flame vs shake

[storaro]

well hi all :)
i will be glad to hear from you all, what will be the best tool to work on for a full 3d ficher film.
the old but proofing: flame, or the new major player: shake?
this is the famos soft vs soft thread but still try to be focused.

thanx

storaro

:)

[kuban]

As an old flame* user, I would definetely go flame. But I know it is much more expensive. If the price is not much of a problem, use shake, as a helper tool to flame.

Thats my idea.

[storaro]

thnx Kuban :)
i am not a flame user :( but can you tell the diferents between the 2?
regarding to the fact that the project is full 3d.
why do the shake is a major player now in the film indatry?
what's the major con and pro for this 2 ?
hope you can answer all that :)
storaro.

[kuban]

I am not a good shake guy. I am telling you my impressions on shake. First of all, you have to render everything with CPU, when you work with shake. That's a problem of speed.

Flame: faster, expensive
Shake: slower, cheaper

So that's a choice of, whether you drive a ferrari, or an opel. If you have the money, if you want race with time. You will buy the ferrari, but the opel may bring you to the same place, but slower both at open road, and curves. But the price is very different.

So the question should be, can we afford a flame? If you can afford a flame, buy it. And get 2-3 shake licenses as addition. The shake systems will cost 10% in total to flame budget. There can be no price comparison between shake and flame. Flame is 50 times expensive.

And v8 is ideal for 3D jobs, now with true resolution independence in flame, things are much more fluent. And the new batch is good. The burn* is the way to render faster. With Gigabit network, data flow is fast, network rendering is efficient.

[storaro]

ok, i understand that the $$$ is what's make the overall story.
and i think that i shold know more about the exact diferent's between all the major compositing soft avalable tody 8O
so if have some links to some usfull articles-it will be cool :D
thanks for the help, and hope that i'm not buthering to mach
storaro :wink:

[netviper]

Shake is 2.5 D
Flame is 3d

Shake will get the job done faster, But you can not import .fbx formats.

If you want to learn shake or get a better understanding of what it can do:


http://www.cmistudios.com/dvd.htm

there are free overviews there as well as a learning DVD.

[Maz]

How about Combustion, its cheaper than shake and has some of flames tools, .....and I can tell u it kicks Shakes ASS,, and uses RPF/RLA, 3dSudio MAx, has real time ram player, Shake is not Real Time, and has hardly changed in the last 3-4 years, it just a buzz that wont last as long as Flame 10 year reign, theres a lot of work on Shake at the moment, ...it is quite stable, has crap paint tools, crap tracking tools, and it is 2d, but you can fake 3d, but theres no 3d space, Combustion has 3d space just like flame,
Shake is being used a lot in films 2k, you can write scripts, create macros, which is about 5% of the useage of the package, you also can get half rendered frames withit , Combustion uses 99% of After Effects Plugins, it has FLames tracker, keyer, Colour Corrector, masking tools, and a superior Paint tool, there isnt a buzz with it like Shake, b'cos people dont use it to its fullest and people have not learned it yet ....get an experienced Flame op to learn it, and he will create wonders to your project!!

Trust me if you have shit loads of $$$ use FLame if you don't use Combustion 3.

[Maz]

It is completely stupid to suggest Shake is faster than Flame, ..even Combustion, its just a myth that has infected alot of people by zeolot Shake Advocates cos they couldnt find an opportunity to learn Flame ...and to sell training DVD's, .....oops sorry netviper(joke) :lol:

[netviper]

I have a license of Flame, combsution, shake AND digital fusion.

dude,

combsution is OK. but it has its share of problems.

shake IS faster at a lot of things.

flame is a great program. I love it. BUT there are some times... that i swear it isnt worth it.

(yes the tracker in shake sucks)

But the usabiltiy of shake is quick.


try version 3. its a whole lot different then the 2.x series.


As far as training...


I train for all of the applications. Including FLAME. he he

[kuban]

Come on boys. Everybody loves flame* It is great piece of software. I like its workflow. Ofcourse 5 shake seats are much cheaper than 1 flame seat, and shake is much much cheaper, and productive. But if you just need ONE very very powerfull seat, when working with directors, etc.. Flame is great. You can show many effects interactively.
Shake is great for its price, but if you have a good flame artist, get a flame for him/her.

[storaro]

no need to fight boys :)
my task is to compose a full lenght movie that where created in 3d soft(maya),the format is hd(1920x1080),so if any of you worked at this scale of project, it will be good to know :D and shere the knoleg :idea:
thnx again
storaro.

[Rebel]

:D
Its actually very simple,
FFI systems (well Flame and Inferno anyhow) are client based systems. They are VERY FAST! The clients sit with the operator and get the job done while they are in session. Thats why they cost big bucks because they earn bigger bucks. If you have no clients in sessions and no worry about time then shake is more than capable.

What decides what you need? Your clients and your market decide for you.
cheers
D

[Xavier]

I work in Inferno all day at 2K or HD.

I have dabbled a little bit with shake, but haven't ever used it in a real production.

First of all, the price difference is so huge between the two products, you are really looking at a 1xFlame or 10xShake seats dilemma. Not Flame vs. Shake. If you are alone doing comp, Flame is an excellent one-man band system. If you can hire a full team of compositors, then Shake might make more sense.

FFI has a better toolkit in general than Shake. The tools are more polished. For complex colour correct, hardcore chroma keying, painting, tracking/stabilizing, nudging and warping all sorts of footage into a single composite, FFI is the tool of choice. Having a desktop to put your clips and edit them is huge advantage. Even if you don't plan on doing any "editing", you always end up doing versions of shots, rendering small bits and replacing just a few frames here and there. Plus you have real-time playback straight from the framestore (at HD 8 bits at least) with a properly genlocked player module (i.e. strobe/jitter free playback on the graphics monitor).

I love FFI and couldn't work without it's Modular Keyer, Desktop and editing, playback module, Colour Correction tools and 3D compositing space (aka Action) and extended bicubics (all missing in Shake).

That being said, most of these advantages are negated on a full 3D production.

First of all, Flame has no clue whatsoever about RGBA clips. Those 50 passes you (slowly!) imported from the 3D department just exploded to 100 clips on your desktop. One front and one matte clip for every pass, eating 50% more space in the process. Most nodes and plug-ins have no clue about RGBA either. Wanna pre-process a nice Sapphire rack-defocus on one of your layers (before a 2D move for instance), you gotta render twice. One for the front, and one for the matte.

Flame has no clue about frame index numbers. When you import clips in the framestore, all the clips start at frame 1. Even if the clip was called my_clip.0131.pic, my_clip.0132.pic, etc... This means you have to manually pad or slip every layer that doesn't start at frame 1. Shake does this automatically, according to the frame index number. With complex 3D scenes where lots of stuff is coming in and out of frame, this can be a real pain in the neck.

Most 3D renders are pre-multiplied by default, and pre-mult support is just being built-in properly into FFI. It just got an un-mult tool (LogicOps Divide) at version 8.5 and apparently version 9 knows about pre-multiplied clips properly straight in Action. But Shake just "gets it", whereas Flame still treats premultiplied clips as some sort of strange kind of format.

Flame is limited to 12bits, whereas Shake supports 16 and 32 bits float. This is not a big deal if you deal with film scans or tape based material primarily, but can become annoying if your 3D team exports (and exploits!) 16bit, OpenEXR or 32-bit float passes.

Flame v.9 just got the possibility of building custom batch nodes. In this way it is catching up to Shake, but you still can't design your own control interface (select which controls are shown and what are the min. and max. values for each control for example). Shake excels at custom tools and gives you the possiblity of building your own nodes that are virtually impossible to tell appart from "real" nodes. If you have lots of 3D passes to build a common character in your movie, you can build a custom node that will sandwich everything together with the proper blend modes etc... in just one click.

Speaking of custom tools, shake can be driven from the command line. This makes it super easy to integrate it with in-house custom tools and scripts. Flame has no intention of working like that (probably for good reason, because most Flame customers don't have any desire to use it from the command line). Again, for a full-3D show, this might prove very valuable to perform post-render 2D tasks like downscale, upscale, quality control, filtering, etc... automatically after the 3D renderer is done.

Another advantage of Shake for complex 3D shots is the ability to use the DOD to do sub-region rendering. Why render the whole comp if you are really working only on those little backgroud characters up there in the corner? With flame, you render all or nothing.

Yes, FFI now has renderfarm support, but it is outrageously expensive. Especially with the ridiculous pricing scheme of the (almost mandatory) Sapphire Sparks. On the other hand, Shake has unlimited free renderfarm support (as long as you're willing to buy Mac render nodes).

Yes, FFI has real-time playback. But if you work at 12bits HD, then you have to load clips into RAM for real-time playback too in FFI, just like shake.

As for performance, anybody that says FFI can take shake to the cleaners should take their heads out of the sand and play a little with shake on a decent machine (by decent I mean fibre-channel array, multi-gigabyte RAM, dual 2.5 G5 with monster video and graphics card). Casual testing showed that a stock, straight from internal SATA drive, dual 2.0 G5 was able to outperform my 4-CPU Onyx2 with stonefs on a semi-simple batch setup on involving mostly logic ops and quickcomps on HD 8 bits clips. OK, a Tezro is probably faster than the Onyx2 I was using, but the Mac I was using wasn't built for compositing at all (no fast storage). Again, for a 3D show, remember that Shake has a 50% advantage on IO, not having to load 6 channels of info for a 4-channel RGBA clip.

Comparing Flame to a Ferrari and Shake to an Opel is quite misleading in the context of this discussion (and why do people always compare compositing systems to cars???). If I must do a comparison of that kind, I would say that Flame is a Ferrari, and Shake a very nice and specialized farm tractor. Both excel at what they do, but they definitely do not do the same thing. Would you wanna race a farm tractor? Would you pull farm equipment with a ferrari? You *could* do both of these things, but would you *want* to?

For SD client-driven advertising sessions, Flame is the clear winner. For film general kinds of effects (live action + 3D), the line gets blurred, depending of the type of shots you need to deliver. For a full 3D show, I would say that Shake is more suited to the task.

Another thing that people tend to ignore in this discussion, is the fact that even if Shake's toolset is not as rich as FFI, at least with shake, you have the option of minimizing, and then switch to FCP, Maya, AfterEffects, Combustion, GFX, DVD Studio Pro, Photoshop, etc... if you need to.

On Flame, you have to export, then network all your stuff to another box if you wanna take advantage of any software besides Flame.

My suggestion, buy the biggest badest Mac you can get with:

Cinema Display + monster graphics card
xServe fibre-channel RAID
Blackmagic HD IO card
Tons of RAM

And trick it out with Shake (primary compositing), Motion (motion graphics), Gen-Arts Sapphire plug-ins (the secret weapon of flame users is now available to other platforms!), AE (for the stuff motion can't handle), FCP (for editing), Combustion (for colour correction, tracking, roto, vector paint), Curious GFX (for raster paint) and Photoshop (everybody needs Photoshop at some point).

Still cheaper than a Flame (although not *cheap*!), but lots of different softwares to learn and master. But again, for a full 3D job, you might have zero motion graphics work, zero tracking, close to zero paint jobs and light-weight colour correction (depending on how talented your lighting people are!). So it really depends on your workload.

-- Xavier

[imported_johnmont]

I work in Inferno all day at 2K or HD.

I have dabbled a little bit with shake, but haven't ever used it in a real production.

-- Xavier

I have to say, this is an excellent post. However, you talk about having used it in a real production yet strongly recommend it over the discreet solutions. How have you come to such a determination without actually using it on a real job? And if the benefits are so strong, why haven't you used it on a real job?

Again -- just want to be clear that you bring up very good points about the differences/strengths of each product...just curous how you gained your knowledge.

[swerve]

Yea Flame is good, not to hip to the 12-bits thing though, Its warper is awesome best i've used and it colour correction tools are very nice. Tracking a breeze. and 3D

Complex comping i always moved over to Shake. Its tools are quite refined for more n-depth comping, its nice to work in 8,16, and float modes. Also its a heck lot cheaper then a FFI systems.

But truly i'd have to say my favorite app right now has to be NUKE from Digital Domain. Although still fairly new, its very fast, It only works in float, so your getting the best possible image out. Its damn fast, eats 2K frames. And its 3D module is the best i've used.

Really end of the day all these apps are just tools, with different named buttons in different named menus. They all do the same thing.

| swerve |

[Xavier]

Johnmont said:
-----------
I have to say, this is an excellent post. However, you talk about having used it in a real production yet strongly recommend it over the discreet solutions. How have you come to such a determination without actually using it on a real job? And if the benefits are so strong, why haven't you used it on a real job?

Again -- just want to be clear that you bring up very good points about the differences/strengths of each product...just curous how you gained your knowledge.
-----------


Note that I recommend Shake for Storaro and his full-3D show. I also recommend it with the caveat of using other software to fill in the gaps. I certainly do NOT recommend shake alone, or for all types of work.

Granted I haven't used Shake in production myself, so for all I know, Shake might have horrible flaws that I haven't uncovered with my casual use yet. I leave that part to seasoned shake users on this forum.

Being stuck with a complex full 3D shot right now, I admit I curse at most of the shortcomings of FFI I mentionned in my previous post.

The reason I haven't used shake on a real production yet, is because I am fortunate enough to work for a company that has many FFI seats and swears by it. I love FFI too, but I am realistic and I understand that it is not the ideal tool for everything and everyone. I just hate the typical comment "FFI is so expensive, so it *must* be the best at everything".

For the type of work I have to do, Inferno is still the best choice. Why? Because we have insane amounts of greenscreens to pull (and not "ultimatte demo clip" type shots, if you know what I mean). We could not deliver our shows without the modular keyer. We have lots of major "fix it in post" projects, so we need powerful paint, garbage mask, tracking, extended bicubics, etc... Plus, for doing multiple versions of a shot, the desktop with its reels and editing features are mandatory. All these advantages outweigh the shortcomings in the "comping 3D layers together" department at which Shake (and Nuke and Fusion) excel.

I don't want to sound condescending, but Shake is not the most complex software in the world. Once you figure out the batch-like schematic, you just have to take a look at the nodes available and you can figure out quite quickly what it can and cannot do. Coming from Inferno, I fell in love with the macro capabilities, the command line interface and CGI/3D oritented features. Shake also felt a lot less bloated than FFI. However, I still think it is missing must have features for my type of work, so switching is not an option... yet.

Discreet has best of class *tools*. But the toolbox is getting rusty (FFI is 10 years old!!), and I sure hope Toxik will bring a brand new shiny toolbox in our Monster Post Houses... Hopefully, the trusty old hammer and good old wrench will be found in it.

-- Xavier

[Rebel]

Exavier,

Just to update you on a few items,

YS: Yes, FFI has real-time playback. But if you work at 12bits HD, then you have to load clips into RAM for real-time playback too in FFI, just like shake.

(I sure don't, your inferno is probably older?, new flame tezro and infernos (setup right) play realtime 2K 12 bit straight off the drives.


YS:Wanna pre-process a nice Sapphire rack-defocus on one of your layers (before a 2D move for instance), you gotta render twice. One for the front, and one for the matte.

(use the new batch setup and now you don't render twice)


YS: For SD client-driven advertising sessions, Flame is the clear winner. For film general kinds of effects (live action + 3D), the line gets blurred, depending of the type of shots you need to deliver. For a full 3D show, I would say that Shake is more suited to the task.

(I would add also that in HD television, it is best on FI sytems. Done quite a few full 3D shows and haveing Flame and inferno saved our ass by makeing the deadlines and we never would have on anything else).

All in, If lack of moneys the driving factor, then purchase a shake system and do small jobs , if moneys not an issue then purchase a FI system and and do big jobs.

Rebel
8)

[Xavier]

Just to update you on a few items,

YS: Yes, FFI has real-time playback. But if you work at 12bits HD, then you have to load clips into RAM for real-time playback too in FFI, just like shake.

(I sure don't, your inferno is probably older?, new flame tezro and infernos (setup right) play realtime 2K 12 bit straight off the drives.



I'll check it out on our Tezros (I usually work on Onyx2 boxes). I know we've been able to play small 2k@12bits clips on the Tezro, but for longer clips, I think we started to drop frames. Possibly a configuration issue?



YS:Wanna pre-process a nice Sapphire rack-defocus on one of your layers (before a 2D move for instance), you gotta render twice. One for the front, and one for the matte.

(use the new batch setup and now you don't render twice)



Huh... I meant twice the render time, not actually hitting the "Process" button twice. To pre-process any kind of filtering on a RGBA clip (except for Action blurs), you need one node for the front, and the same node for the matte.

This means processing 6 channels of information where only 4 are required.

Even more annoying, you can't link channels accross sparks in batch, so you have to manually update the matte node everytime you change the front node. I like having direct access to front or matte in batch (unlike Shake where every node expects to be RGBA), but I wish Sparks, RGB Blur, Filter, Optics, Resize (and probably a few others I forget) had a front+matte input/output.





(I would add also that in HD television, it is best on FI sytems. Done quite a few full 3D shows and haveing Flame and inferno saved our ass by makeing the deadlines and we never would have on anything else).



I'm sure FFI saved your ass many times. I know it saved ours many many many times. But if you comped full 3D shows with it, didn't the caveats I mentionned in my first post annoy you? I know they do.




All in, If lack of moneys the driving factor, then purchase a shake system and do small jobs , if moneys not an issue then purchase a FI system and and do big jobs.



I disagree with that statement, but you're entitled to your opinion. I still maintain that FFI is the best overall performer, but it can be brought down to its knees just like every other product.

And by the way, I wonder if ESC thought the Matrix sequels were "small jobs"... Or if Weta thought the LOTR trilogy were "small jobs"...
:-)


-- Xavier

[patdawg]

It was my understanding that WETA did, in fact, use Inferno for some of the more complex shots.

[bounce]

NO other keyer can stand against Ultimattes Advantedge, I've seen Flames Modular keyer fall to it knees on a really nasty green screen shot, with a very experienced op, keylite and primatte failed too, Ultimattes Advantedge gave perfect results, and its a plugin that can work on any desktop compositing sw. Works well with Combustion.

[AdamG]

Well I must say,
You have all inspired me, (as a student and intern) to learn both platforms which is what seems to be the ideal. :D

[aracid]

hey all

shake vs flame, a tough one.
being a little compositor my self,
Im not gonna quote half the world etc.
because most of what u guys say is valuable arguments, but for my 30cents

for the lord of the rings story. Rumour has it that weta had scripts linking shake to their render manager. so artists could press render when they leave their work station and their shots came out already comped.
i've personally done that, it its a lovely way to work.

Then as for nuke, also being an increadible app. With the bit ive played around with it, the 64 imbedded channels makes it quiet unusual but highly efficient. especially with the node layout that becomes far less complicated because of this feature. i'm keeping my eye out for that app in the future, its the only compositing tool that i've thought about leaving shake for.

shakes ability to network render across multiple macs is a stunning feature.

If i were to do commercials, with the producer,director ,creative director, the directors girlfriend, her brother, and the producers dad and dog behind you, i'd go flame.

however i find it invaluable that i have a copy of shake on my 3d work station. having said that, if i were doing long form animation with alot of 3d elements or visual effects, i'd definately go the shake(and maybe nuke) route.

anyways

all the best

aracid

[-k]

for the lord of the rings story. Rumour has it that weta had scripts linking shake to their render manager. so artists could press render when they leave their work station and their shots came out already comped.
i've personally done that, it its a lovely way to work.

You can network render with flame too. Works very smoothly
Check out "burn".
It's just terribly expensive... ;-)

-k