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.
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.
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?
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.
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.