From an engineering perspective I’ve been part of serval “flame killer projects’ as flame never really scaled well in the larger Post houses. Both those projects pretty much died on the hill. Flame is still here and I build more than I ever have. Also the price of flame is a fraction of what it was. I am pretty sure it will be around for a while yet
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I maintain that flame is healthy in large part due to the caliber and stress tolerance of the fools who operate it, and any potential “flame killer” needs to either magically grow a new crop of these folk or convince a significant chunk of us to jump ship.
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It’s an interesting perspective really. But if I may…
In my mind if you’re capable of making do with Resolve and Fusion then chances are you don’t need flame. Chances are you can continue on in that universe, because 200fps QuickTime outputs with grades and timeline fx are what you need and want. On the flip side, if you’re finding holes in your approach or idiosyncrasies that leave you wanting more then taking the red pill and going down the flame rabbit hole maybe will give you what you’re after.
What you’ll find is that there is in fact no perfect solution. Areas you point out as points if interest maybe lag behind Resolve, but that’s not why you’re here. If those were your reasons you’d be fine to remain in your BMD world and would have no need to venture outside of it.
In the end I think what you’ll find is—and I don’t think it’s just me—flame won’t be the fastest option for some things, nor will it have the bleeding edge latest greatest from siggraph, nor at times will it even make sense. Flame will seemingly lag behind other packages on a bullet style feature list. It will be harder to setup and maintain then any other software you’ve ever used. It is infuriating and heartbreaking at times. You will shake your fists and the sky. Pens will break.
But… it has all the tools to get the job done and those tool are mostly fucking solid and all in one place. It’s dependable by and large and repeatable and predictable and there is a certain quality to it’s integration of editorial and compositing that is unmatched.
We bitch moan and groan here loudly and often but flame is the go to for all of us. Like @andy_dill so poignantly mentioned, this community is half of what makes flame last and why it’s staying power has defied all logic.
My two cents.
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I’ve been using Flame for 8 years. I love Flame. Yes, some tools might be better. But you can still do great things. I think the biggest problem is getting a job. I just don’t want to work in advertising. I want to work in movies or TV series, and when I have a job interview, companies want me to use nuke. The post-production industry is pushing us into other software. We need to show that we’re doing more with Flame
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Agree!
I have resolve, after effects, fcpx, premiere all on my mac but i never use any of them. Flame does 99.85% of everything i need, does it well and saves me the hassle of jumping projects around multiple applications.
Ok, it has its own idiosyncrasies but so does everything.
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I’ve used Flame since it first began, prior to that I was on Harry, (never like Henry!) I started in advertising, (MPC, The Mill and VTR), but transitioned over to film and more recently episodic work.
Over the years Flame has been on a rollercoaster of development, some good and some bad, but all this time I’ve seen cineon, shake and others come and go, (I do wonder how much longer Nuke will be around), I’ve heard many times over the years “Inferno / Flame won’t be around this time next year” but it’s still here and long may it remain so!.
I feel privileged, and lucky, to be able to use Flame on film work, fortunately my boss was a big discreet logic fan and took delivery of the first flame in the UK.
Flame on!
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I’m a relative newcomer to Flame, I’ve been using it less than two years. More than a decade prior to that cutting or doing the one man band thing, in FCP 7/Premiere/Resolve. Apple Color, Motion, After Effects and my least favorite Avid, all mixed in there at some point. Flame 95% of the time, is the most rock solid I’ve seen of any of them.
One big thing to compare to Resolve, Resolve’s caching is terrible compared to Flame. There’s always going to be a limit to what you can playback in realtime. With Resolve the caching comes down to, don’t touch the system and wait for the blue line fill in. No time estimate, wildly inaccurate or not, of how long the caching will take and if you sneeze it might un-cache the whole timeline. Have an overlay of some sort across several clips? Turn it off and on in Resolve and you un-cache everything underneath. Had a longform online session a few months back that the best route was to do in Resolve for a whole host of workflow reasons. Doing things live with the client as you could in flame and then playing it back smoothly in real time, was extremely painful. Yes Resolve recently added “render in place”, but you have to manage those renders in a very manual way.
I think that’s a big strength where Flame doesn’t need to have GPU acceleration on everything. Is it helpful if it can render things quickly? Absolutely. But realtime playback without any rendering or caching at all is still not realistic when you hit a certain level of complexity or increased resolution. And if you’re going to have to render or cache I much prefer Flame’s approach.
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I disagree. It’s not a marketing problem. It’s a need problem. Flame isn’t a daily driver for 99% of the world that messes with pictures. Its a 95% solve for those of us in the 1% of image messer withers.
It’s just like a F1 car. F1 cars need to be circulated with warm oil and started with a laptop because the engine tolerances are so crazy that that’s just the way it needs to get done. At the highest levels stuff gets hard and not everyone needs it.
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Ok this is what I need to know. I work most of the time with 6K BRAW files I guess soon it will be 8K. What I do now is work native in Resolve and can be really fast with cut and color amd also audio. I am not a big fan of Fusion but I did all of my simple 3D integrations on it and everything is done in one package. I see it as a modern day DS box.
The only reason I am looking into Flame is because I always eanted to learn more about it ans now when I have built Epyc Milan workstation monster with 3090 I can finally try Flame.
What would be good workflow in Flame working mostly one man band between 6K BRAW and Softimage XSI for 3D and bringing passes in Flame?
Can I just work with native 6K BRAW or I need to transcode for Flame?
A recent version of Flame does support Braw. And if your storage is fast enough that shouldn’t be a problem at all to playback anything.
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@andy_dill hit it on the head. We’ve seen really interesting tools appear but never quite catch on (Fusion, Scratch, Shake, Mistika, etc) and they will have their own ups and downs as companies but the pool of experience that we make as artists, isn’t something you can manufacture, market and sell. I takes decades to build a community like this and, unless we all jump ship and become Nuke artists or something else, Flame should keep going (as long as Autodesk doesn’t run itself into the ground) so here’s to Flame! 
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you misspelled logik
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I was tempted. Really tempted.
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I get the F1 analogy, but if it wasn’t so well marketed, who would know about it or want to drive one of those crazy-ass buttrockets?
How many times did you not know you needed something until a marketer revealed that need to you, and then presented a solution?
So often you hear the phrase 'never knew i needed x but now i can’t do without it."
Autodesks marketing needs to create the desire in more post people to want to find out about Flame. If they have never even heard of it, they don’t know they need it.
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I don’t think I could disagree more with this. The perception that Flame is a niche product is exactly what leads others in the industry to proclaim that its on the way out the door.
What’s the reason that the average compositor couldn’t be on Flame instead of Nuke?
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A product’s scope has nothing to do with its quality. I used to be a cook. And I had lots of different knives. Some knives were capable of doing everything, but not everything well. Some knives were very niche…I’d only use them for a specific task.
And just because someone proclaims something doesn’t mean it’s true. In the overall grand scheme of things there just aren’t a lot of flame artists in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is likely more nuke artists. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Each tool has strengths and weaknesses. Any artist worth her salt knows that and uses the right tool for the right job.
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I guess one concern I have for Flame is that traditionally we all learned through osmosis while helping out more senior artists with roto, coffees etc. I don’t know if it’s still the case but when Nuke was released they gave it away to schools/universities for very little/nothing which was a huge value-add for those institutions - a fully functional real-world compositing system for $0? That’s a no brainer. And that’s why their user base (and all that goes with it) grew so rapidly. Nowadays if you’re going to learn compositing at a school, you’re probably going to learn Nuke because that’s what they offer. If you want to learn Flame online there are places you can get it for sure, but as we become more siloed and work from home is a much more viable, even preferable option, that traditional way we learned the trade is less viable because we just don’t have that direct contact. I’d love to see Flame being offered for free to those tertiary institutions to continue to generate new users.
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I don’t think Flame is going anywhere. If Flame were to disappear I reckon it would be because AD arbitrarily decided to can it, not because of the chorus of voices that have been intoning its death for the past fifteen years.
I guess my broader point is that I have yet to encounter too many things that Nuke can do that Flame cannot. As you pointed out, Nuke has a much larger userbase than Flame. Given that I feel the products are competitive with each other, I don’t think this disparity is representative of the scope or quality of Flame. As Simon pointed out, the difference in users is in part the result of good marketing tactics by The Foundry, which gets at whether AD has successfully marketed their product.
My argument is agnostic on whether more Flame artists is a good or bad thing. There is after all a reason that the average rate for a Nuke artist is less than it is for a Flame artist and I don’t think its because Flame artists are special or better.
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And JoelOsis 
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I would say comparing Nuke and Flame is apples and oranges for the most part.
Being that they are both fruit (in the sense that both flame and Nuke can comp), in the Venn diagram where they overlap, they share a space where their respective implementations of tools required to fulfill those functions operate—but everything behind those tools is quite different architecturally and it’s that difference that the discerning eye knows how to exploit.
I think that a viewpoint of “they’re both compositing systems therefore largely interchangeable” drastically misses the point while short changing both system’s relative strengths and weakness contra the other.
In the end it wasn’t simply marketing that drove the changes, but architectural differences which favored one platform for a certain deployment and another for its citrusy counterpart. That’s the long way of saying each system ended up kinda where it was intended from a design perspective compounded by the influence of the folks buying it, deploying it in the manner they saw fit and voting for features with dollars.
If I misunderstood your intended meaning, I’m apologizing in advance.
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