The Explorer and the horse it rode in on

I have a 5:00 video that’s 95% anamorphic Alexa. I need to blast resizes across the whole cut. Flame correctly read the PAR off the prores files on the conform so everything looks square pixel even though the underlying clips are 2944x2160. I set the resize scale to 133% on the first shot. It looks great. This is where I’d normally F-drag it to a source area, select all the other shots, and drag it back. Can’t do that anymore. Ok, let’s F-drag it to the Explorer. Cool, that seems like it work. Let’s pick my next shot and double-click the saved explorer effect. Ok, that worked too. Great! Let me now select the other 198 shots and double click the explorer effect. Oh cool…it barfed on the PAR somehow ano now everything is skinny. It’s ok. I guess I’ll just copy the resizes from shot to shot one at a time AGAIN since the cut keeps changing. Congrats, you made basic, bread and butter stuff way fucking harder, but at least now I have a clever way to save all my 3d Advanced Look Creation ML Segmentation Lights That Shoot HSL With Falloff in one place.

Sorry for the venting. I’m super fried and super pissed at a massive regression in the name of shit no one wanted. Maybe I can go navigate your probably-just-changed-again web support system and someone from Outer Mongolia can email me in a few days asking if Flame is similar to Revit123 2021.

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If you park on the clip that has the correct resize, select all segments in the edit and then drag your resize to any other segment you want to copy it to, it should copy it to them all. I think you can even copy the resize first then select all segments, right click on one that you want to copy the resize to, select paste-resize and it will also paste it to all.

Doesn’t make the explorer suck less.

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Thanks, man. I’d tried that before, but it didn’t work. I just tried again and now it’s working. Truly, it is a mystery! Huzzah!

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I sure can’t understand, why they ditch the option to place TL FX on the desktop and made a full replacement instead.

But I think I can get used to the explorer more and more. I can place setups in there, that I need all over again in a long term campaign without searching in my tons of different desktops.
Or to have handy tools like the 2D-Transform-Black-Border-Check-setup right away.

But yeah… It should have been an addition instead of a replacement…
Maybe there is a feature request somewhere?

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If all you need is to copy a Timeline FX from a segment in Sequence A to another segment in Sequence B then why don’t you just use

  1. Contextual menu on the Timeline FX in Sequence A > Copy
  2. Contextual menu on the segment in Sequence B > Paste Timeline FX

Isn’t that more useful then dragging a clip to a reel, then drag it to another sequence and then delete the clip in the reels?

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I like the explorer. I keep things in it that I know I will use on most jobs, and things that I make that I know I will use frequently on any particular job. For the one-off copy I use the contextuals or hotkeys. If the action tab is selected, for instance, Ctl-C will copy it to the buffer and I have programed Smoke-V (also known as Meta) to Paste Effect. Way faster than dragging here, then there . . . .

This is new to me, having only just upgraded to Flame 2022. Is it like the batch User tab but for timeline FX? I am happpy to give it a crack. To be honest it doesn’t take the Explorer to mess up my timeline resizes when it comes to mixed PAR. Man that shit will just drive you nuts!!

Why remove the ability to drag a timelineFX to the desktop though? Isn’t the magic of Flame that it suits all types of workflows? Or is that just a software development nightmare?

With months of hindsight, my anger aged very, vey poorly. Sincerest apologies, dev team.

That said, I still miss being able to copy whatever segments I want wherever I want. Often this is because it’s a timeline fx that I need to reuse 30 times but not all at once, like during a multi-step shipping/versioning workflow. More specific use cases might be to use a Text softfx to update the mix date on 50 imported tiff slates, or an Action gap effect with a super that needs to get its shadow transparency updated in 25 different versions after last minute art direction. I know connected conform is supposed to skin this cat for us, but I still blow my own foot off with that toolset more often than not. For this sort of thing the explorer just adds extra steps and takes away UI space from the image I’m working on.

Also, hotkey contextual menu copy+paste has never worked with smoke classic hot keys, I suspect due to a conflict with the very important play (and less important) reverse play hotkeys. Right click copy+paste works, though.

While I’ve got your attention about copying segments around, can we please copy segments from the timeline directly into Shared Libraries again? This is something I do all the time to distribute shots to other artists, and it went away a few versions ago (maybe in 2021?)

Thanks,
Brian

I have zero issues with copy/paste with classic smoke keys. I live by it. One of the best developments of Flame is bringing copy/paste into the 21st century with the rest of the world. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I added Smoke(Meta)-V to the hotkeys as Paste Effect.

That said, I agree that we shouldn’t need to lose real estate to the Explorer. I hate losing my player options or overlays menu to the explorer. I think it should be incorporated into the media panel as a tab, and I think we should be able to select multiple tabs, rather than only one or only all. And also be able to cycle through those tabs with a hotkey.

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I also love the explorer. I love the fact that I can copy specific selectives from Image to it as well.
A couple of enhancements I’d like to see is to have folders in the reference clips and that when you grab a still that the reference bin opens and highlights it.

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Hi all

I’m only just now having to deal with this new flavour of soft effects.

How does one copy them to use at a later date in another project?

I have a bunch of useful little setups that get used time and again which I stored inside folders in an earlier version of flame. If I were to make a new setup I can’t see immediately where to store the bfx/gapfx/soft fx. Of course I could save setups but that won’t save media.

Hi John,

Here is the link to the video series that covers the Explorer

When you want to copy setups between projects, you can call up the explorer in the MediaHub and copy to them to other projects. This is also covered in a later video in the series.

Thanks
Grant

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