To this day I’m not clear on what else that function did.
We also conformed everything inside of a single action at IF. I’m not entirely sure why, if it was just because it was easy to upres, or because title sequences were so agressively anti-cut that each transition had to be blended into the next anyway.
It was mostly the second one. We would do conforms for each “layer” in the edit, with an accompanying 11x17 sheet of paper detailing all the animations they’d done in Avid, then plug those into the action layers and take it from there.
Non-main title projects, when they occurred, were conformed more traditionally.
But yeah, eventually every spot/title sequence/trailer became one “moon shot” render that took (if I was the artist that set it up) hours or days to render.
The Import/Export OMF code only supported a single piece of media, it had no concept of a “composition” (or whatever the OMF nomenclature for an actual timeline / edit), and it only supported the older AVR resolutions (the ones that were basically MJPEG). That code had been implemented before I joined and was considered “mysterious”, no one really knew how it worked or whether anyone actually used the functionality (apparently some did).
I had a apprentice in the '90’s who was very keen to learn flame. I set him up on my oldest flint with the manual, and he stayed late at night, and on weekends, going through it page by page.
One Sunday night he called me to let me know that ‘he just noticed that my big project on the inferno was not there’. That was strange. I asked him how he would notice if he wasn’t allowed to touch that machine. He didn’t have a good answer.
I went into the office early on Monday AM, fired up the inferno, and did a framestore recover. The disk was full of images from a low budget music video. Obviously he had erased the job that payed the bills for the studio, and his salary, to do some side work, without permission.
I had to call my clients and say that we’d had a ‘computer problem’, and couldn’t have our session that morning. By re-digitizing the EDLs and re-rendering the shots I was able to redo a week of work in a day.
I asked him to get back the tape of the work he had done, and it took several hours. When it came back, there was a ‘dub’ sticker on the tape.
So obviously I fired the guy. His only response was ‘I thought you liked me.’
I didn’t hear anything from him for a couple of months, until a producer at another flame house messengered over his reel. It was all my work. She thought it was funny, and of course had no intention of hiring him.
I called him up to ask about it, and he lamely said that he had done his own versions of the shots. I did a difference matte between ‘his work’ and mine, and there was no difference. I had to threaten legal action to get him to stop showing my work, and saying he’d done it.
Fast forward a few years when I’d moved out to LA. I went in to work at one of the big studios on the West Side, and the first person I saw was my old apprentice, now a big time flame artist. He looked at me, terrified, apparently concerned that I would tell his boss.
I let it slide. Three years felt like ancient history, and I didn’t want to start a new job with a big conflict.
I hope I don’t get sued for telling this story. If you can guess who it is, keep it to yourself.
There’s a surprising volume of Flame artists in LA that seem to inexplicably fail forward… arguably the most shocking thing I realized when I moved there from Sweden all those years back.
…even more shocking was how many of those “artists” continued to succeed with little talent other than an accent or a spot on their reel that a bunch of other artists did the heavy lifting on.
LA in a nutshell.
People just get better and as bad as he was at that point at least he was staying all night to learn… that’s what gets you there the fastest.
I once had a guy turn up for an interview ,with,rather mysteriously,some of my work on his showreel .I kept a straight face and asked him at length about the job and how he had achieved the effects ……needless to say he didn’t get the position …!
Back in the early 90’s, I had a young cg “artist” interview with me. His reel consisted of 1 shot - a rudimentary chair model, lit poorly, rotating 360 degrees “turnable” style. His requested salary: $300k.
Yeah.
And that man’s name was Jeff Bezos…
at a job i had many years ago, we all came in one monday to find all of the chairs, desks and computers rearranged in a slightly different way than we had left them friday evening, all of the computers had been messed with too… strange files littered the desktops of all of our systems. It took a few hours to figure it out, but we eventually pieced together one of the employees had come in over the weekend with an entire team of freelancers to crank out some project they landed on the side. (we even found the craigslist ads looking for help) When confronted with this, despite trying to conceal the entire gig, the individual could see no offense at what they had done and was perplexed as to what the problem was. 6 months later they listed me as a recommendation on an application which i was contacted about (!)
The way I see it, I’m a rookie amongst you. I first heard about the IFFS about 2007. If I remember correctly, Autodesk just discontinued Combustion, and I was looking for an alternative. I’ve found a demonstration by CE Raum on the internet. He created a winter scene entirely from stills in Smoke. I clearly remember the wow moment when he added the depth illusion to the trees by distorting them with extended bicubics.
Three years later, I was working at an advertising agency when a nationwide broadcaster in Hungary sought an on-air promo producer and editor. I applied and got the job. On my first day, my boss gave me the 6000+ pages user manual for Smoke and said I have a week to learn. Next week I delivered my first series trailer edited and finished in Smoke.
Only after a few weeks, I found out that the TV station I work for has a Flint machine, too, hidden in the basement because no one had enough knowledge to operate it. So I asked my boss if he had a user manual for that thing as well. He gave me, and in a month, I was finishing my promos on Flint.
Around 2013 our every license has been switched to a Flame license. It was a real pain in the ass because the Anniversary Edition crashed for me about ten times in an hour. I found out that our MFX files caused the instability, and I remember Autodesk said that MXF handling is a third-party code, and they can’t do anything with it. However, later the local reseller brought a patch for our Flames. According to them, it was written especially for us, and it never became an official update for the 2013 version. Side note: it didn’t help at all.
I left the company in 2015, and as I heard after this, they replaced the Flames with Premiere Pro and After Effects. These days I’m still working on Flame on tv commercials in my own production company and post boutique. It’s kind of funny that it all started with an abandoned Flint I’ve accidentally found.
@CERaum → Legend
I miss my intuos 2 - and the satisfying sound of the logik keyboard
i spent ages this weekend trying to get my two Intuos 3’s to work on any of my current macs, but the software firtlers have decided they’re too old to run! Buggers!
I love this story! Thanks for sharing!
They have not worked in either catalina or big sur. just a good job i have a newer model that does work!
Hey that’s Steve Scott on the left!!
Ah, the memories. Just some off the top of my head…
Yes, I do.
But what I also remember and sorely miss is the “rat.”
i remember tile o mat. A script i ran on irix console to break apart stills grater than PAL into action layers.