Wich is the point with Flame? (it seems as slow as the other comp programs)

[pipopi]

Hi, I recently had my first time a Flame machine (Flame 2009). I had like two hours to experiment with it with a guy guiding me.

I always thougt that Flame was an almost renderless machine and that it was realtime due to his really high cost and legendary reputation as the best and faster in the planet. As an After Effects artist I wished desperately to see with my eyes what this machines can do in comparisson with AE.

Well, first I must say… what a deception!!! 🙁

I wish I’m wrong with this sentence but it’s what I feeled after the session so it’s my point of view ny now. My reasons:

First I saw the impressive playback speed of uncompressed videos in the playback module, really great here. But secondly I tried the CC module and saw the Process button… I asked for it and the guy telled me that it was the render button… so I hitted it and it took some time…

Well, I thougt this kind of thing would be done almost instant but I supposed it was the I/O to write the new render file. I asked to try a Sapphire plugin and I tried a Cloud effect, I hitted play and it seemed realtime. So I incremented the frequency and tried again… it was really slow now, so I hit Process and it taked like two minutes… I thought Flame would render effects using the Quadro GPU I saw his proccessing power was similar to my desktop AE…

Next I asked for the famous nodal system and he showed me the Batch… it seemed like toxic.. I thought it would be really fast and different from Shake, Nuke… but what I saw is taht it was really similar to desktop systems in speed and that you must render at the end the same way! The only big difference would be that you have the render automatically put in the desktop to see it.

I’m very comfused now cause I thougt Flame was a beast appart and what I’ve seen is like a Nuke or Shake with a Desktop environment to do simple editing on the results. The speed was normal, such like what I expect from After Effects with a Quad Core or Shake.

I cant understand why it’s considered the preffered machine to do commercials when it takes a long way to do the renders like the other packages.

My question here is.. what I’m missing??? Why Flame is considered so powerful when it is like the other’s(and much more limited in some areas) but with better I/O???? I know you can have an expensive Burn renderfarm but I can have one with every other package nowadays.

Hope you guys can make me see it with another eyes, I hope.. Thanks.

[Ramazan]

ok…first off there is no deception! maybe some wrong assumptions and urban myths! Its only recently that the desktop software is offering so much and therefore has narrowed the gap with flame. So your dissapointment is probably to do with out of date comparisons.

Having said that I can tell you that the disk based playback system is integral to it’s Client driven reputation. I did my last job in after effects and when 5 VIP clients turned up to view the work with not much warning, I found myself rather embarressed that i could only offer to show them the HD title seq in low resolution compressed format. Even then the thing wouldn’t fit in ram so I had to render out a quicktime version. On the Flame I would simply have clicked on the latest edit and hit play.

When you have a director sitting behind you making lots and lots of changes, some only subtle and some drastic, You will see the benefits of the workflow which currently only the flame offers. Say your example of the saphire spark, iF you change the frequency of the effect, whilst you have to render the change like anywhere else, once done, you have immediate playback of the entire edit timeline ( ie the whole sequence) and so can see the effect of the change in context very very quickly. The director then asks to split the difference and so on…

Doing this in after effects is not much fun when it doesn’t fit in ram.

The other benefit for me is the unified interface and project management. I don’t have to mess around in windows running a 3d package, a paint package, a comp package and an edit package. You’d be surprised how much time this saves.

This also applies to the toolset…a shot we are working on requires rebuilding the entire thing digitally, including the talent, and seamlessly blending from the live action to the digital version which now has a super super slomo bullet time virtual camera. Seeing as this is archival footage it obviously can’t be shot with a bullet time rig. We have the paint, 3d modelling, mapping, 3d camera tracking, warping, etc and editing in one batch…and this is simply not possible in after effects. I would have to use at least 4 apps to do this on the desktop with after effects/shake/fusion/ needing to use a 3d app and an edit app and a 3d tracker in conjunction. Nuke may seem the closest in terms of 3d toolset but again no timeline/editing/3d tracking. Then you have to carefully project manage all the data in these multiple apps. When the director askes you to make a change you have to go through all those hoops again whereas on flame, make the change, render and watch! This is where the speed factor comes in when comparing to desktop solutions. Although fusion Generation does sound really cool in the project management and timeline (allbeit with very limited editing tools)

Anyway 2 hours is not ever going to get you understanding the benefits of any piece of software that is as fully featured as flame. You need to sit in on a client situation to really see how it justifies itself.

lastly, in general, Flame artists have a lot of experience and tend to supervise shoots and lead the compositing team in post and build direct relationships with clients. So a part of people wanting to hire a flame is that they want to hire the particular flame artist.

cheers

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

wish u could save this comprehensive answer as a sticky or better yet a rubber stamp.

[shannones riders]

pgill gave you a great answer!

I think it’s possible to work really fast when you’re organised and you have a good overview on the workflow. The ‘brute force’ way of working won’t work on Flame either, you still have to think.

On Flame the trial and error phase of the work can be pretty short, because you see the results immediately.

OK, processing spark took 2 minutes. But what if you need 10 elements for a shot made by sparks? You process them separetely and you’ve them on the desktop within an hour. Same in Batch, you can cache the nodes you don’t want to change any more.

If you want to read more on this, read Stu’s opinion:

http://prolost.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-should-adobe-do-with-premiere-pro.html

I don’t completely agree with him, but it’s an interesting comparision and might enlight the differences better.

pH

[Jaron]

Render speed is not everything for application. You need more experience in actual job.

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

hope nobody objects to cross-pollination of threads >

http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/flame-t14409.html

http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/why-ffi-so-expensive-t4149.html

btw paul the divorce bit is quite funny. 🙂

[Scott Balkcom]

hey Pgill… u seem to know a lot about flame, i work on an inferno 6.5 & 2009 (im really new), but you say there is a place on it where you can MODEL 3D??? can’t seem to find it, i only can import 3d models, and light them, but actualy create a model, inside…
please help! 😀

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

3d modelling in flame ? i think he meant u can import 3d models [3ds/dxf/fbx etc etc ]

[greek]

@rohit 27428 wrote:

3d modelling in flame ? i think he meant u can import 3d models [3ds/dxf/fbx etc etc ]

.. and modify – to some extent – i probably wouldnt start to create a character animation, but with deform and with extended bicubics you can do a lot.

robert

[pixelmonk]

You can create 3D models by importing Gmasks and extruding them.
Crude, but useful.

Paul

[Saran Sirikasamsap]

ah those models… i tot he was talking about serious 3d modelling 🙂

[Ramazan]

yeah extended bicubics are the same as a 3d patch surface in 3dsmax, so i use them to model directly in flame, for example i have modeled pretty complex terrains to project onto with matte paintings. Also modeled human head features in flame directly this way you could then use the model to run textures through for example an animated tattoo and it will deform correctly, or use it to relight/digital make up. Generally you don’t see the actual model i am using but it is used to deform or as a surface for projection. You can do lip sync animation by setting up the morph targets as you would in 3d and then copy and paste in the keyframes. Obviously this is more useful/efficient for auxillary stuff when you may not have 3d available to you! the hard thing is to create a model that is a closed surface but you can by making sure the edge vertices are located correctly. There was a post here on fxguide somewhere about how to make a sphere from a bicubic, so similar to this.

for an example of a very very quick and simple model look at my reel at 01:37:

http://www.vimeo.com/2488898

it has a camera projection with a key so the ext bic only needs a rough depth and it took a matter of minutes to create the camera move from a still. Also used this technique to remove the cricketers and to remove the chopper shadow from the mountain top.

apologies, the reel is not very good at the mo!

paul

[Ramazan]

double post!

[Doug Meyer]

like what you did with the blue mountains shot, simple but very effective. i’ve done similar things before but never thought to push the bicubics as far as that.

[Author]

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