That grass is always greener when it’s fertilized with bullshit.
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What’s about the 2 years we had no action and everything happened in the compositor?
Or using Ethernet to import footage from an a60 before the Sirius capture card.
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You could fade the screen up and down by taking the gain down in the colour corrector.
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Random old nonsense coming back to mind that hasn’t been mentioned yet:
- Tape Library: string all your clips together (not a problem since they are all the same library), Tape Library saves / loads to Exabyte / DAT (but it does it IN THE BACKGROUND, miraculous technology)
- Optics: weird module that generated glows using funky Onyx-only functionality
- The “Extent List Trashed” saga: Onyx systems would randomly crash and corrupt the IRIX system disk, you had to reinstall IRIX and Flame to get back up and running. First Flame UG I attended at NAB 95 had some rather agitated customers because of this problem. When SGI came out with a kernel fix, it turned out to requires 5 or 6 “trigger conditions” that only Flame likely combined.
- Flame/Flame/Inferno logo in the channel editor background, if you held D-L and clicked on the logo, it would rotate in 3D. The function that did that was called something like SpiningF…ingLogo()
- When you ran Fire for the first time with Sonic Solutions audio, you would get this weird progress bar on top of the Fire splash screen, “Initializing Fonts”. The Sonic Solutions libraries included a full Mac System 9 emulator, and that was the GUI for that code peeking through.
-You could enable “SpinalTapMode” in init.cfg and have all audio meters go to 11 (taken from the IRIX audio control panel “apanel -spinaltap” command line option)
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
The legend himself, JFP is here… 
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So does that mean that optics behaved differently when the software went to Octane and Tezro?
- The customer who was getting these weird stripe corruptions in images on their DL12 array, turns out swap space had been misconfigured to use one of the framestore disks, so every time the system ran low on memory, IRIX would overwrite parts of that disk
- For the longest time internal builds of Flame had a “Help” button that didn’t actually do anything. The joke was that it was help for Flame itself, which really needed it.
- Flint RT
- Endless discussions about why Flame wouldn’t preserve illegal YCbCr colors on capture, “yes, I know that electric blue sky looked great on the Sony BVM when you graded it in YCbCr off the telecine, but the monitor is an RGB device, and those colors are going to get clipped when you broadcast anyway…”.
- “Why isn’t my expensive 8 CPU Onyx any faster than a 4 CPU machine in NTSC?”
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Faint recollections about Optics, but I believe the idea was that in order to make it work in 12 bits, we ended up using something called the Accumulation Buffer, which was only implemented in hardware on Reality Engine and Infinite Reality graphics. I think Indigo2 Extreme didn’t have it at all, Indigo 2 Impact and then Octane MXI / MXE / SI / SE was software only and slow as molasses (don’t remember with V10/V12 graphics). The algorithm was also heavily dependent on how the color components would saturate, and thus varied greatly based on the platform. It might be that initially it was only available on RE2 / IR graphics?
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Were you still at discreet when the big stone+wire debacle went down? Some y2kish thing (though a couple years later) where s+w would fail for everyone at a specific time, based on your system clock. I vaguely remember someone in the furthest time zone ”discovered” it and R&D had like 24 hours to fix it before everyone else’s disk array locked up.
Now that was fun. Not Onyx/Quake NAB demo fun or Windowlicker screening at NAB fun, but still pretty fun.
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That was around 2004 if I remember well, I had already left by then. Something about a data structure in the stonefs filesystem that didn’t have enough bits to store the timestamp past that date, fortunately they found enough “spare” bits to work around the issue. To me that was an example of a crisis well handled by engineering, support and sales, managing to reach most of the installed based in time to install the workaround. I don’t remember how far forward the fix pushed the deadline, or if it’s still relevant now that stonefs is long dead (but frameIDs live on with standardfs).
Oh
Umm
On the quantifiably awful side:
Inferno - a $250,000 hardware difference and a $100,000 software difference, and no market for film work in the uk.
Fire - the forerunner to: what do you mean it’s the same as flame but doesn’t have (x or y) tools: see product differentiation - see flint, smoke, flame assist, flare, burn, background reactor, etc…
River (was it called that or was it called stream?) corrupting a stone daily.
On the special side:
Like Sinan said - gestural editing (better than quantel).
Particles in flame 5 - not Houdini, but clients were stupid in the mid 90s and didn’t know what they wanted (except sushi,cocaine and prostitutes)
Batch in flame 5 - awful but better than every other software which didn’t have anything like batch.
The tracker - which used to work on a vertex level but strangely doesn’t any longer.
But old flame, although it’s kind of fun to look back in some ways, was a train wreck compared to the spaceship that is new flame.
I just wish that new flame didn’t keep exploding on the launchpad.
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Smoke 1.0: rebuilding audio disk, daily, for hours.
Don’t get me started.
I’m getting you started buddy…
Open mic’ moment for the man like Chris:
Drop that science…
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I wish I had archived all those old posts. What a fucking shit show of a dumpster fire in a fucking train wreck that mess was…
And what a bunch of fucking triggered little babies over the “F” word.
Magic!
Pure magic!
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With so many national and international security crises going on at this very moment, I’m curious what Human Resources departments around the world are using as their verbal measures of concern…
Pfooey! We didn’t spot those little rascals that would sell us out for a few bucks…
Or
Crikey! I had no idea that our employees were duplicitous scoundrels who would sell our secrets for sneakers…
The double and triple standards are beginning to make themselves self evident…
I can only imagine the tortology employed by the “big” companies:
Swearing on public fora - verbal warning
Swearing twice on public fora - written warning
Swearing three times on public fora - magical appearance of a blue genie…
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Given my penchant for data hoarding, I probably have a disk image somewhere with that thread on it. Sadly the wayback machine is no help, though getting to see a few old discreet dot com homepages was worth the trip.
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@kirk
Given that most countries on the planet have legislated in favor of “right to forget” you’d have a pretty hard time proving that any of your old hoarded data was legit’
Speaking of data hoarding, here are some pretty terrible pictures from the vault:
Backdraft running in X11 on my TiBook!
Mr. Mayor, Martin Helie!
When the 10 Duke lobby was good.
Where the 2002 NAB showreel was edited/future support dept. machine room.
Some of your favorite Smoke* demo artists: Schirm, Vojkovic, Andrews, and… Toni Garcia (whose last name I forgot, but know now. Sorry Toni).
The training machine room. I’d never seen more than one Octane in any one place at a time, so this was exciting for me.
And this was where I sat capturing the 16+ hours of showreel submissions (because it was close to the decks, but loud as fuck and quite cold).
The “chill room” at the NAB booth (2002 maybe?) where I spent the night after a dub house screwed up our compilation BetaSPs. The hassocks were fairly comfy, if memory serves.!
The rm450 I used to fix said screwup.
Stephane “Read the Famous Manual” Labrie and Vince “backdraft” Cerundulo.
There’s more, but that’s plenty for now.
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