Hi Flame friends!
I am curious to know what types of matchbox shaders you wish you had available in Flame. I am a GLSL shader developing enthusiast so I would love to know what are some scripts that would be helpful for the community. 
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Is there any way to help with matching grades?
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A quick & user friendly entirely Flame hosted lens undistort/redistort tool.
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A look forward-backward smart fill.
Not sure if this is possible or not with glsl, but a tool where you can pump in a matte and motion vector data and the shader looks ahead or behind to patch in the matte with the closest available clean part of the frame to fill in the alpha. Obviously not useful on a static shot but on a moving shot this would be ultra helpful.
A bit like how Furnace Rig Removal works (though I use that for all kinds of object removal. Really good for flares). I believe Furnace tools are glsl but I could be wrong on thatâŚ
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What Iâd really like (to start with):
Something to mimic electronic advertising boards/Jumbotrons - like properly good build it how the boards are with the pixels properly made, colour and picture gets split into pixels/LEDs the same way.
Something to turn fonts/jpeg type on black bg designs into train announcement boards - something like Autodesk dots but then has some colour and gloss in and maybe a layer for reflections.
Something to get a proper good vhs/Betamax/umatic emulation. With proper tracking guff, tweet, warble guff and tbc shizzle. Not just the old tinder old film chaff.
Even more difficult:
Then something that will intelligently take a matte and based on a second input will mold the feathering of the matte to make shapes. For example you soft matte a patch of grass: the second input is a luma key of the grass and the soft mattes feathering will warp to the shape of second shape so you can comp imperceptibly.
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As long as you can track with 3D Equalizer⌠there is a matchbox for that. Works very well.
I"d really really really like something from Nuke similar to its âgizmoâ tool. Basically itâs a way to group/collapse/contain nodes together into one ânode/matchboxâ, but leave/expose/have access to the parameters of those nodes that you choose, and have all those displayed together in one menu. Basically itâs a poor mans tool for building basic âmatchboxesâ that you can customize very easily. Good for simple little set-ups inside batch. Not sure if this is something that can be done by a matchbox⌠feels like itâs an autodesk thing, more like and advanced "groupâ function.
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As a basic Matchbox task⌠have a look at Sapphire âdistortâ and copy that! I know Iva made something called âcrok_distortâ but it doesnt behave anywhere near as nicely as the Sapphire original. Basically distort image A with the luminunce of image B.
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kind of
You can create a null matchbox with a bunch of named sliders/variables and then link those to other nodes, then group the whole enterprise and expose only the UI of the matchbox, making it behave similarly to the gizmo.
But.
But you have to code up a new matchbox for each new named variable set, which isnât hard per-se but is outside of flame work that needs to be done every time. I also do not have ironclad trust in expressions once the âgizmoâ has been duplicated, but that may be unfounded.
I made a Rack Defocus Comp group for the Mill LA this way. No one ever used it, including me.
Which is a very long winded way of saying I too would like gizmo functionality to exist inside of flame. Haha.
Itâs kind of covered by A2Beauty and Washer, but Iâd like to see a multi-band texture tool. Hereâs a screenshot of the Baselight texture tool UI. Essentially a multi-band frequency separation that you can dial in softness or sharpening quickly in a single node. There are similar tools in other platforms as well.
Update: exists as crok_equalizer
Along those same lines, a 3-band contrast/saturation adjustment, so you can quickly adjust contrast and/or saturation in shadows / mids / highlights. You can build this with a luma key + image node per band, but it becomes quite a few nodes for a relatively simple and useful correction.
Update: exists in colour correct node
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This would be great especially for those quick beauty fixes where youâre only hitting one or two things. Would definitely use a tool like this!
This is more or less in color correct already isnât it? I may not be understanding correctly, but this strikes me as the same thing as the Shadows/Midtones/Highlights tabs in combo with the Ranges histo.
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There is a great way to do it with Mocha Pro.
Still, it would be nice to just be able to do it inside of Flame.
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It is indeed, I overlooked that. Iâll update my original post to reflect that.
Could you think of a specific scenario for this? Something like having a raw footage and its grade version and then having a matchbox that helps matching that grade into another raw footage?
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Yup. Or any kind of general grading and matching us compers do when we are trying to bring 2 clips together into one world.
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Having had to do this plenty of times from a colorists perspective, it seems like a non-trivial process to automate, especially for disparate footage. There a lots of nuances.
That said a shader could give you nice head start.
I might be wrong, but I feel like this is similar to what crok_equalizer is meant to do. Iâve never really used it, but check it out, maybe it fits the bill!
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It is indeed. Flame continues to delight as a most capable and complete platform.
Googling it I found this article which under step 3 indicates that it was specifically designed to emulate the Baselight feature in my screen shot.
Just downloaded and tested it, now actually called texture equalizer. It does exactly that.
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The ideas on the beauty shader sound very doable. Iâll def look into that!
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Interesting. Iâll look into this!
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