Sorry to hear that. That’s a shame,as out of all the compositors I’ve used over the years, flame is definitely the fastest and client friendly. Nuke definitely
Has the edge over 3D also Deep comps, AI(Copy Cat)
Simon, I think we’re pretty much tied as the “longest continuous flame user alive”. First used Flame at 525 when the modules weren’t even integrated. Anyway, perhaps your disillusionment comes from having to keep up with the shifting sands of progress. As we get older it gets a little more challenging to take on board new ideas when they’re integrated into tools we are so familiar with. Spend a year or two away from Flame you’ll have a steep hill to climb. I get it. That’s why I’m always eager to find out what’s new and try to use it as soon as possible. Maybe it’s time to retire if you’ve lost the joy of stretching yourself in the craft. I’m getting there myself, but not quite. If you aren’t pushing forward you’re sliding backwards. If other tools do it for you, that’s cool But let’s not disparage those who are developing innovative tools to make all the magic happen, eh? Love you, brother. Whatever works for you!
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I come from the other side of things - only having been a flame user for 7 years now.
I started in 2014, which gave me many reasons to absolutely hate it.
Coupled with the fact that we didn’t have any sort of I.T. infrastructure - I had to learn linux at the same time.
It was a recipe for madness.
My favorite bug was the total corruption of my projects, the workaround being saving 20 versions and piping the usable bits across. With clients behind me. Not happy memories.
And still - there was a magic to it all.
Jankiness - but magic too. Theres a freeform(ness) to Flame which is both confusing and liberating. But once it hooked me it has made it difficult to move on. Batchception is glorious when it doesn’t eat your project alive.
I came from the motion design world, so I used (and still do) a grab bag of apps. Everything from Houdini and Blender to Unreal and Unity. Even dabbled in Avid DS and Shake in the olden days (and a brief, infuriating stint with Apple Motion)
I am quite serious about being as software agnostic as possible. Tribalism has no place in post - I’ve seen too many legacy outfits suffer for lack of agility
And yet, for me, as an outsider, there has been something about Flame that has stuck - once I got past the first jank recoil.
I fought it for a while - few years back I was convinced that Nuke Studio was the answer - so bought a license and tried some client attend and…
It worked, but so much of the workflow just bogged down. So much of what I do is “creative problem solving” - and in the rush and intensity of trying to appease an unruly client, I love the freeform chaos that flame allows to “experiment” out of a corner. Smushing motion vectors and hijacking position passes. Its all such lovely bedlam.
I’m a one man band so even though I’m not always involved in grand big budget comping like a lot of you, for someone trying to do it all its been…
It’s been infuriating and sweary, but also kinda perfect.
Still janky - but more of a magic jank.
Which as we all know, "magic jank is best jank."
And, much to my suprise, the flame guys have really listened to feedback. When they added elbows and the compass I literally did a little jig.
As a solo type generalist, I’ve been really excited about the confluence with color. I do a lot of grading, and instead of breaking out to resolve I now do most of my color work in flame. Many of the directors love it, able to noodle and comp / online / color in the same flow.
The machine learning direction is really great too. They’re trying to innovate, which is all I could ask really.
Nuke is great.
I WANT to love Nuke Studio, I really do. But I don’t think our relationship will ever have the intensity of the love/ hate passion I have for Flame.
And, I know that it will never happen because of “software architecture” (see! Flame has forced me to actually know things about unix and terminals n shit) but windows would rock.
Or someone convinces Apple to use Nvidia. Whichever is easier. Thanks.
Also:
Particles
Please
Too obtuse
I’ve resorted to installing blender on the box as a stopgap, which is working, but it slows down the flow.
Anyway, my lineage is nothing compared to you gentlemen, but as a troubador journeyman in a leetle boutique - Flame’s been alright. I think we’ll walk a ways together. I’ll be a Flame advocate - but like a jaded drunken one who speaks of love and pain, and how the two are often intertwined, while sipping cognac and bathing in life’s blessed contradiction.
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I love Flame, i wish more people would use it and more people become AWARE of what you can actually do in here.
Is it perfect? No, but so what? Nothing is or ever will be
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I am currently training up a couple of juniors.
It’s been a while since I have seen this much youthful enthusiasm for the software.
It has also been a while since I have had to explain in detail how I do what I do and how this software works.
Let’s just say it doesn’t come easy. There are a lot of odd quirks and things that I do for reasons I seem to have forgotten. Things I don’t know how I do them. “Pass me the pen and let me try” it can be difficult to explain.
We have spent a few days doing roto in the gmask Tracer and they have been finding bugs and glitches I have never seen before. Heaps of fun.
It is only once I take a step back and see it though someone else’s eyes. Seeing the software for the first time. I can remove my rose tinted glasses.
And yet for some reason they are not deterred. Maybe they see the versatility in the software. Maybe they believe in my insistence that once it snaps and they get it, it is one of the fastest pieces of software for finishing. Maybe like I was when I saw it for the first time, they see what it is that I do on the Flame. The compositing. The finishing. The clients and they like the look of it and they want to do it themselves.
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I think flame is in its best incarnation ever. There are other interesting tools and many have amazing features (good!) but flame also has some aces up its sleeve. This sounds like a friend of mine telling me: “I am done with the iPhone” he goes and buys an Android phone and a couple of months later he is back… I don’t understand how people can get this mad at a hammer…
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I’m loving Flame right now. I just ditched a Nuke studio licence. I have everything in a timeline for a massive project; VFX in nested batches, pre TW, giving me exactly the frames I need to work on. I can publish for grade, re-conform, or make social media versions all at a moments notice. It feels like a super-efficient hub!
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when was the last time your hammer refused to recognise the nails?..even when you put them right in its path, and said “thats the nail…hit it!”
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Given my eternal hate/love relationship with Flame since forever and the million times I ditched it in favor of other software that was better suited to the task at hand, I come back to Flame as the zero point, the equilibrium marker for commercial jobs. If I worked in long format that most likely wouldn’t be the case, but for what I do, it’s remained the bellwether not because it can do everything but because it can do what it does reliably, repeatedly and with an appropriate degree of scalability.
No one does it all, no software does it all. Being good at what we do means knowing your limits, knowing your team’s limits and knowing the limits of the tools at your disposal.
… or in the common vernacular that would be “know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘me, know when to walk away and know when to run.”
And in closing we’ve all been fucked by some aspect of flame at some time or another, so frustration at times is warranted. Collectively we would be good to remember our own version of that frustration and not be too quick to judge.
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Yeah! And the numerous times i have hit my fingers with it.
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The TW thing was actually quite a biggie. It was one of the reasons Nuke Studio drove me round the bend - such a small consideration - but also a massive headache when dealing with the timewarp obsessed editors I tend to work with.
To be fair, there’s probably something I was missing in studio, but I just like the “logik” of flame.
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Here is my hot take and some of the things that worry me about Flame.
Spent 11 years working on Flame.
I also do Blender, Houdini, CC, and Resolve.
I have worked in commercial work for all 11 years with a spattering of film and music videos.
Pros - I think flame is amazing for the simple fact that it is the most reliable software I have found. I think when I hit render, or when I hard commit, I know that when I hit play and show the client the timeline, it will run without exception. It is very fast (hardware dependent) and it gives a huge swath of tools.
Cons - The biggest con of flame is that when I look at the field of Flame Artists (I am 38) I don’t see anyone really young in our field. I don’t see people coming out of school and knowing Flame. It is something that is taught on the job. I see people coming out of school knowing Nuke, CC, and Resolve. That being said, I have started to use Resolve more often for conforms and for general work. I have found it to be competing with Flame in a lot of categories. The problem with resolve is the unreliability of rendering and playing timeline. But they just added render in place. That is supposed to be the “hard commit” of resolve (doesn’t really work yet). But if they got that in place. Resolve could be the defacto of post houses for the reliability, cost, color, and mass learning database on youtube and reddit. It is also being taught in schools. (big plus)
Listen, I still think Flame is the king of commercial post as of right now. I use it for 90 percent of my clients. But last year I used resolve for 0 percent of jobs and now I use it for 10 percent. That number will tick up dramatically if it becomes as reliable, if I have a bigger pool of freelancers I can use, and also a bonus that the ability to work with my color artist in parallel is seamless.
Just my two cents. Start getting more schools involved with better out reach. Get better youtube and reddit saturation. Get a younger talent pool.
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This thread is paramount. I wonder how much love/hate comes from Finishing vs. Shot x Shot? I work on shot comps, whether it be creative or technical. If I have any frustration with Flame, it’s usually artistic jealousy, being isolated from other solutions, and platforms. Also not having speedy plug-ins that scratch somebody’s itch.
I was on Flame from '97-13. Flare ever since. No conforming, somebody else does that. So I picked up After Effects for teaching and somehow came up with new Flame solutions by learning AE. Different hammer, same nails, the first hammer works too! It was Eye-opening. Some of us use Houdini, etc. If we do, we are definitely not the “conformers/Finishers”. It’s just time economics, and they DO NOT have time for the stuff we do. So they give it to me, and I hand my result to them. In our shop, a bunch of us mix up a graphic/CGI/VFX side-dish with all kinds of software and hand it to the Finisher, who manages all the courses in the dinner. If I’m not the Finisher, it just means I am more of an artist than an Online Editor. Big conforms, several people.
I used to run Flame like an AE artist does today. Lots of Mo Graphics, type animation, etc. That’s all changed. Full honesty, I started on Quantel Paintbox before Photoshop was released so I’ve seen a lot of development to be sure. To me, those of us Artists who send stuff to Finishers were once Flame artists, and my Friends/Colleagues who were once Smoke Artists, are now Finishers. Flare lets me compile a lot of VFX/artistic stuff to prep correctly for the Finish.
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The lack of juniors is probably my biggest concern for Flame at the moment. When I first started out running in 2001, there was a queue of people in the machine room all wanting to get into Flame. The competition was pretty fierce at times but it drove people on. But there were more people interested than jobs available. But now it’s definitely the other way round. Right now feels a very good time to move into Flame. My current company could do with a good junior and they would be thrown right into in terms of learning on the job and helping out the seniors. And from speaking to a few people, this seems like a problem in a number of places. I think there are a few reasons for this and probably worth a thread of its own to discuss, but definitely feels like something that needs some attention. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would jump at the chance to do this as a job.
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A big part of the problem is that many simply have never heard of Flame. I know many video editors who look blank when you mention the name. Autodesk really should do more to promote it.
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I think Flame is doing a good job of keeping up with the times. Moving away from locked hardware has been a godsend. I still have mixed feelings about the “rental” model of licenses, although it does help freelancers and small shops in the short term. The wealth of freely available knowledge on Youtube is awesome. Back in the old days you had to read the manual and it was the most soporific thing in the world and didn’t really do a good job of explaining things.
Where Flame has always lagged is in handling raw formats. In contrast, Resolve is very no-nonsense when it comes to conforming raw footage. I wish Flame had the same ease for that.
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Been putting this off a bit, head down on a bunch of deliveries, from Flame no less (then via Media Encoder, because… hmmm?)
I understand the anger here, I’m leveling a charge against a beloved software that many of us have built decades-long careers around.
I was Flame’s (Flash at the time) first product manager, and one of the founders of Discreet Logic.
My career has been centered largely around flame. I have always had skin in the game.
I’ve always used Flame at a high level even though one of the responses below suggested that I’ve “aged-out”. I think the reverse is true - Flame’s aged-out on me.
My bone-fides:
Originally a coder, I started working with Wavefront and Qantel Harry in 1988 as a CG artist in Sydney. I then helped create Eddy (1st node based compositing software, although Nuke was being developed concurrently at DD), worked for Softimage in Montreal as a product specialist, then helped start DL with Richard Z, Diana S, Chris G, Bruno N, Pierre J, and Zareh N (Discreet Logic was then the sister company of Animal Logic.) in 1992.
Gary T created Flame as a new paradigm - computer-based compositing / on-line finishing - a Harry (& then Henry) competitor even if we were too scared to say that aloud - Qantel notoriously litigious. But always an intrinsically creative tool, with the flexibility of being software-driven.
I didn’t last long as product manager, I wasn’t very good! Too young, and wanted to be back in production, as much as I loved the DL crew.
Blah blah blah.
My statement last week (after a bottle of wine, full points Rene) and a very annoying afternoon of ripple edits crashing my Flame (2021 version something), I got fed-up. Flame: great-expensive-now-do-it-twice.
I’m also a Maya & Houdini user.
Houdini is amazing. The original node-based creative system that’s evolved into something extraordinary. I fell in love hook&line about five years ago. Especially after struggling with Maya’s silliness for too long (and the premature death of Softimage).
Working from home, I have Houdini on a maxed out Puget system, sitting beside the Flame on a nice HP Z8. And it’s hard not to compare. Especially because Houdini has such a superior UI. It’s DAG based, but unlike Flame I can have thousand of nodes, zoom out instantaneously to see all of them, and then select and concurrently, change, a massive number of nodes in one action. Yes, I’ve had thousand of nodes in Action, things I’ve created, not just imported from the CG department. I’ve use projection-mapping from the start, and delved into all the PBR stuff. Happy to show you jobs where I’ve out-shone the CG department, and from the way-back.
I’ve always used Flame to do 3D stuff, and dived so deeply into this because it was how I did my job, with clients behind me, the $$ ticking away (when hourly was the way), & the pressure on. I loved it! I could pull rabbits out that Flame-hat so fast.
I miss working on the acknowledged premium creative platform - Flame is almost invisible now.
I miss being able to do magic in real time, in front of very demanding clients.
The bar is SO much higher now. Creatively and budge-wise.
I do not consider “finishing” to be below production, we’ve all saved broken shots with Flame magic. But, I’ve always expected flame to be a creative toolset as well as the quotidian get-shit-done stuff. And, why doesn’t Flame have Houdini-like PDG UI for versioning? A node-based UI for controlling what shot goes where, what super goes over what etc. Why is Sidefx SO far ahead?
I WANT flame to be the best solution, AND we PAY for it to be that. BUT,
I DO NOT see it advancing fast enough. Particles? VDB? How long did shadows take to work properly? I have pages of this.
I DO NOT see it becoming much more stable than it was for the Anniversary edition (undo stops working anyone?)
I AM OVER how it doesn’t take advantage of all the new GPU tech.
Lastly,
I DO NOT think that Autodesk has Flame as a priority. I’m sure the flame developers are top notch, but perhaps there aren’t enough of them.
Flamers, bring it on!
Much Love
Simon.
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Damn, who would have predicted that 2021 will find you with the title “Houdini artist” under your LinkedIn account…
Hard to disagree with any of that… and it was refreshing to hear someone give Houdini and the SideFX team their due.
I think also it’s a fair reminder that the best available implementation doesn’t have to be the best implementation. There’s always room for improvement—in some cases a complete overhaul and fork-lift style massive changes like Anniversary edition. I also think, and this may be a bit unpopular, but the development of the software needs to go beyond answering what we’re asking for and into the grey area of what we actually need moving forward whether or not we even know what that may be. SideFX is good at analyzing trends quite early and implement with haste.
Logik group-think is nice, feature requests are imperative, but I want the experts building the software we use to go beyond the average of our upvotes. They’re the software dev experts, we’re expert users. Those roles are intrinsically different. Yes the Venn diagram needs a lot of overlap but there needs to be a vision above and beyond what our highest mean is watered down to. I’m talking about the the kind of structural changes that drag users kicking and screaming only to have us thanking the devs six months in.
Regardless, thanks for clarifying Simon.
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I didn’t like your first post much, but I really appreciate your new one. I think a lot of this feedback is highly constructive and fair. As much as I love Flame there are definitely areas of improvement.
Performance is great, but after experiencing Mistika, EVERYTHING feels slow, as in all Post software. I still cannot understand how it does some of the things it does in real-time. Plus makes full use of the CPUs and GPUs. Shame the UI is so disappointing. Houdini is also an incredible piece of software. Very different use case of course.
I love the idea of node based output & finishing. If it is a creative finishing tool, it seems to be something lacking. If a preset isn’t available it is pretty inflexible.
In the end, I think the Dev team are great, and that Will does an excellent job. I’ve always got the feeling that those guys have been hamstrung by Autodesk to some degree. But that happens to a lot of software that gets bought out by conglomerates or venture capitalists.
Still, I am yet to experience a tool that is more efficient or effective for what I do so Flame it is.
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