Pretty sure this has been said for the past 20 years…
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I agree with you.
And yet what is interesting to me is the difficulty of finding talent. There are a lot of nuke ops but it’s much more difficult to find flame ops.
And it’s difficult to find talent who have heard of or are interested in flame.
Then you add to it the difficulty in sharing batches across geographic boundaries with the talent you know and trust and the problem becomes even more substantial.
As I say, it’s got me pondering.
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Isn’t it interesting, 20+ years ago I remember being told Flame is dead, but it’s seen off Harry, Henry, cineon and shake, and don’t forget cineon and shake were both industry standards in the day. I wonder how much longer Nuke will be around for.
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It’s impossible to answer that question, because there are so many variables.
It’s worth going back to the premise though: Why do we need to think one is better than the other, or is more dead than the other?
The reality is both are great apps. Some things are easier/faster/better in one, and then the next task is the other way around. Rather than hoping to find the oracle answer, which then will be filtered by confirmation bias, just keep both around and use the one that’s best for the job at hand. Then you don’t have to stress about whether you made the right choice.
Example: I was just working out the 3D track/project/uv unwrap workflow in Flame. I also watched the tutorial for doing the same thing in Nuke. The Nuke tree is a lot simpler, and more predictable - not to worry about how to align the 2nd camera. But Nuke’s render performance on that tree sucks, while Flame is real-time. Which one does it better in the end? Depends on what is more important day off and the footage you’re working with. And that’s just a example of a myriad of scenarios.
Another consideration: I’ve worked in at least 5 different color apps over the years. Being fluent in more than one app, makes your brain think about the problem and then maps how to use the tool to solve, rather think only within the confines of a single tool. Makes you a better artist. Kind of like knowing multiple languages. It makes your brain work more flexibly. So being both a Nuke and Flame artist has considerable benefits, and the cost of doing it has come down.
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Just wanted to jump in here since I started this thread to say that it was never intended as a Nuke vs Flame thread but purely as a fact gathering exercise. I genuinely wanted to know what tools Nuke had that Flame did not. It has gotten a bit sidetracked at times but that is going to be the nature of theads such as these…
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I saw the thread on Reddit, but chose to stand down, as it was turning into a bit of a mud-slinger.
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Haha if it was down to facility owners it would have died in the 90s. Cineon was going to kill it, shake was going to kill it, 5d cyborg was going to kill it… And for a time toxik was going to kill it.
The thing that keeps flame ticking is the guys on the boxes dont want to leave the big suites and sit in a row with Nuke artists. We like rhe mini bar and windows as much as we like flame:)
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I know this is tongue in cheek…
What will help Flame survive longer is attracting more young people and converting some others to the tool. The nice suites probably do very little for these people, but a fantastic tool that solves hard problems in easy to understand ways, which gets you premium rates, runs on stable and easy to use infrastructure, is reasonable to learn, and has a fantastic, supportive, and welcoming community will do a lot for that.
Flame has a lot of those. Could use a bit of help in the rest.
A friendly rivalry with Nuke isn’t bad if kept on the positive.
I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. Post pandemic vfx workforce
Deep compositing. It just feels like anything involving multiple CG elements is 1000x better in Nuke. Just imagine how many holdout mattes would have to be manually created if they had to use Flame for Planet of the Apes.
I want deep compositing in Flame so badly. Anyone in the same boat?
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Nope.
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Has been batted around many times.
It doesn’t make much sense to get full feature parity between all the apps. Wasted dev capacity. I’d rather spend that energy in making Flame yet better at what it already does best. Each app has their particular playground it focuses on, and handles enough of the rest to be functional.
If you need deep that much, just do it in Nuke. There are many of us that use both regularly.
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