Stories of OLD FLAME

I’m up for that, been on Flame since Day 1, can also tell you an interesting story about the first Flame in the UK, not Rushes, but Peerless Camera Company.

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Sweet! I’ll hit you up about it later next week.

I do have a screen capture of the Harry interface.

Harry is still the box I made the most money an hour from - fully loaded at video post with mirage and starlight it charged about 2k an hour :slight_smile:

Not to mention the stroke inducing step jitter where it played fields as it processed the move as frames flickering as it passed though once for fill and once for matte.

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In 1994 money that’s like $3500/hr! Oh, how times have changed. :frowning:

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I remember the day we bought the first channel of AMPEX ADO (1980 something). It was $415k and we had to share it between 2 suites. The suite cost back then was about $800/hour and 1k if you added ADO. We had to measure how long we used ADO for in a session.

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It was worse than that in the Uk, we’d literally book two decks for a conform until you needed a third. Edl max would let you sort the list and put vfx at the end so you only needed the extra deck for as short a time as possible.

On the flip side I’ve run multimachine online sessions with two decks per ado channel (Digimatte), background VTR and VTR to dissolve out plus a record deck with 2 of the vtrs in slave mode 4 caption cameras a chyron 4, and live telecine to drop in grade changes on the end of a gpi. And all locking up in 7 seconds in a cmx 3600.

Edit suite pricing was crazy back then, when I arrived in Hong Kong they literally charged separately for the ace edit controller the switcher and anything else. It was a nightmare quoting jobs.

Though I did like how we turned 60 quid rolls of Sony video tape into dozens of small tvc delivery k spools at 80 quid each:)

I think it’s more that normal computers just caught up. Flame languished for sure as they played around with frost and all manner of other things like toxik, but you can’t change the speed ratio.

An 8 cpu onxy with 150mhz mips chips was quite a lot faster than the fastest mac we had which was I think 16mhz. Working on the big box was the equivalent of time travel, whenever I watched anyone using mac or pc it was horrifying. Now we use the same boxes as everyone else so there’s no built in advantage.

HAHA

That beats my 10 machine roll with 3 channels of ADO - infinity making a glass cube effect for some record compilation tvc. Did you use a gvg300 with mem recall or AVC Century?

Sorry I think we are going off topic…

I used both I loved the gvg 300 but the century 310 fully loaded was the most powerful. Especially under ace control with full timeline control of every parameter. Once I was already a Harry guy I used to occasionally run an abekas a84 and a kadenza room but it was no fun once I’d got used to pointing at the things I wanted to fix.
But late night conforms in a big post house when everyone else had gone home was always fun, call VTR get all the i squares switched to my room and checkerboard assemble from every one inch I could grab and heading home two hours later was always so satisfying.

The issue wasn’t the decks per se it was that the pinch roller in the capstan wasn’t hard enough and shrunk as it wore down. The smaller diameter made the tapes go a tiny bit faster and outside the tolerance of the error correction circuits. We had a Sony engineer come and tweak the speed so we could copy a whole years worth of tapes to new stock once they worked it out.

That time when everything you render from action was soft and blurry.

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Di you think you could rip the reels and stick it on Logik’s YouTube? From an historical perspective it might be nice to see…hopefully @randy @andymilkis

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Yes, but…

These aren’t the “distribution versions” with cleared music, these are the trade show versions and would probably be flagged immediately.

I can put them behind a password somewhere and share that as soon as I resurrect my one computer with a working dvd drive. I’ll make that my project today.

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Wow. You have a DVD drive? I’ve relegated that term to the same status as Jazz drive, optical floppy, exabyte and DAT.

It might even be a Blu-ray drive. I don’t really remember. Excitingly, it’s built into a machine that I used for a brief, ill-advised flirtation with Bitcoin mining, so there’s a wallet on there with perhaps DOZENS of dollars in it. Maybe. Probably not. Eight dollars worth of Bitcoin is my guess.

I’ll post the videos later today and let you all know if I’m rich or not.

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I don’t know that any of my work has made it into the Flame reel, but I do remember seeing some of my 3DS max animation in one of those reels at one point, which was kinda weird cos my 3DS work was shiiiiit.

Anybody remember old and cool Colorfront plugin?

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Tell us more.