Action ? and what about Compositor, around flame 5.0.
At this time we had 2 modules to comp. 1 in 2d, 1 in 3d.
But all the users used Action, a 3d scene to comp A over B… It was silly but we are still doing it 
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I remember the DVE having crops and a master keyer in the same layer. A bit like the way Henry worked, each layer having a standard set of tools
Compositor? What about 3D effects…
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When I was first shown the tools (by Eric Pouliot on a Flint RT), he got to Action, turned and looked at me, and said, “they call it that because it’s where the action is.”
And I believed him, so I used it for everything.
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Oh, I remember this. It was only in the paint node.
This is the best thread ever! The memories are flooding in faster than the Dataview board would crash when we tried to archive it to SD D5 
We gotta do a Zoom on this subject and release it as a podcast! Who’s in?
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I used to work with Rich. What an awesome guy!!!
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Must be tough to be old.
I’ll pack up my shit.
Sadly youth is wasted on the young.
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If I remember, I started learning in 94 on a demo system that was lent to RG/A NY for a month. Freelance there during the day, they let me learn it at night.
-3DEffects module which was like action but only one layer. With one camera and everything in 3D space. It had surface displacement. And one light.
-Compositor module had just 2D space. Only Z rotation. It let you do up to 2 point tracking and stabilizing.
-Stabilizer was it’s own module. This was back when RG/A Already was stabilizing shots by mixing the clip on an Abekas disk recorder with the negated version to get a difference matte, moving it a tiny amount, and setting keyframes in K-scope. So it was not new to them but a HUGE time saver.
-Paint was the most thought-out module.
-Classic keyer was pretty full featured.
-We made special forms to record the order to do operations in and set-up names
-Action came less than a year later.
-This might be a 2-3 years later, when I was finally doing film, but I remember having so little framestore space that we would combine 3 different mattes with one each in R,G, and B. and separate them with the matte CC.
-Space was at such a premium that there were many times there was only room for one render, then you had to delete it before you did the next. Once I was doing a 100 frame film res wire removal. Went into Paint, did 6 hrs of meticulous work, and it wouldn’t let me exit because there weren’t enough frames left to write it out. Had to go to the “save image” button in prefs, which would save the one frame you were on, and do that a hundred times to get the painted clip out. Never made that mistake again.
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If you want to get the details on how it began, what it was like and how it evolved, you should contact:
Jon Hollis
Sean Broughton
Tom Sparks
You know, all those heavy hitters, whose balls were on the chopping block, by buying all those original onyx machines and experimental flame licenses.
But they’re probably too busy…
Right Jon?
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When I was starting out at the mill no one really used batch. I remember the ops taking the piss out of batch in discreet demos. The techniques I stole from the flame ops by and large worked in smoke so it was useful to me: Stabilise paint track.
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Well the very next cycle smoke was due to have DVE replaced with action and some people in the product management team were quite terrified of how that was going to go over
I remember staying pretty late on a Friday night for an emergency meeting about the DVE-Action merger with the hot topic being if Smoke would get the Expressions or not. There were some concerns…
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I earned my stripes in the early days in the Warper module.
Talking animals, morphs, ‘liquid type’ were things commercials seemed to need every month. We used to write out lists of operations because there was no Batch.
When Batch arrived, it was missing most of the key functionality. There was no Action and no Warper. I remember being promised that the Warper would be in there very soon. That was around ‘96. I’m still waiting!
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Yes…if i remember correctly, the 3 layered Fire became Smoke and they boosted Fire up to 6.
And back in '98…at least as far as Smoke was concerned, wasn’t it like 70 minutes of uncompressed storage? And EVRYTHING had to come in uncompressed…
A quirk from the engineering side back in the day. I always felt PAL video IO didn’t get the rigorous testing that NTSC got. I spent a lot of time checking edit timings when upgrading versions in the Onyx/Octane days.
Cool t-shirts. I wore out of my stoned+wired t-shirt. That would have been a good one to pull out on special occasions.
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Stoned and wired was the greatest t shirt ever.
It was wasted on anyone that wasn’t working in London.
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Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was 95% NTSC and was constantly adjusting the timings with each new upgrade. On one version, when outputting or archiving to a Sony 2100 D1 machine, it would make the first edit in F2, even if it were F1 dominant material. If we were outputting shots we we needed to put a black frame on the head and set the in point a frame early so that the first frame wasn’t a single field. I always thought PAL was a lot nicer and friendlier.
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Haha. Proof the grass isn’t always greener 
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