One thing I wish we’d had time to get to on today’s Logik Live was Henry vs. Flame, and how, in the LA commercial world at least, it was considered as fact that Flame “couldn’t handle” EDLs, and thus conforms, until well into 97 or 98.
This is how I ended up doing pen-to-pen layoffs to Henry for conform and versioning. How much of that was flame artists just not wanting to deal with that part of the process, and how much of it was an actual software limitation is not my place to say, but a couple things stand out in my memory:
NAB 99, when (I think) the new EDL module dropped into smoke. I got my beta “training” on the upper deck of the booth from Louis Girardin, who was late for a dinner reservation, so I think the whole thing lasted like 15 minutes.
“Vertical editing” was a very big deal. Avid had the ability to stack multiple segments on tracks and play whichever clip was on top of each segment in 96 (or possibly earlier), but I don’t think smoke adopted such sorcery until like version 3. And even then you couldn’t composite within the timeline until 2002 or 2003, when Soft Effects arrived. Text was not one of the original soft effects, so to add client bugs to showreel segments I had to use 3D text with a ton of AA, which was effective, but expensive.
The current timeline, which I consider to be a modern marvel, is definitely the product of a lot of hard work by my friends in Montréal, but it was pushed along in no small part by a hardy few smoke artists who never stopped yelling.
The timeline could still do with a few tweaks in my opinion. But I’ve given up yelling. I still get confused by too many different order views of masters/sequences possible at the same time.
I don’t! Despite spending years near Henrys, I only played with one a couple of times.
The Quantel folks offered to have me by their LA office for a demo once, but the Discreet folks brought the machine to us and left it there for a month. Kinda made a difference, saleswise.
In fact, it’s amazing to recall how slow the flame tracker was in the early days. I remember working on Twelve Monkeys in 94/95 and at 2k, it would take hours to analyse a clip, then, of course, if the track was no good, you had to do it again!
I found my website from 21 years ago. WOW. It echoes the clear “film strip” business card I made by hand. I even have a page dedicated to helping people get into the industry! Digital Banshee
It’s certainly not the most cringe-worthy thing that could be on the internet, but DAYUM it made me nostalgic. When I was in HS, me and my two friends started what we would now call a production company called “Around the Block Entertainment”. We owned the wedding scene for a summer, let me tell you. I ended up selling that domain to someone for a nice chunk of change about 15 years ago!
It was all command line when I used it (so was Shake). There was just starting to be a GUI but it was quite basic. Just a sea of blue/gray with menus across the top to populate the script with a rectangular node. Bill Spitzak, the primary author of it, was writing it along with artist input while we all worked at DD. http://www.nukepedia.com/interviews/interview-bill-spitzak/
i remember BBC (dont remember which departement) coming for a smoke demo (NAB or IBC) and one of their points was checking EDL functionality. They brought a 3.5 floppy with the EDL; the Octane did have a built in floppyDrive, but it took me a while to realize, that that drive was built in upside down … - filnally the EDL (CMX3600) loaded & looked good, which supported their decision to buy smoke …
Oh I had totally forgotten about the “upside down floppy” in the Octane, where the specifics of the SCSI floppy drive and the SGI disk tray meant it could only go in that way.
I have to wonder how many actual CMX floppies got read on a Smoke, I guess if you needed it, you were happy to have it… And it’s possibly one of those cases where the development effort would have been hard to justify, but having it allowed you to tick a box on a requirements list…
I was always a Fetch guy, but I think all my Octanes had DAT drives.
But even so, we were moving fonts, graphics, and the occasional text file from the Mac anyway, might as well send the edls that way too.
Imaginary Forces was the only place I ever saw anyone use the Import OMF function as a way of pulling in offlines in the days before flame could read QuickTime, which I thought was kinda clever.
