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Why not ? all companies are waiting for it there.Mac’s pro got now:
-12 cores
-FX5600 or 4800
-Kona3
-Fiber
-Raid
-The best stable OS in the world
What Autodesk needs more to think about a better business than the one where no “regular” companies want to invest money “Linux+PC” ?
Why not Lustre too ?This came up on flame-news recently, and from a hardware point there are some lingering issues (the amount of slots, the lack of a 5800 gfx card, the fact that there’s no pro-graphics options at all currently for the 12 core machines).
I doubt there’s any reason why Montreal can’t make it work from a hardware standpoint–they’re a very smart bunch. From a business standpoint there’s a lot of reasons why Autodesk HQ doesn’t want that to happen.
A likely scenario:
–Flame price drops to 20k software only.
–Many many facilities buy it up, especially the ‘regular’ companies.
–Everyone and their mother starts advertising that they have flame and bill out the rooms at current rates.
–Jobs deliver late, wrong or fail completely because companies aren’t accustomed to a flame workflow and the talent pool is stretched too thin.
–the name “flame” becomes synonymous with overcharging and screwing up your job.Alternate scenario:
–Flame price drops to 20k software only.
–Many many facilities buy it up, especially the ‘regular’ companies.
–Everyone and their mother starts advertising that they have flame and bill out the rooms at significantly discounted rates.
–The talent pool dries up as companies try to get us to work harder for less money on jobs that are smaller in profile.And the third, obvious scenario:
–People pirate the hell out of it.I feel like this would be a VERY bad idea
@andy_dill
Your comments are welcome and thanks for them.
I think your thoughts come only from the same interest like other Flame artists and like
other ‘big’ companies.
1-if Flame comes on standard companies there will be +800% of new flame artists
2-old flame artists won’t be on their confortable sites (wage+to be essential)
3-I’m sure that Montreal will see his business plan growing to +500% even for a 20k price soft.
4-If it never appends…don’t you think that young and fresh people won’t come one day (coming from the nuke land or other good soft and will push you out ?
5-ADSK can’t continue to be on their own world where most of companies aren’t.
6-You would like to see Flame/Lustre die ?
7-There are enough place on Mac pro slots to receive all cards for Flame trust me 😎 Quadro takes 2 slots, Aja one, raid one and you have one free for fiber if you would like.Now (thinking about Smoke on OSX proccess) we don’t need SDI outpout on the Quadro for Mac, preview works better under OSX than Linux (just ask Smoke OSX users and you will see(or ADSK themself).
8-Glade to share point of view with people like you 🙂To all who have still doubts.
Just watch the post views score for only that title “Flame on Mac”
It doesn’t want to say everythings ?Flame on Mac is the way to go. I think that, it is the future of Autodesk systems. (Although I am not sure if they will name it systems products after they move everything to MacOSX)
It was a pain in SGI systems, when we moved to linux, our hardware became so much more stable and easier to maintain. Now if we move to macos, we will have the same stability, and the hardware would be so easy to obtain. Just go to an apple store, go buy macpro. If you would like to have video IO, throw an aja card in. But if you ask me, I am loosing interest in video IO, everyday.
And I think that moving to MacOS, has the benefits of other software. Who wouldn’t want to have a photoshop running at the same box with a flame? And AvidMC or FinalCut?.. These days, we do lots of conform jobs coming from r3d files. So it might help to have a Media Composer license, and a better AAF integration on a flame box. So this way, I can open the editing project, and fix a multilayer avid timeline really work on my flame.
When it comes to pirating… Belive me, there has always been pirated versions of flame. In the past: one of the Autodesk guys said that, flame has a big dongle: “It needs an onyx to work :)” But those were the old days, and even in those days many pirate flames existed! Even after the move to linux, pirating continued. So you can’t say that, we shouldn’t move to Macos, because it will leads to piracy. Is a Z800 secure enough, compared to onyx?
The missing part would be the infiniband drivers on Macos! I don’t know why, but they stopped infiniband drivers for macos. Does anybody know the reason?.. Infiniband is the lowest delay networking hardware between PC hardwares right now. And on macos, 10G is the best you are going to get. Ok, even 10G might be enough for most work, but still infiniband exists on linux and has a lower delay, an greater bandwidth (up to 40Gbit/sec).
1. New flame artists would be nice, and I’m always eager to see more talent in the field, but my main point in the above lists is that flame is finishing software. That’s what differentiates it from Nuke or Final Cut. What that specifically means is that the person operating the flame is responsible for the product as it leaves the building. If they screw up, money is lost, lawsuits may arise. It’s a highly skilled gig that takes years to get good at and has nothing to do with keying, editing or matching your blacks, but requires you to be good at all of them.
So I don’t see a lot of bonus in broadening the user base on an exponential scale, and yes that logic is coming specifically from my flame artist background. I’ve spent years getting good at finishing commercials and I don’t want to see my pedigree watered down by a pile of people who don’t know what they’re doing. It’s certainly protectionist, but I don’t want truck drivers on the roads who don’t know how to drive trucks either.
2. We’re hardly comfortable. Anyone who’s tied to a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and tens to maintain isn’t going to be very comfortable when companies are looking to cut the fat.
3. I”m sure they do see the bonuses there. I see the benefits to going software only, but what I can’t see is how it would compete with things like Nuke and Final Cut. If i’m going to divorce myself from this giant turnkey system and the experienced talent and company infrastructure that comes along, it doesn’t seem all that smart to spend $20k when I could spend $3-7k for the compositing side and $1k for the editing side. Flame works and exists because it’s in a weird space and I don’t see it being able to compete outside of that.
4. I don’t know what you’re getting at–flame software is updated twice a year, with bug fixes throughout. Do I worry about hot new talent pushing me out? Nope. I’d rather encourage and teach talented people. If I can make them better than me, that’s awesome.
5. Autodesk owns a lot of products. I think they’re fine.
6. I’d love to see flame thrive, but I don’t know that making it cheap will do that. I think my proposed scenarios are likely and that’s not going to do flame’s lifespan any favors.
7. People I know better than you disagree, but as I stated initially, Montreal’s got a lot of smart cookies and I’m sure they can work it out if they haven’t already.
@Borsalino 32001 wrote:
@andy_dill
Your comments are welcome and thanks for them.
I think your thoughts come only from the same interest like other Flame artists and like
other ‘big’ companies.
1-if Flame comes on standard companies there will be +800% of new flame artists
2-old flame artists won’t be on their confortable sites (wage+to be essential)
3-I’m sure that Montreal will see his business plan growing to +500% even for a 20k price soft.
4-If it never appends…don’t you think that young and fresh people won’t come one day (coming from the nuke land or other good soft and will push you out ?
5-ADSK can’t continue to be on their own world where most of companies aren’t.
6-You would like to see Flame/Lustre die ?
7-There are enough place on Mac pro slots to receive all cards for Flame trust me 😎 Quadro takes 2 slots, Aja one, raid one and you have one free for fiber if you would like.Now (thinking about Smoke on OSX proccess) we don’t need SDI outpout on the Quadro for Mac, preview works better under OSX than Linux (just ask Smoke OSX users and you will see(or ADSK themself).
8-Glade to share point of view with people like you 🙂andy_dill, I totally agree with everything your saying.
Two things I might add:
There is a small post house up the road from us that finished all their TVC’s on Combustion/Final cut and Motion, they do a nice job, mainly retail, but in the end they moved to DS as you really do need a turn key solution for TVC market. So I would like to see Flame continue as a Full hardware/software (The advantage being that you know it’s at optimal stability given a certain hardware) turn-key solution for the TVC market. I think Nuke and Fusion have the Film side of compositing sown up.
The other thing is Flame Premium, do you think that given the cost that there is a possibility that these ‘Truck Drivers’ of which you speak, that may have a Smoke Advance, and now see an opportunity to step up to a Flame/Lustre and call them selves Flame/Lustre Artists??
Given it is still the best TVC Finishing tool around it has a few years left in it.
Chrisb.
all those who make the same arguments are just the same people who think that on their personal interest and nothing else, iti s the same speech for years and is the reason why new artists do not turn to flame and Lustre.
Just a last question :
The money to buy flame or linux came from your pocket or from your boss pocket ?
‘Regular’ boss like i am could buy a system (flame and lustre on osx) because the machine won’t be blocked only for them.Please stop talking many times about stability, i’m fed up to ear that bad argument.Osx is able to run many different apps without any problems but i don’t think i could change your mind for that.So if you’d like to get a stable machine where only one and one only, application must stay on it, then MAC pro is still the better choice for hardwares perf+low prices (if we can buy the software only like smoke of course).
Other artists or boss can’t agree with me because they don’t come to fxguide, they move to fusion and nuke and soon Davinci instead.That’s why fxguidei is a 90%of Autodesk comunauty.
Anyway, fxguide is great, Adsk too and it’s not end users who can make the changes but marketing and business.@Borsalino 32042 wrote:
all those who make the same arguments are just the same people who think that on their personal interest and nothing else, iti s the same speech for years and is the reason why new artists do not turn to flame and Lustre.
New artists do not turn to flame and Lustre purely due to the cost of the equipment, just look at Nuke/Fusion/AE, for Nuke and Fusion you can download a learning edition something Autodesk should have done with Flare but they will only sell you that product to you if you have a Flame.
The problem is not what I or any Flame Artist argues in defence of keeping Flame high end and that this is stifling new artists coming through, but Autodesks business model when it comes to the compositing packages, which given their rapid decline in market share, appears to be broken.
@Borsalino 32042 wrote:
Just a last question :
The money to buy flame or linux came from your pocket or from your boss pocket ?
‘Regular’ boss like i am could buy a system (flame and lustre on osx) because the machine won’t be blocked only for them.Please stop talking many times about stability, i’m fed up to ear that bad argument.Osx is able to run many different apps without any problems but i don’t think i could change your mind for that.So if you’d like to get a stable machine where only one and one only, application must stay on it, then MAC pro is still the better choice for hardwares perf+low prices (if we can buy the software only like smoke of course).
Other artists or boss can’t agree with me because they don’t come to fxguide, they move to fusion and nuke and soon Davinci instead.That’s why fxguidei is a 90%of Autodesk comunauty.
Anyway, fxguide is great, Adsk too and it’s not end users who can make the changes but marketing and business.While we’re on the topic of OSX, given I use Linux/OSX/Windows7 nearly everyday I much prefer W7 over OSX and Linux over both of them, just look at companies like Animal Logic who have slowly been moving there Nuke work stations over to Linux from OSX, I think it is a little remiss of you to say you want Flame on OSX when all you want is a cheap version of Flame that runs on a stable platform (Also look at Syntheyes, according to their website the OSX64 version is more expensive because to is so much harder to program OSX64 than the other OS’s).
Just as an aside, Flame is mainly used for Highend TVC finishing most of the 2D artists I speak to would rather work on features than commercials mainly due to the hours, which means they either use Nuke or Fusion, so given that, finding people who want to use Flame is also a little hard, finding the right person is also harder. The model of compositing in Nuke and Finishing in Flame is, at the moment, the most effective for a larger margin.
Chrisb.
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