This might seem like a silly question but my knowledge of Flame is very limited so I’d love to hear some professional opinions.
The problem
We are going to be working on a long form project for 9 months, we have a Supe coming in to run the project via Flame (exports, timeline etc) who will also be comping UHD 16bit EXR’s quite heavily and needs equipment. He is a Flame Op and we need to provide a machine for him to work on.
Solutions
I’ve been looking at options and from a few suppliers they are spec’ing some pretty insane machines on rental or for purchase, but they’re all Dual core Xeon, 128gb RAM, A5000, 16tb nvme Flamestore, all the bells and whistles. (HP Z8 or something similar)
But, from people in studio reaching out to other Flame Ops they know, they have been saying a Mac Mini (M4) is perfectly fine and we’ve also looked at a Mac Studio, even though that’s only an M2 Ultra.
So now we’re not too sure which way to turn. The Z8 feels like it could be overkill (Coming from a C4D/Nuke studio, the specs seem insane compared to our usual workstations) but also we don’t want to spend on a budget option (Mac Mini) to find out it’s underpowered for what we need and leave us struggling, £5k out of pocket, and still needing something more powerful.
As a group of Flame professionals, what would be your advice/recommendation?.
We have invested in a P620 with 192GB RAM and A6000 gfx card 3 years ago. Never looked back for price/performance. You would definitely see the performance for big comp setups.
On the other hand, we also have a MacStudio M2 Ultra, for half the price and, well, half the performance, if you count performance by render time. A lot of my time is spent in the UI and they both seem snappy enough for me. I think the M4 Mac mini is on par with M2 Ultra as far as performance is concerned.
We have but he said he’s not a techy guy so just uses what he’s given, hence why I’m here. I feel he’d be happy with either but my concern is he’d take an underspec machine without knowing it and then we’re burning cash on his day rate waiting on render times etc.
But I guess that’s the eternal connundrum when it comes to kit, do I spend up front on raw power, or pay in bits with lost productivity
Yep that’s definitely a “hidden” cost I’m trying to explain to the guys here at the moment but even with a beefy NAS/DAS we’re still maybe £5k difference between a Mac and a Z8 so just need to decide if the performance boost to a Z8 is worth that cost or will the Mac be speedy enough on it’s own
I can’t speak for your flame op, but as a non-techy guy myself I tend to lean Mac IF I’m going to be my own tech support/infrastructure. I’ve fallen down linux wells in the past and hate it.
If you have solid infrastructure and engineering, or at least someone tech savvy to mount drives, troubleshoot drivers, etc, the PC is the better call.
My question to you is what do you think you would utilise more once the project is over? I’d be thinking about a use case over the next 3-5 years.
If a powerful system that could easily be reconfigured for Windows is going to be utilised afterwards, and you have IT support that knows enough about Linux (Linux really isn’t that hard to administer) to look after it then I’d go the PC if you want a performant workstation long term.
However, if a Mac Mini (Max the spec if you do) or a M2 Mac Studio (which is what I’d pick due to the additional available RAM which will become useful on beefy shots) would get utilised more afterwards, then that is also a good solution.
Have you considered a spec’d up MacBook Pro? You can get the same M4 Max chip as the Mac Mini but double the RAM. You’d need a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter potentially but I kind of think it could be useful for a VFX Supervisor who may end up being on set or going to meetings that wants to cart around a system with him/her. I kind of think this would also be handy due to the flexibility.
In the end, they are all good solutions and it will be what best fits your use case. Best bang for the buck would be the Mac Mini/Mac Studio. Best performance would be the PC. Best flexibility would be a MacBook Pro.
I have a M4 Max MacBook Pro with 128Gigs of ram. It’s a pleasure of a machine to use both directly with Flame, Houdini and Nuke as well as a remote head for the linux systems. I’m going to 10gigE over an TB adapter to the network and a TB4 to an OWC NVME raid. Video preview over a BMD Ultrastudio mini.
Flame benchmark-wise 6:08.49. So no slouch compared to a lot of the options out there.
The crazy part is that the choice of a Z8 dual Xeon Beast and a mac mini is even a QUESTION … a few years ago people would laught at you for asking this, but its super VALID these days.
otherwise i can only agree with everyone else here bascially
you got a linux savy IT department that can support a beast of a machine? → buy a Lenovo P8 or Used P620
You got a Linux savy nerd that likes to stick it to the man? Get a Ryzen based gaming system with a 4090/5090 but dont come crying if it crashes
You dont have anyone with solid Linux skills → get a macStudio or mac Mini or even Mac Pro
I just got a maxxed out mini to try if it bottlenecks not having as much Vram, but if you want to be safe it will keep up, the M2 Ultra with maxed ram is still the king of the Hill
Mac Pro even CAN make sense if you consider all the extra stuff you might want/need/allready have, how about 25/100 Gbit networking? Internal large framestore? Blackmagic/Aja cards? do the math. thunderbolt stuff is a high premium over anything pciE directly.
macbooks are just not my vibe that much for things like that but the m4 Max is actually faster than the m4 pro mini… so there is that. just feels wrong but I get it.
You can also generally buy 2 macs for the price of one linux machine, depending on what has to be done sometimes its really nice to be able to render on one machine and continue on another … itll also be twice the licenseing so there is that.
Hahahaha. RS is a decent intermediate if you don’t mind paying the Maxon tax…
…and surely it’s coming. Karma’s barely out of beta in the grand scheme of things and MacOS is always the red-headed step child of the SideEffects world.
I also think you can look at a Ryzen or i9 with a Pro GPU card like a RTX4000 or 4500 ada too. Apple silicon is a lot closer to one of the gaming CPUs in terms of design (forgetting the whole x86 vs arm part) and also has the whole mixed efficient & performance cores. This would be similar bang for the buck as the Macs, but I’d go the Mac for simplicity for Flame, though down the line you could flip the PC to a Windows system and run whatever on it.
we switched from rs to full native karma for many reason, main thing is to not have to deal with maxon, we sre full
usd now and have a karma farm and such… no rs for use snymore maxon free since 2024
I am a crazy person and ive got a personal vendetta against companies that mess with me and maxon is very high on that list next to adobe. I Used to be a huge redshift fanboy with a bunch of perpetual licenses before they got bought by maxon and then everything went downhill fast.
It was a pretty painfull transition, more regarding USD/Solaris than with XPU. lots to learn.
Its definetely a early adopter tax tho, however we now have over a year of full karma XPU experience and we know how to deal with it pretty well.
All the native integrations and variables and stuff actually working , viewport actually working and stuff has been super good and its getting updates like crazy.
If you ask me to bet on sideFX , autodesk or maxon to create a stable and fast render engine my bets are on sideFX.
So yea i cant say you can just transition from redshift to karma like you could between rs and vray or arnold as the whole hydra / solaris/ usd stuff is a BEAST to learn, some say its overkill for our small commercials… i dont think it is.
Rendering wise however its been solid, sure some stuff wasnt supported and you had to fallback to cpu for some things but thats getting less and less. but we dont really have bugged renders or anything like that.
Id say the biggest benefit for me is that we can just upgrade to every production build of houdini without worry yhat redshift will break … getting all these jucy bugfixes and performance improvments like every other month. With RS you had to wait and wait and wait and I am not patient .
