I just stumbled upon this video of a YouTuber trying out Flame for the first time. I wanted to get the community’s thoughts since the video comments seem to judge the capabilities of Flame simply because this YouTuber misunderstands the program and positions it as just an expensive NLE. It just feels like clickbait to sell his own software guidebooks.
Don’t give this guy any more views. He sucks, typical YT garbage.
It doesn’t matter what YouTube commenters feel about flame any more than my opinions on structurally reinforcing concrete for multi story buildings. We’re not the target market.
The video itself is amusing if incurious. He doesn’t slag off the software, but he also doesn’t have any interest in understanding why it is considered worth the price.
This is probably due to the main goal of the video being “buy my editing courses!”
I expected worse from the description.
Some of the things he says aren’t wrong. From all the apps I learned in recent years, Flame has by far been the hardest nut to crack. I’ve written that before.
That may be hard to see if you’ve been in it for a decade plus and don’t remember learning it. Or when you learned it, you came up the old-school way mastering one aspect at a time before becoming a senior artist that can wrangle most aspects fluidly. And learning it in a suite with other artists around you, rather than YT tutorials, starting at a screen, or deciphering a mostly useless manual.
For me it comes down primarily to UI and level of abstraction. The UI is dense, but first and foremost a lot of things aren’t intuitively labeled. If you come from another app and want to just do some basic task you’ve done elsewhere, finding the right batch node is infuriating. Most tools have a variation of ‘frame hold’, ‘freeze frame’, etc. Unless someone educated you, you’d never guess that this is buried in the ‘Mux’ node… Just a simple example.
Another are the HSL keyers which are most editors go-to. I’ve used HSL keyers in Premiere, Resolve, Baselight, Mistika and more. Flame’s HSL keyer UI is pretty quirky to where it takes more time than it should, and is not intuitive. That is if you use the node. If you stay in Mastergrade you only have the diamond keyer, which is equally atrocious. Not from a results perspective, but from a usability/UI perspective compared to other tools.
Many of the nodes have advanced functions that have been added over time. And often entire workflows are encompassed by a single button which is oddly labeled and stuck somewhere on the screen were a few pixels were still unused.
So if you come from any other NLE and expect to quickly cross-train you’ll mirror the experience of this YTer. You have to have a reason to stick with it, which means you need to see something that the other NLEs don’t do. But that may in fact be something that most YTer don’t really work on.
Whether Flame is worth the money or overpriced is a fair question. It lives in the stratosphere only occupied by a few other apps. And it’s not even by complexity. One could argue that several of the 3D apps do a lot more, yet are cheaper comparatively. However the price is no doubt what it is, and has to be, to keep a capable dev team around that can advance this app on a relatively small user base.
If there were as many Flame users as Adobe subscribers, the price could be a lot lower and still yield higher margins. But that’s where we are. A bit of a chicken and the egg situation.
On the flip side this smaller user based gives us unprecedented access and ears among the dev team. Something that’s not feasible at Adobe scale.
So we have to ask ourselves - can we do our jobs better because of these conditions? For me the answer is yes, and for me the price is much less material than you average YTer, because I have different clients than they have, and thus the cost of Flame is just one puzzle piece in a bigger picture.
You could ask that same guy if he’d be willing to pay $5K for pretty basic FSI monitor?
12 days of flame and he didnt find logik?
“I have failed. I need to bow down to the Flame gods.”
Hi. Have you heard about Logik Academy Pro?
I found this guy on my feed too. Entertaining video. I think anyone trying to use Flame as an Offline tool as their first foray into Flame is in for a difficult time, especially if you’re used to Premiere or Resolve.
If anything he did fuel my desire to create a “What is Autodesk Flame” video. I’m dying to just have something solid we can point to for when people ask the question that pops up all too often.
Definitely an audience question.
On the flip side when you ask most offline editors, they’re rock solid on track patching, sync lock, etc. The ongoing questions about the yellow arrow in the timeline make it clear that this is not how most Flame artists think.
It’s just a different world. Maybe all we need is a big disclaimer: ‘Not a replacement for Premiere - go look elsewhere’ 
What is Flame in 5 mins
This is a cool rapid-fire feature demonstration but what I had in mind was more of an explanation geared toward explaining the “why” behind Flame in addition to the “what” Flame can do.
And who among us has consistently been ranting like a loon that social media and influenza influencers are a greasy euphemism for a toxic wasteland populated by unqualified zombies and meaninglessness?
Oh that’s right me - I said it…
I’m not alone…
Likes != Truth
My career change was from dish washer to plate cleaner and flame blessed/cursed me with that.
Oh wait that makes me unqualified too…
I take comfort knowing that YouTube was a dating app for truly lonely hearts once…
Oh dear!
he really doesn’t have a clue, so you pre-key, (badly) your greenscreen in premier pro and call nuke a 3d app!
He thinks Flame is expensive now, maybe he should go back 20 years ago, or even 30 and see how much it cost then, and how much training material was around then.
Jesus!!
Well, Nuke is a 3D app, and capable one. These days does read USD files. Flame is too (minus USD). I just recently did some 3D stuff in Nuke that is considerably harder in Flame.
Are they on the same level as major CG apps like Maya, Max, Blender, etc? Not quite. But that doesn’t make Nuke and Flame 2D or 2.5D only.
In the end he finishes it in AfterEffects. Because that’s what he knows. I could make a similar video why I hate AfterEffects and why I would be horribly slow in it for anything but MoGraph. And I absolutely do hate AfterEffects.
It comes down to properly learning an app. None of these apps is learned in 30 days. Which is why the 30 day trial is a serious limitation on Flame. Discussed multiple times already. That is the crux.
He kind of says that, because he wants to hux his course and make a click-baity YT video to do so. If had done better in Flame, that video wouldn’t have gotten the same attention.
As the saying goes: “What what they do, not what they say”.