Are you saying that conducting an online session whilst sipping a 'rita on the beach is within the realm of possibility?
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high speed composting? 
Isn’t that far more important? 
I always wanted to create a massive thread about Flame artists sharing their amazing composting efforts, but in fact post pictures of their compost bins but mistype every instance of composting as ‘compositing’ and watch the world burn.
I spend far too much time composting. #serious
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I also do feel the fun of being the magician is definitely no longer there…but that’s the same for all vfx software. The bar as you say being so high, means everything has to be so hugely process oriented, and things are forever moving more and more to a factory like production line…
As such we are apt to bring up one of Clarke’s 3 laws… 1. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Well now the tech is so advanced, and the results are too, its just tech and science and no longer a mysterious thing…unlike “magic”, which is a pretty disempowering situation if that is the feeling you hanker for (I also do) !
So it feels to me like maybe you can come to accept all these shifts and then no longer look for that ‘magic’ hit from Flame, or tbh, vfx in general, because I don’t think you’ll find that again very purely for a while.
This is the reason why I myself see flame now more as a job that i always want to do well, but not truly as a huge passion as I used to have with Flame. I have started to explore writing, as the immediacy between imagination and expression into the real world still makes it a very magical feeling thing. It still feels truly organic to be able to visualise something in your mind and very quickly be able to give it form that another person can then experience. VFX just is not going back to that place for a long long while. It will eventually, when all the current process based workflows end up resulting in a robust and highly fluid and real time resource for the imagination to express itself. It will arc back to that but has some way to go yet !
So…I get your disappointment but I think its such a wide thing, that it’s unavoidable. It’s in all industries. Best thing is to make peace and find other ways to be magical ! I started to really explore advanced physics and philosophy also, to get some otherworldly play back in my life ! There still is a lot of great mystery in those fields to be explored ! Vfx is kinda at an evolutionary lull of consolidating a very advanced level nowadays…that is also quite a natural thing to happen in all development pathways…it will at some point go forth again with as yet unimagined leaps and the magic will return !
Right now you can do things that where mind blowing even 10 years ago, and they are now so normalised that you barely get a reaction from clients…a thank you rather than a wow ! It’s just expected now.
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We used to poop in the woods a hundred years ago. What’d we expect? 
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They thank you?
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haha…maybe the same thing, I’m sure pooping in space has also lost it’s “lustre” these days 
!
maybe William SHATner could tell us lol
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This is a very interesting topic you bring up here. I’ve always enjoyed writing music on the side, It’s a more fluid connection to the imagination, much like you mention with writing/reading, thank you for putting words to this
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Zorrofx yes totally agree music is the same ! Acoustic guitar and a voice and there is the magic ! Also what with the super responsive Daws and Synths we have available now !
Happy new year
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oh, don’t get me started. I started using Garage Band on my iPhone while riding the subway and ended up mocking up dozens of songs. Things have changed so much.
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Interesting. I must rank as one of the longest Flame users out there… And im still using it. Only difference is it isn’t the one stop solution anymore. I go outside for Tracking, Roto - Basic 3D and text! apart from that its where I like to put it all together as it were. I still refer to myself as a Flame artist anyhow. My worry is im not sure what the future holds as I can’t see much young blood out there - all the kids are using nuke or resolve/fusion. I did a university panel the other day and no one had heard of flame! Which is heartbreaking!
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I blame Autodesk for a complete failure to properly market what is arguably the best marketing tool out there!
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Yo, big respect for this - Autodesk / Avid killed my favorite two tools DS and XSI - I guess Flame is next 
I am all invested into Resolve studio and Fusion but was hoping that Flame is up there with them especially for RAW workflows and GPU Cuda stuff - I guess this is not so? I just started to learn about Flame and this post is really important for me!
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Pretty sure I’ve been hearing that Flame has been dying the entire 13 years i’ve been using it. Hopefully it continues dying another 20!
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I hope that Flame can keep up with the new developments in hardware and gives us more for less time. 3D rendering is going all GPU and it is fast replacing CPU - how many tools in Flame are GPU powered ? Is this going to be one of the main goals of Flame going into the future?
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Revisiting this after a while. Flame 2022 still drives me nuts with its missed opportunities, idiosyncrasies, decades old bugs… But I still use it, daily, and I haven’t found anything that comes close, maybe because it really is fast (linux), or because it’s ingrained so deep. But, the day sideFx decides to create its own 2D integration software, I’m jumping. That’s if ML/AI doesn’t destroy our careers in the meantime.
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And flame is up there with linear / ACES workflows. AD got that right.
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We’ve been hearing that for over 25 years.
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