A slated version and an unslated version are 2 different deliverables. A person still has to make them, whether the body of the spot is the same or not. I have had a 600 master deliverable when you include the titled, generics, subtitled, and 1x1,4x5,9x16 and 16x9 of all spots. And the 16x9’s had 5.1 surround, Broadcast stereo for Innovid and Hulu, and Web mixes. Some of the 9x16’s had seperate mixes so that the action that was cut off didn’t have a sound effect. And only 80-120 slated masters??? You must not do your own slates. That’s just the pro-rez. That does not include the mp4s that are made from them.
Also, you do not neccessarily need to disconnect each segment one at a time. There are a variety of methods for doing it in bulk. What is lacking is simply doing it by selection. I have a request in for that. FL-02554. Welcome to our Feedback Community
Absolutely This. I know producers think I’m a complainer or worse when I say “it will take me x hours to build these slates” but nobody appreciates how archaic and painful the Flame text tool is.
Oh, no question. But the text tool turns it from numbing to infuriating for me. Imagine if you could just reach up into the viewer and paste an AD-ID directly into a text field without having to open a totally different interface where you may or may not be able to highlight the text you need to replace.
I wrote a lil python tool early in the pandemic that can loop through a gsheet-generated .csv using imagemagick and spit out 100 or so slates a minute as tiffs. It’s a little labor heavy compared to the text tool for 1 or 2 slates, but after that it’s awesome. You still have to import them all and cut them in, but you can make your producer do all the metadata entry in google sheets!
That sounds wonderful but I do this by remoting into various companies’ Flames and I’m at the mercy of whatever pipeline and (dis)organization method they have setup.
I didn’t mean to hijack the versioning rant with my text tool rant. The text tool just especially pains me
i used to do slates on the first frame of every render, mind writing in comp versions and such but never manually that was all handled automatically, i guess slate versions are for commercials? sounds like that can be automated with ffmpeg unless they need to look extremely fancy but hen one could do that in nuke also…
one of the issues is apart from having to export 600+ assets is to deal with edit changes and creating sources sequences and doing comp on the source etc it all needs to be this procedual hellscape of repeating the same thing all over again…
I loooove versioning… no one ever said… I usually tell my clients I’m far too expensive to do versioning. haha…
In Lustre, there was/ is this option where one could put a red dot (if I remember correctly) on segments on different layers in the TL and those would be viewed/ exported. I always thought this principle could at least help a little while versioning and having to deal with subtitles, language variations in image and audio. So you’d end up with 1 TL that has multiple layers segments/ audio and then you’d tag (put a dot, whatever) segments that would correspond to an output/ version. Then you’d hit export and all those versions would be exported at once. Oh and that export would do an h264 and prores master simultaneously (and then have your producers check 'm all… )
So once we’ve got that… we’ll need that adaptive text module for the 1x1/ 9x16/ 4x5 versions…
I hate versioning, thing is, like you said… it’s hard to pass that to juniors as you need focus and experience to do it reasonably fast with as little mistakes as possible and like others mentioned, clients tend to only remember the last thing you did… so even if the vfx are amazing, if deliverables are messed up… that’s what sticks…
yea thats the thing I want, bring action render outputs into the timeline… could be extended to have a resize in each output or whatever… many options but we need a total paradigm change .
Today I was asked by a producer “are you still doing versioning in flame?!?”
probably premier . . . Bear in mind, these note donkeys think there is a button you push that changes it from one version to the other. I love it when they ask things like “How long will it take to take the reflection off a car?” then get all pissy because you won’t give them a number. They think we memorize a certain set of button pushes for everything we do. By their reasoning, the best artists are the ones who can remember the most sets of button pushes without looking it up.
Yea mostly premiere because thats where its edited, why do we need rebuild all the timewarps and repos and “warp stabilizers” in flame or resolve if its sitting right there in premiere ready to be used and just hit export after grading?
you know things like that. obviosuly you STILL NEED to go through every keyframe and you cant really do that stuff properly in premiere, but …
man I dont know i dont want to go back to doing a premiere roundtrip, i hate it with every fibre of my body.
This is equally amazing and concerning. I certainly won’t miss having to paint as much as I do, at the same time in the current environment while this tech matures to be more reliable, we get stuck in the middle because now the expectation is that it’s all a few simple clicks, unless it isn’t. Sounds like this Mercedes commercial from a few years ago that played off ‘it isn’t’.
Don’t forget MikeV’s excellent SlateMaker python script available on the Logik Portal. Get your producer to make up a simple csv and automatically generate your skates from that. Take a bit of setup, but it is a massive timesaver for us.
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love it