They called it a Mirage because from a distance it looked useful. Once the novelty of the page curl and the three little dancing balls wore off, it was a $500,000 doorstop unless you had someone fluent in Pascal on staff.
2 Likes
I made a bunch of shapes using Tr-shape and tr-contour on the hp terminal. It was not a quick process and we’d literally get an artist to build things out of Styrofoam then cut them in to layers we drew around on a tablet. Kind of worked but not great biggest issue is total lack of any hidden face removal and of course zero interpolation if you zoomed in - the pixels literally just drifted apart…
The most used shape for me was 99 which blew an image into pixels - used it on many many titles.
Technicians render, artists process.
2 Likes
Fun classic paintbox story - I had a brown box one with the huge 80 gig 5 platter disk working until at least 2000 in a ampex dcp suite in Malaysia for the editors to draw a quick matte in.
Red dots all over the screen on disk access due to noise on the smb bus no amount of tinfoil helped but it was only there as you read and wrote to disk.
It came from Cal whose Harry I bought and replaced the paintbox with a vseries from Component video. I spent a month in a bonded warehouse rebuilding it as it hadn’t been switched on for years helped by Ian Gough Williams then partner in extreme video sales. When we stitched it on it still had the title sequence and mattes of sea quest dsv on it. I think we used the water element as part of a clock for years 
I think I paid 70k for it all and I had loads of trips to quantel to look at the change book to work out what was wrong. The 601 Input on the v series was dead so I ended up moving the b In/out module to the a side and that worked. The biggest issue I had was no audio which took a week to solve. Turned out the audio connector had fallen off the mother board which was literally a thousand pins pointing at you inside and just needed a two way wire putting on the right pins.
Within a year we’d made enough money out of the suite to buy a third of the company we had based it in and I flew to Chicago and bought a henry from film workers club. Made a ton of money out of the Henry and bought a second flame on an onyx and an ursa gold to replace the old 422 telecine along with a resolve 888 and a pogle to replace the 422s sunburst 2 panel. Had mike waldie do a full blueprint on both chains and life was pretty good and I quit running anything but flame for about 15 years.
4 Likes
At least it used the same menu colours, Encore Hud was my one and only PAL/GAL design as a software guy.
1 Like
The aliased text wasn’t the worst part of the encore:)
The one bit key wasn’t great forcing you to squint when hand tracking shots - at least later it became semi transparent when moving things…
The actual worst thing was the over temp alarm which went off all the time as the chips ran hot to get the speed needed. Quantel fixed it by adding a button to switch off the alarm
Reminds me of when sequence macros used to crash the Harry/paintbox if replayed faster than you recorded the pen movements. The fix… disable the speed control meaning any time you made a macro you’d have to move your hands as fast as you could to save time on the repeated looped executions. Lots of fun.
1 Like
Here you go… @paul_round and @andymilkis I’m sure you will need this…
2 Likes
I’d love to have pedals that speed up renders.
1 Like
I don’t want to speculate about render speed, but I’m sure you can set it up to do a Vulcan death step
Can it be set to open a trap door and return my client to the depths of hell from which they came riding on a horse named Fucking Idiot?
5 Likes
These shots of the guys going over the rail with the surfboard… that’s the Molson ad demo project i was talking about! It came on a mini Digibeta. Lots of fond memories learning smoke with that project.
5 Likes
We gave those out at NAB and at User Groups! 
1 Like
To be honest, I"m just someone who watched flame from the sidelines since I was a kid. An odd kid, of course, who loved to pester every company in the world by (snail-)mailing and faxing them from 1994 on to learn what the tools of the trade were. Having finally turned into a 2D/3D (AFX/Houdini-) artist I saw a couple of flames over the years, on Irix and the Onyx, later on the Tezro and then on Linux/HP and, of course, on the Mac. In the last few years I’ve actually thought hard about finally getting into flame as well. But the way Autodesk thinks it should approach new users is outright ridiculous. On the one hand they’re providing a gigantic amount of training material on YouTube. But at the same time they really think it is a good idea to not provide a learning edition of flame but just a stupid demo limited to 30 days. Heck, I even was thinking to get a Mac for the whole purpose to get into flame. But without a proper learning edition that’s totally out of question. I’m doing extremely well financially but won’t spend 420 bucks a month to learn it with the full version. I’m totally sure they’re losing a lot of people who would learn it if a PLE existed - and no, I’m not interested in cracking it as some have suggested…
3 Likes
Additionally a lot of tutorials you can’t do or teach on students if they refer content wise to a feature in a point-update, because the 30 days demo is always the major version without considering any point-update. You’ll end up in waiting for the next major version and it’s demo.
2 Likes
Discovered whilst moving!
I’d like to think this was looted during the Great Swag Hunt that immediately followed the rebranding announcement in 2005, but I’m pretty sure it was actually a gift/bribe in return for another year of editing marketing videos without hurting anyone.
2 Likes
What’s the difference?
1 Like
Why it’s a cocktail shaker! Though @randy is correct that, in a pinch, one may be substituted for the other.
This has an integrated strainer and originally came with two frosted martini glasses that IMMEDIATELY broke.
It also has an AMD logo on the back. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool!
1 Like
@kirk We used to call those MBUs (mobile beverage units). Pre-mix your cocktails & find ice later! Or just ice 'em if you got one of those vacuum insulated deals. You could serve up some serious heat w/ a half-gallon growler…
3 Likes