I got this marketing email from Autodesk this morning: “The 2022 releases are here!”
In the M&E category (the last) not a single mention of Flame.
WTF Autodesk! Really worrying that Autodesk is such a colander with its products. Push your products don’t commit suicide with them!
We are punk rock. Let the pop stars shine as we do the work that is remembered.
Or something. I mostly paint out boom mics. Haha.
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Based on the 2020 financial report from Autodesk Flame is not even listed as a product. I mean I get Max and Maya, but Shotgun? and no Flame?
To be fair, guesstimating from the revenue, there are probably 120.000 licenses of the aforementioned products, and we are what 5000 licenses?
And don’t get me started on “committing suicide”
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I came to Flame in 2014 from a product its owners never gave a shit about (Avid DS) and just don’t want to wind up back in the same place.
How do you think the six of us who use Flame Assist feel? Its a mystery app that some how can even evade an internet search.
Sadder yet is the product line seems largely unknown
By anyone new(ish) to the business…doesn’t really bode well for the future.
Anyone know a smoke/flame assist/flame operator under the age of 35? Just curious.
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This is quite worrying for the future.
Hopefully nothing to worry about. I jumped on Flame in 2015 when I was 30. And most people were saying learn Nuke not Flame. But I always had a fascination with Flame from the amazing work I saw while being in supervised sessions as an Assistant Editor. So I dove full in to Flame and never looked back. Although recently I’m learning Nuke to broaden my compositing knowledge. Figure it can’t hurt.
Luckily the shop I work at is still invested in Flame. But sometimes I hear rumblings of hey what if we finished in Premiere, Resolve, and whatever else is out there. And its like NO!!! I mean you can finish projects in those applications but it would take five times longer and would be extremely painful. The speed, flexibility, and depth of Flame is completely amazing. So hopefully it’s here for the long haul.
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There are currently 3 at Flavor.
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I trained 3 generations of Flame artists myself. I would lure them in with sweet promises, teach them to conform and mask, drag them through that hell for 6 months, then feed them to the lions, sorry clients, the ones that made it through are prospering 
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33 here and started on Flame 6 months ago.
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I’ve trained dozens. They are out there. They are hungry tigers. And hungry tigers get fed. They will be our bosses any day now.
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My hunch is the marketing of Flame is harder to do than the marketing of Maya. It’s very easy to point out what was done in Maya, even without befores & afters. Clients are much less likely to allow ‘befores’ and since much of our work is seamless it’s hard to show what you’ve done. I can think of many, many spots I’ve done, work that I’m very proud of, where not even my peers know what I did to a shot until I painstakingly explain it.
That makes marketing the product hard. Sure you can cut together a reel of very flashy material, but it’s still a question of “what did you do”? If there’s a CG octopus devouring a city, no explanation is needed.
A friend once said, “as long as people keep fucking up, we’ll have a job.”
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A friend once said, “as long as people keep fucking up, we’ll have a job.”
That’s a great line. I need to remember that because it’s so true.
On a similar note I think the marketing for Flame was easier during 90s when I got started. The effects were in your eye then and 3D was too unrealistic to be savvy.
The Discreet demo reels were all tvcs with deforimg bodies, looooooong limousines, giant people in cities. And being an Inferno Artist was one of the coolest jobs.
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