@randy Self admittedly I’m not the most computer savvy. I would say cloud machines… if it’s easy to gain access to them.
At the advertising agency I work at we have been trying to get Teradici up and going for 1 year now, for Resolve. That’s dealing with our internal IT department and some issues with Resolve color panels and peripherals, but just saying some of the solutions for remoting into machines is cumbersome.
Your IT dept. is in-competent.
In fairness Teradici doesn’t make it simple by any means. It unnecessarily complex in terms of deployment. Of course you should be able to work through it. But they need to fix it too. I was hopeful HP would be a good influence there. So far no evidence.
Yes… Yes they are. It’s ridiculous.
I’ve had relatively in-depth communication with the RGS team in the past, and the Teradici team in the present. No hope.
Here in France Junior Flame Artists are people that are already good with After Effects, had opened Nuke a few times, did some rotos and tracking. Then, when they delivered some convincing shots and were up to a good speed, they were offered to go into Flame.
In the companies that I was offered a shot at learning and being a Flame Assistant, their “complete” training was between 6 months and 1 year.
I have to say that I only had these opportunities because I was friend with a very well known Senior Flame Artist in the first place. Otherwise, as stated here before, it’s pretty closed and too much of a niche.
Update to this banger of an old thread…
In 2024 we launched Logik Academy Pro, an online training platform for Flame Artists, by Flame Artists. In the past 18 months, we’ve put together over 100 hours of Flame-specific training. From Introduction to Python for Flame, Matchbox Shader Development, how to build your own Linux Flame, screen comps, tracking, Mocha, Publishing, Conform, Connected Conform, weekly Comp Club challenges, and more.
As someone who has started using Flame in the last 4 years, Logik Pro Academy has been a fantastic learning resource.
The courses are a great mix of lessons for someone who has never opened flame and for those who have used other software for years and need to know how to do now do it in flame.
For the artists who want to learn it, it’s a great modern update to flame training.
The challenge I still see with getting more artist interested, is the access to flame. It’s really only something Autodesk can solve.
The difference in a yearly license of flame vs Adobe isn’t even in the same ballpark. When on the surface to most that after effects and premiere “do the same thing” it’s a hard sell for people to even consider it.
It is a bit disappointing considering you’ve got Nuke non-commercial edition and Fusion within Resolve for free. Let’s face it though, unless they’ve got a Mac, it won’t be worth the effort as almost nobody is going to go to the effort to setup a Rocky Linux system just to try out Flame.
It’s hard enough to find anyone in the next generation who even knows what Flame is let alone someone with actual Flame experience.
Might depend on your definition of ‘junior’. And there is a lot of room for the middle age bracket to be ‘junior’ in Flame while not ‘junior’ in age.
Flame is not a starter app. You kind of have to had the experience and frustration with AfterEffect and even Fusion to appreciate what Flame brings to the table. Same to a degree with Nuke. I always felt that Flame is a destination, not a trail head type of app. As such a smaller user community and higher price tag is not a show stopper by definition.
You try AfterEffects and feel limited by the UI and the layer based system. You try Fusion, and it’s better, but still not (I’m working with someone who recently switched from Fusion to Nuke, and his excitement about the upgrade is palpable). And then you are limited by the fact that Nuke is a shot based (Nuke Studio/Hiero works in very narrow cases, but is not as flexible as Flame’s timeline). And so inevitably you end up in Flame because it has the answer to most of those things. Not perfect by any means, but one of the most well rounded feature sets that is a pleasure to work in.
Why not? It all depends on the circumstances but if someone’s first foray into the industry is at a Post Production facility that uses Flame then it is totally feasible for Flame to be a starter app. I know plenty of people who started on Flame. If it has been possible previously there is no reason for it not to be the case now. Personally, I think it is the lack of exposure and marketing combined with the difficulty of accessing the app or training courses that has more to do with the minimal new talent rather than anything to do with learning the app itself.
I also don’t buy into Flame being more difficult to learn than Nuke, Fusion or AE due to the app itself. Every app has its quirks.
Fair points. My take is certainly somewhat color by my own experience.
Mostly applies though to starting out in a higher end facility at the beginning of your career. Is that still a majority path? Not an area I know well enough to say.
With computers and software being so accessible, almost everyone learns some part of it long before they start their career. If this is a space you are interested in, you might start playing with apps in High School, or definitely in college (if you go there, not required by any means). So even if Flame is your first app on a paid job, the younger folks will have been in After Effects or Fusion most certainly beforehand.
Same if you are choosing more of an independent artist / freelance route rather than working at a big facility. Because of the price point and training requirements (many more tutorials on After Effects on YouTube), you are likely to start somewhere else before getting to Flame.
Or if you started out early career working for one of the many agencies cranking out social media content, you almost certainly would have started in the Adobe suite. Then you might advance to a bigger post house and pick up Flame.
I’m a different generation, but I have grown kids who could have been Flame juniors. I dove head first into computer hardware and software in my mid-teens, back in the mid 80s. It was a different time then though. All these apps, if they existed, were insanely expensive.
All that being said - I think it’s a mistake that ADSK is not offering the equivalent of Nuke Indie.
While I would also love to see a learning version of Flame, I thinks it’s availability or lack thereof is only a small part of the dearth of Flame juniors.
As ridiculous as it sounds, given pricing and hardware requirements, Flame has never been more accessible than it is now. When I was a junior, the senior artists loved to regale me with stories of the old days when you could only learn Flame by working the night shift, archiving the seniors work after they left and then spending the rest of the night roto’ing or painting whatever task had been left for you. The number of times I was told how easy I had it in learning Flame was remarkable.
One thing that never came up in those old stories though was how it was hard to find junior artists. So pinning the issue on Flame’s availability has never held much water with me.
We’ve seen the ground move under our feet, so I’m open to the idea that the industry has changed in a way such that a learning edition of Flame is the biggest barrier to entry now, but I really think that obscures the whole picture.
I had no visual effects experience before using flame. Layer based compositing is totally alien and counterintuitive to me as a result. I am loathe to have to open up after effects and every night I dream of a node based photoshop alternative. The Art and Science of Compositing by Ron Brinkmann was my Bible for the first two years and I recommend it to any junior artists I meet. The node system is alien at first, but once you have that aha moment, you see how much more sense it makes as a visual representation of workflow and what gets unlocked. Plus, it just looks cool. Like literally, a schematic looks cool. I think there is some resistance to learning flame once folks see what I work on/ what I do on a regular basis which is not (or at least not very often) compositing spaceship battles or dinosaurs. Though I have killed my fair share of zombies, built entire cities and put people in them, and lit some stuff on fire.
I think there’s a distinction between a learning version, and a Nuke Indie type version. Nuke Indie made Nuke accessible to countless working freelance artists who did not have the client pipeline to justify a $10K purchase (before Foundry changed to subscription), or even now a $6K annual subscription.
But once you get people who either don’t yet have the jobs to justify an annual license, or people who only use it occasionally among other apps hooked and comfortable with it, the barrier to making it your primary app is much smaller.
The flex tokens are a way of getting there. But I think ADSK isn’t looking at the usability of flex tokens enough. They see those more in the context of the big studios, not independent artists. I just was part of a market research study by ADSK on new checkout pages, and this was abundandly clear in how they were thinking about it.
BTW - so far 14 folks have entered their choices into the survey I posted. Need more to make it more reliable. But already it’s interesting to see that there are way more people in the 1-5 year category than you would have expected based on the typical arguments here. We may have a lot more ‘juniors’ here than you might think - but they’re not necessarily early career or inexperienced - which may have been the default assumption. And I think that’s a promising thing to understand. Flame may not be as gray haired as we all think by conventional wisdom.
Ooh! In a previous life, I studied logical fallacies. I know, right? If memory serves me right…
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
You can switch up the order of things all you want, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Flame is the F1 of image manipulation softwares. To be an F1 racing driver you have to start with karting and blah blah blah, and eventually moved up to formula 3 and two and maybe formula E for shits and giggles. Oh, and your daddy definitely has to be a billionaire. You kinda have to work your way up.
Flame isn’t designed to solve problems that beginner compositors and visual effects artists face. It’s designed to solve problems that very specific people with very specific clients and very specific needs face.
Also, why does any of this matter? And I ask this with 100% genuine curiosity and humility. For me, flame is an amazing product that makes my life better and allows me to put steaks in the freezer. It’s not going anywhere. Those that need to will stumble upon it eventually. Some of them will persevere. Some of them won’t.
Isn’t that how the world works?
I guess to carry the analogy a little further though.
If someone taught me the basics of paddle shifting and showed me where to put the key in, I reckon I could drive an F1 car. I wouldn’t drive very fast and I certainly wouldn’t win any races, but I’d still be driving.
I think the same holds true for Flame. The amount of Flame you need to know in order to productively contribute in a commercials pipeline is vanishingly small. I know lots of Flame artists who basically only use gmask, cc, blur, 2dtransform, and comp.
I’ll be curious to see if the survey can collect enough data to be informative, but in my mind the difference between junior and senior artists is largely a story that we tell ourselves. Calling oneself a senior artist has more to do with how long you’ve been doing it and how much you want to get paid rather than one’s actual talent or ability.
I spent five years in my first Flame position. I started out of the machine room laying off to tape and archiving, then moved on to finishing, then started doing assistant shoot supervision and junior comp, then I started doing entire commercials that were passing through the color department and needed minor cosmetics and cleanup, then I started leading commercials with small teams of artists. By the time I left I was bidding, shooting sup’ing, leading, and finishing ads. My title was Flame Assist the entire time and my rate when I left was $28/hour.
After that I changed my LinkedIn to say senior flame artist and then took a job roto’ing people’s faces for more than twice as much money.
Do I actually consider myself to be a senior artist? I certainly wasn’t when I only had 5 years under my belt and at this point after 13 years, maybe, maybe not. But everybody and their uncle is out there calling themselves a senior artist so what am I gonna do? Call myself a senior artist so I can get the next job and get paid more money.
And to actually answer the question why does any of this matter?
Because the issue is not actually about increasing the talent pool at all. The “where are the juniors?” question is a canard for “how can I pay less for the same mediocre output I’m getting from this shitty artist calling themself a senior because they got started in the 90’s?”
I’m sorry if it’s impolitic to say, but there are a lot of senior Flame artists out there struggling to stay employed and it’s because their rates are no longer commensurate with the value they provide.
Definitely agree with some of that.
You can absolutely get a Flame license at 18, or heck 15, and use it for your YouTube videos. Why not. Do you need it, or are you underutilizing the software? You don’t need it - Resolve or Premiere will do just fine.
But when I walk to my coffee shop in our village and pass the high school, I also see 17 year olds parking their Teslas, BMW, Grand Waggoneers and more. The average price of cars parked in that block of road is probably $50-$80K. No Ferrari’s though - that takes a different zip code.
Do you need to learn how to drive on that type of car? Absolutely not. Are people doing so - apparently yes. And that Grand Waggoneer is not a hand-me down from the parents, because that model only came out 2 years ago.
So yes, the question is not if you could use Flame right from the get-go. But as @randy said - you probably won’t get into work where Flame makes an absolute difference until you have done work for at least a few years. And you’re not spending those years learning buttons and keyboard shortcuts, but training your eye and taste.
Flame does a lot of what other apps do too. But it’s the only app that does all these things together and does it well. Almost everything Flame does, does also exist in other apps. Sometimes better or sometimes worse. So it’s not a unicorn, but it can be an incredible tool for the right job in the right hands. And that’s what makes the price acceptable, and what makes a difference to some, but others couldn’t care less.
Fucking love this. Brutal and true. 