I completely appreciate your conundrum. As someone who has recently (and still very much is in the process of) learning Flame coming from other apps (among them Nuke), I will say that Flame is an incredibly difficult (way above average) application to learn. If you have to do that in a production environment where you have deadlines and commitments and only limited senior artists that can mentor and supervise would be a risky bet.
The main issue is that most of Flame’s tools and processes lack transparency and intuitive user interfaces. You have fewer basic building blocks, but instead more tools that look like macros with lots of dials that have been added over the decades. The labels are not intuitive. It can take forever to find something in the tool bin if you come from Nuke because it’s not called what you might expect. There is 30 years of tribal knowledge and tinkering in the platform, but no overall design paradigm. I guess some of that got cleaned up in the anniversary edition, but that is a decade ago, and more crust has developed since.
Example: If you need to freeze a frame, in Nuke you quickly find the the intuitive ‘FrameHold’ node. In Flame you have to use the ‘Mux’ node. Somebody has to teach you that, rummaging through the tool bin you will not figure that out. When Flame needed a freeze frame feature way back when, instead of making a node for that, someone decided, oh we have this other node already everyone uses, let’s just stick a button in the bottom and call it ‘freeze current frame’, done deal. Also doesn’t make it easy to see which frame it’s freezing or changing that frame. In Nuke that’s a numeric input field. Repeat this 10,000 times and you end up with Flame as we have it today.
To the experienced artist who has grown up and eats this stuff in his cereal every morning, that’s not an issue, and these much higher level tools are what enables the speed at which Flame artists can operate. But to the new generation that is a major headwind and frustration point. You can look at a Nuke script and largely deconstruct what it does. Look at at a Flame batch, and it will be hit and miss. And if you haven’t done a particular workflow in a while and didn’t take any notes, you’ll take some time remembering what some of the buttons do.
There is no easy fix for that. It is what makes Flame great to experienced aritsts, and has worked in traditional setups where people have come up through ranks over time and were surrounded by others with more experience. In the new landscape that isn’t that easy. And there is not enough effective learning material available to make up the difference.
An additional challenge is that in today’s environment many people will be multi-app artists. No one should put all their career eggs into one basket in today’s market. So Flame is competing for memory capacity and fluidity when artists have to remember how to do that in Nuke and in Flame, and several other apps. That’s major disadvantage for complex and non-intuitive user interfaces.
There are certain type of work (especially when color or cleanup is involved, more real-time playback / attended session, timeline/online) where Flame does win over Nuke as a platform, and depending on the type of work you expect, it may be worth figuring out a way forward. But if that’s less of a concern, Nuke may be the safer bet.
That’s my personal experience. Other’s mileage may vary.
I do love Flame and am committed to keep learning and taming the beast because I see value in it.
