Hell yeah I was a royal PITA to my manager back in the day. I vividly remember setting a junior assist rate card for doing lead billable things…oh, you want me to stay late and layback audio and not call the lead in? Cool, you charge what for that? That’s an hour at this rate for me then.
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I remember clearly the conversation we had in his office about me desperate to get to some crazy low number which felt like the world to me…it might have been 30k a year.
You were destined to run your own business.That’s amazing. lol
Sometimes you would need to restart the machine and IRIX would need a reason:
- Hardware upgrade
- Software upgrade
there were at least 7 items on the list.
Inferno 2.5.1 on Onyx and RE2 was probably the most buggy incarnation of the software I used.
Interesting. I found the RE2 pen interaction to be the best. IR and IR2 started a downward spiral that continued until well into the now.
My memory is that 5.5.1 / 2.5.1 were “challenging” releases. By that time we were supporting OpenGL native platforms (Onyx InfiniteReality and Indigo2 Impact), and although OpenGL had been backported to RE2 graphics (for some reason I remember “patch 154” as the IRIX patch that did that), there were significant performance drawbacks that made that not suitable for production. And although we had come up with some “clever” tricks and macros to allow OpenGL to mostly compile down to native IrisGL on RE2, it was still a big burden to support, and let’s just say that RE2 was no longer the main focus for tuning and testing.
Also if I remember the 2.5/5.5 release stream was when we tried to bring the Flint/Flame/Inferno and Fire/Smoke code back together, finally closing the chapter on “the great Fire fork”, so that also had a lot of implications on stability and the ability to come up with new features.
It was a painful business decision, but no longer having to support RE2 graphics helped to move forward after that.
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Its kind of still there in Timeline Action FX. Still has that daft shadow on the image that I throw away every time I use it.
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I still love optics.
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Me too, but now I understand why it never seems to behave like it used to.
It took a while for the night sweats that this triggered to wear off to the point that I could respond.
This wasn’t strictly true. You had to have a separate partition for each resolution (at least when I started dealing with such things, some time in 2000), and you could size/split your clips to the right resolution as you wired them between partitions.
I did an IBM job at IF that had like 20 different formats and finished in 1920x480 (to be split across 3 screens). I believe I had several encounters with the folks that delivered the flowers early on Monday mornings over the course of that job.
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You also had to have a separate project per partition (so this is after the introduction of project management, before which life was unmitigated chaos), and had to relaunch into each project to manipulate your various resolutions, a process fellow flame artist Rob Trent glumly referred to as “partition surfing.”
I seem to remember a -P option to select the partition to start on.
The “current” project system was developed for the ill-fated FlintRT…
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But with that -p switch you could also define the path to the setups which meant you could script your own project management… kind of.
Well it felt like it at the time…
I do not miss nervously converting 4x3 framestores to 16x9 
JF knows…
I still love the elemental nomenclature of the products:
Small to larger:
Flint, Flame, Inferno
Smoke, Fire
Plug-ins:
Matchbox, Sparks
Disks: Stone
Connection and networking protocol: Wire
Background manager: Backdraft
Virtual set: Vapour
3D modeling and animation for broadcast: Frost
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When you exited Frost it would say “thank you for using Frost.”
If it crashed, “We’re sorry you have crashed, thank you for using Frost.”
So polite.
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Hi fellow old timers, I mean, seasoned veterans of the Flame community 
I’d like to do a Logik Live/podcast ep on this thread on Sunday, May 2nd @ 2pm ET. If you’re interested in participating please let me know! Also, I’d like to chat about this during today’s Patron’s session after Logik Live. If you’re not a patron yet but would like to get in on the chat today also let me know. Thanks!
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I will never turn down an opportunity to wax nostalgic about old discreet, and I love hearing other folks stories. I am DOWN for this.
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NICE! Thanks Kirk & Quinn!