adam.

I have been using Nuke and Fusion on my Windows PC with RTX4090.

Nuke runs just fine. Fusion not so much.

Fusion reads and plays Prores just fine. Actually better than Nuke in my opinion, but If you merge few clips and add some key and roto, It struggles to cache and playback even there is free RAM to use. EXR is very slow when Nuke reads it very fast and multiple keylight for different part of talent combined with keymix and such caches OK and also playback nicely.

Also must be habit and mainly as I am more used to Nuke, I am much faster to handle nodes, views and tools. Fusion node inputs are also odd as the change places depending of where it is and how it’s connected.

Right now I have Mac mini Pro M4 so I can download Flame trial and test how it feels, but obviously I would have to get new Mac Studio to run it better. Linux isn’t my option as I cannot troubleshoot if something happens.

Of course getting Nuke is cheaper than getting Flare and Mac Studio and I already know how to use Nuke when Flare is new software to learn.

5

Flare is just the “Nuke” node-tree-compositing component of Flame, so for shot work there is no loss in the toolset. Flame is Flare plus the timeline and editorial tools.

But, if you’re averse to Fusion, I don’t know that diving into flame/flare would be a positive experience.

1 Like
6

I’m still using Nuke Indie to crop the left and right sides of the image so I can render it at a larger size. Then, I’ll use Fusion Studio to stitch it together. This takes longer than just rendering the final output directly and this is the big issue.

It’s more like getting your feedback and learning more about Flare as I try it out during trial period.

Things I like:
Nuke
Fast, useful gizmos and tools from Nukepedia. Das grain. Simple and logical node view. Easy to mach blacks and whites with few clicks. Huge learning source.

Fusion
Free versions from v9, at least for now.

Flare
Built in Match grain so far. Still early stage of trial.

Price:

Nuke Indie / 449 euro + VAT (1 year)
Nuke / 2989 euro + VAT (1 year)

Fusion Studio / 295 euro + VAT (Singe payment so far)

Flare / 2028 euro + VAT (1 year)

Biggest issues: at least for me

Nuke Indie / Nuke

Nuke indie
Resolution limitation and limited phyton.

Nuke
It’s a stripped-down version of the more expensive NukeX, with fewer features.

Fusion Studio
Not intuitive node flow and when used on same PC and Mac, it is slower than Nuke to process when doing similar tasks such as basic green screen keying over new background.

Flare
I’m not sure yet. I need to try it out more. I think there are the least amount of trainings or resources available on the web.

Oh, one thing comest my mind. Project management. With Nuke and Fusion, comp file is saved where ever you want under project. It is easy to locate, move and copy. With Flare it creates some kind of managed data base without old familiar file structure. What happens if it breaks?

And matching blacks and whites. How can I mimic super easy Nuke Grade node?

Community:

Nuke Indie / Nuke
Non existence for Nuke Indie community on Foundry forum. Not sure about Nuke forum.

Fusion Studio
Good community. Some are very helpful, some are harsh…
steakunderwater forum

Flame / Flare
Seems like very friendly and helpful community here. :slight_smile:

Summary:
Nuke Indie
As I mentioned before, the resolution limitation and limited phyton are deal-breakers for me.

Nuke
The price is a bit high, and it’s missing some features. I could always replace the missing features with other apps, but that would definitely add to the cost. Also, I’ve had a really bad experience with Foundry’s sales team. I’ve reached out to them multiple times to ask about switching from Nuke Indie to Nuke, but they’ve ended our email conversations multiple times during the middle of our discussion.

Fusion Studio
Feels slow. I’m not sure what’s causing the issue. When I cache or render, it doesn’t seem to be using the full power of my CPU or GPU no matter if it’s PC or Mac.

Flare
I need to try it out more.

7

Just few days in with trial and still very much lost, but Flame feels very responsive so far.

Testing with 4608x3164 resolution Prores I usually work with Nuke is very fast even with Master Keyer applied with blurred background on my Mac mini M4 Pro. What I noticed is Flame using GPU for playback which Nuke never does. Nuke usually process image using CPU and then playback from cache. Flame is processing with GPU and playing on the fly without cache?

8

Correct, unless you render or implicitly select a node to cache Flame will play down by processing things on the fly.

1 Like
9

Thanks for the reply. Obviously Mac mini M4 Pro isn’t optimal machine for Flame, but good to see how well it works with low spec Mac. Mac Studio M4 MAX should be plenty good then.

10

Hi,

Does it mean Flame / Flare doesn’t need that much RAM in batch? I mean Nuke, Fusion and specially After Effects need huge amount of RAM to be able to playback, but if Flame / Flare is precessing on the fly and if render or cache means rendering preRender, then it is kind of playing back Prores or something?

11

About Cache and Reners

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12

It’s reliant heavily on the gpu prowess to get its performance for most processes. There is cpu and ram utilization it’s just not as prevalent—you can check the performance monitor to see a little more granularity.

Where you’ll really feel the Mac’s disadvantage to Linux is the new ML tools, where the Mac implementations are forced to run on cpu with no cache as opposed to Linux which will use the gpu.

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13

OK, sound like I was understanding correct. Thanks for the link!

14

Thanks, good to know. For now I am not too keen for Linux option as I know nothing about Linux and don’t know anyone near me who could help me if I get any issue.

I probably end up needing those ML functions at some point, but time will tell.

15

The unsung technological prowess of the Apple Silicon is the ability to transcode material on the fly.
The high-efficiency playback capabilities are remarkable.
I don’t know if these are exploited in flame but it’s unlike the flame team to miss a trick.
But who wants to work on compressed material?
Just kidding…

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16

At least it should be good for preview purpose and during build up stage. Bypass when final render stage comes to get best quality without reusing multiple Prores preRenders maybe.