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I’m a student at Full Sail and I’m very interested in compositing. I’m going to be learning Shake soon and am very excited about that 🙂
I hear all these different names thrown around when talking about about vfx and compositing. Flame, Flint, Inferno, etc.
How do these apps relate to one another? How do they fit into the industry?
Thanks!
JacobThis is a good start for the differences between Flame, Flint and Inferno:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Media_and_Entertainment#History
Jeff
A over-priced frame playback machine !!! 😉
i was going to say the same thing.
C’mon, guys…!!!???
Ok… more…
Some history to help where we are today and why this might be confusing. SGI hardware used to be the only platform for Discreet products. And there was a vast difference in speed and cost across the sgi line. After Flame was introduced and popular Discreet added Inferno to the line to work on the biggest computers sgi made and they made Inferno handle higher bit depths. So Flame became the video machine, Inferno for film work. Inferno ran on the biggest most expensive hardware and cost a lot more for the software too.
Well of course some video people ended up with Infernos and started using as a marketing tool against the competiton with “just Flames”. And as Flame started getting higher bit depths film people bought cheaper Flames. And sgi kept changing the product line until the past few years when you found youself in the confusing position of being able to buy Flame on a Tezro for such a vast difference in cost vs. an Onyx3 with not enough performance difference to make Inferno worthwile.
While all this was going on Flint was in there on the smallest sgi machines (O2 for example) and with other feature limitations due to both hardware issues and marketing desicions (like not having all the keyers). So Flint was used as a full fledged machine in less demanding (non client) areas or as a support tool.
For a very brief time all new features started in Inferno and then in future releases trickled down to Flame. Today there is like one feature that Inferno has over Flame (motion node in batch) but even this is mostly eclipsed by new timewarp features.
So the bottom line is Flame, Flint, Inferno are all essentially the same software, running on different platforms at different price points.
Now that everything is moving/has moved to Linux the whole differentiation thing becomes even more confusing to the extreme where for the Japan market they started shipping “Inferno” as a linux Flame with dedicated Burn nodes.
I work on both an Inferno on Onyx 2 and Flame on Tezro. I don’t feel that much of a difference although the Tezro definitely is snappier in the interface. I must add I use both with Burn so the interface is all I would notice as local processing is not an issue.
Hope this helps.
Jeff
Now that’s what I call a good answer!
Flame/Flint/Inferno are like these mythological beings that everyone seems to know about but me. I find it very difficult to get my head around the concept. I don’t know why.
I’ve been using a lot of Maya in school. You model an object, rig it, texture it, light it, animate it, etc. What’s the workflow like in F/F/I? Do they use objects that have relationships to one another and exist in world space? Or is F/F/I mostly used in post when everything is already created and only finishing touches need to be added?
jmoneystl wrote:Flame/Flint/Inferno are like these mythological beings that everyone seems to know about but me. I find it very difficult to get my head around the concept. I don’t know why.It is not that hard… first call it Flame. So we are down to one thing to wrap your head around. Second it is a tool. A compositing tool similar to After Effects, Shake, Nuke, Fusion. It can key, track, color correct, edit, layer, etc just like those packages.
Where Flame differs is it is designed to be fast and use hardware to work with lot’s of layers quickly. Also it uses a proprietary dedicated framestore to give it fast access to images and provide a structure that can be archived and networked with other Flame and Smoke workstations. My favorite phrase is that Flame is designed for interactivity and other packages are designed for iterations. But even that is not set in stone as Flame with burn is quite efficient at iterations and for example After Effects doing title treatments is quite excellent and interactive.
Still the big defining difference is usually that if you need to do a client interactive session… a room full of advertising clients needing the spot done now, you will usually find a Flame in that room.
(quick diversion – difference between Flame and Smoke. Flame is really best working with lots of layers. Smoke is designed to work with a timeline. Yes, Flame can read an edl and edit and yes Smoke can have multiple layers… but each are optimized to do certain things).
I work all day on a Flame (and have for over 10 years). I use and try and stay current with After Effects. I am learning Shake and Toxik thru fxphd. I love all tools and want more and more!
Hope this helps.
Jeff
I also want to see, how AME will differentiate the product line on linux in the future. Where will flint/flame/inferno be (I’m sure that it is also a hard situation for AME marketing)? These are really popular brands, commercial clients/agencies just book inferno, for whatever they do. It is still the most popular solution for clients needing fast jobs. We finish almost every high budget commercial on flame/inferno(mostly on inferno) here in Istanbul. However this has started to change just little by little. I use ffi for 10 years, and now I try to learn fusion.
Inferno was the only good tool for interactive paint, but now we paint out 2K dust/scratches in combustion, because inferno advances to next frame in 2 seconds! If you have a back layer with a slip, it takes 4 seconds! But with combustion, it works almost with no delay, because it works with ram cache… So important, when you work on a full DI feature.
But inferno still sits in the centre of our workflow. And it will be there for many years, it is 64bit for almost 1 year. Which is very important when dealing with hires images. In the near future, I expect AME to rely on GPU processing technology, do many of the compositing tasks with the GPU.
About onyx2 vs tezro: I see the difference with lots of hires action layers. If you have big texture memory like RM11, and many raster managers, V12 gfx with only 104MB texture memory, and lower rasterization speed starts to become an issue. However if you are a batch freak, with lots of CPU processing nodes, tezro 4CPU is a lot faster, because onyx2 processors are limited to 500Mhz. But in the end, linux platform work with intel/amd processors, which run around 3Ghz! So when you compare mips processors with intel, there is a huge difference. I can’t wait to upgrade onyx to PC! 😯
If you want more In Depth information, you can go to http://www.discreet.com where inside the Products section you can find Brochures (PDF) on each equipment…
ricardo
While it was touched on, I thought I should clarify a difference between FFI and desktop compositing applications.
A very significant difference between FFI and software-only products like Combustion, AE, Shake, Nuke, Fusion, etc. is that FFI plays back footage directly from disk, and does not need to cache clips into RAM first. Thus, the length of clip playback is not limited by system RAM, only by storage size and disk bandwidth. This makes a HUGE difference in interactivity between FFI and other compositors.
If Combustion were to have the ability to play back footage in realtime directly from disk, it would cut into the Flint (and possibly Flame) market in a big way. I think Discreet keeps Combustion RAM cache-dependent partly in order to prevent cannibalism in its product line.
What I don’t understand is why other companies haven’t focused on this issue in their compositing products. Adobe, Apple and others don’t have to worry about cutting into sales of their own higher end applications, so it would be a huge strategic advantage for them to support realtime disk-based framestores. If AE or Shake gained that functionality, Discreet would be forced to bring it to Combustion or risk obsolescence.
zolo wrote:What I don’t understand is why other companies haven’t focused on this issue in their compositing products. Adobe, Apple and others don’t have to worry about cutting into sales of their own higher end applications, so it would be a huge strategic advantage for them to support realtime disk-based framestores. If AE or Shake gained that functionality, Discreet would be forced to bring it to Combustion or risk obsolescence.I think it has to do with focus of products. For example Shake, nuke etc are more for film and collaborative environments. You are working on a small portion of a project and don’t really have a need for fast playback and “edits on the fly”. On top of that I still think you need a pretty well speced system to get that kind of playback (especially if you wanna go HD 4:4:4 and higher). A finely tuned system with RAIDs, fibre-channel and such aren’t something you can expect a normal shake user to own. But sure it would be nice with direct playback from a regular desktop system. If you go from FFI to a desktop you sort of feel like your hands are tied behind your back. But desktops have their advantages as well and systems gets faster and faster as we speak.
It sounds like Toxik has the ability to playback from disk. I’m interested in looking at that app at some point. I had two Flints on O2 and they were great for a long time but I got very frustrated with Discreet’s (AMD) marketing strategy to keep the products artificially differentiated and to keep the prices so ridiculously high. We do project based (mostly unsupervised) work so I made the move to Combustion and for the most part love it. Especially the fact that the keyer, color corrector and tracker are the same as Flames. Also free network rendering. It does everything I’ve ever asked of it and most people I work with just assume I’m on a Flame. Fine. The biggest difference anyway is in the pilot not the plane. I’m sure most of the veterens here would agree with that. You can do great work on After Effects, Combustion or Fusion. You can also do crap work on Flame or Inferno.
deandec wrote:It sounds like Toxik has the ability to playback from disk. I’m interested in looking at that app at some point. I had two Flints on O2 and they were great for a long time but I got very frustrated with Discreet’s (AMD) marketing strategy to keep the products artificially differentiated and to keep the prices so ridiculously high. We do project based (mostly unsupervised) work so I made the move to Combustion and for the most part love it. Especially the fact that the keyer, color corrector and tracker are the same as Flames. Also free network rendering. It does everything I’ve ever asked of it and most people I work with just assume I’m on a Flame. Fine. The biggest difference anyway is in the pilot not the plane. I’m sure most of the veterens here would agree with that. You can do great work on After Effects, Combustion or Fusion. You can also do crap work on Flame or Inferno.Yes, Toxik is a pretty cool system. We tested it on a dual core dual opteron system with loads of ram (only sata raid though) and it was sure a snappy system. But I still haven’t come a cross a solution as good as the FFI desktop. No one can beat it when it comes to fast edits and “versioning” (yet). Invaluable when you have a client breathing down your neck. And that’s where I disagree with you (or at least sort of), you say it’s in the pilot and not the plane. Not entirely true. I would say that if you bring in the constant “time” or to be more specific “no time at all” then I believe that the plane is very important. If the box works against you, you will have less time and your work will be affected. If you do unsupervised work that is another thing but as soon as you have someone behind you, you will want the fastest thing you can get. But high- and midrange products are getting awfully close in both performance and toolsets. It’s an interresting development.
flames the bees knees. its the machine to make a living from, its the only creative compositing tool out there> im rather biased though. jh
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