[Ana wills]

@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.

[Ana wills]

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.

[Ana wills]

I believe this was fixed in 2010ext1, although there is a trade off…. It renders very slowly, I put the 3D blur node doen as a ‘Beta’ Node as sapphire has had good Z-Blur and renders alot faster.

Just on the speed of the render, we had a three minute render blow out to 16min.

cb.

[Ana wills]

Hey Tahl, I hate to be the go between but Philippe gave this great response to my question of Linear-Light workflow in flame:

Conf: flame-news
From: Philippe Soeiro
Date: Friday, October 09, 2009 01:54 PM

Hi guys,

Sorry I missed the begining of this thread. I did not mean to ignore it!
It is true that as far as blending is concerned in Action, the maths actually assume linear sources! Incidentally this has forced us to create blending curves precisely to compensate for the fact that most users don’t actually use linear “scene referred” footage in Flame. If you look at the entire Flame toolset, things become a bit more blurry, but I suspect this is the case pretty much in every application.

If you take the example of a colour correction, it should assume an average grey at 0.18 with linear images as opposed to 0.5. This is something that Flame doesn’t do with the exception of the Exposure node. A gamma compensated image will shift a mid grey to 0.5 and it is a common assumption that this is how things should be treated in most applications. As stated before, this assumption is incorrect with scene referred linear footage. However Flame has the good taste of computing gamma correction as power function which makes it much friendlier with linear footage. Anyone confused? Welcome to the wonderful world of colour management.

We are in the process of examining how to clean things up, and have recently introduced viewer data types which “understand” linear footage. Compositing with linear footage in Flame should not be a technical issue. As you look at more creative image processing tools, the lines become a bit more blurry, because the end result can indeed vary quite a bit when feeding certain tools with different colour distributions. As we move forward, you can expect us to make things clearer and simpler for the user. Right now, Flame should allow you to use linear images, visualize them properly, and create comps that will look good. But it does require some knowledge from the user on how to do things.

A good example is keying with linear images. Most keying algorithms make the assumption that you are dealing with a perceptually uniform colourspace. It actually makes the process of keying easier. Of course, scene referred linear space is everything but perceptually uniform! In the context of Flame, it means that your linear “scene referred” KeyIn should be passed through a video gamma compensation to provide the easiest extraction or colour selection. Ideally this should all be transparent to the user. It is not the case just yet I’m afraid, and I wonder whether it is that clear in other applications?… I suspect it isn’t quite that clear. If anyone wants to comment on this, please do, we’re quite interested in this type of feedback.

thanks

Philippe Soeiro

[Ana wills]

Thanks for that Tahl!!

cb.

[Ana wills]

@ares 28897 wrote:

Yes, you misunderstood.

This podcast was about the benefits of (or rather the downsides of not) compositing in a linear light color space as opposed to a video gamma color space.

This has got nothing to do with linear vs. non-linear workflows.

Personally I liked this podcast a lot and I’m surprised there aren’t more comments or discussions in response to it.

I’m working on flame and see a lot of the issues mentioned, especially with blurs, CC and glows. Now all I need is to find out how to work around it on flame.

Wouldn’t mind Autodesk adding a little “lin” button to affected modules, layers in action or complete batch setups. Or even to the project settings.

Totally agree, it would be good if someone that was a little smarter than myself could come up with a solid Linear-Light workflow for flame.

Is it as simple as getting the 3D dept. working in Linear-Light, us Flame people getting the graded footage and converting it to Linear-Light, comping the 3D then converting it back to the gamma-adjusted space for TV?? (This is for TVC workflow)

Or,

Can 3D work in a gamma-adjusted space and we convert it to Linear-Light space??

Any thoughts??

cb.

[Ana wills]

Just one more thing to add, make sure your footage matches your EDL ‘Assembly Options’ settings.

For example, I may be working in a PAL at 10bit project but all the graded footage may be 2K, HD or 1K. In ‘Assembly Options’ you can force the EDL module to over ride the project settings.

cb.

[Ana wills]

digitalrhino, for the few shots I did on Australia we had our FilmRecorder/Scanner specialist here to create a 3DLut that was comparable to the one the Shake guys were using, it took a number of goes to get it close.

The other thing I would recommend would be to use a viewingLut rather than converting the file from Log/Lin then back.

cb.

[Ana wills]

Hey JJFS, thanks for that, we are running Tinder 5.1 so that will be the problem.

cb.

[Ana wills]

Hey JJFS, thanks for that, we are running Tinder 5.1 so that will be the problem.

cb.

[Ana wills]

Thanks Kuban, thought it may have been our systems.

cb

[Ana wills]

Quite correct vfxtodd, the next version of Nuke, six I think, you can have multiple shapes in one node.

Chrisb.

[Ana wills]

Quite correct vfxtodd, the next version of Nuke, six I think, you can have multiple shapes in one node.

Chrisb.

[Ana wills]

I don’t think you can arythmic, I just went for a hunt in the manual too and all it it says is”

Frame-Stepping the Timeline

To isolate a specific frame, move the positioner frame by frame through the
timeline.

To frame-step the timeline:

1 Press the left or right arrow key.

No mention of moving more than one frame.

Regards,

Chrisb
iLoura.

[Ana wills]

Hey Nephilim87, Might be the AJA has a bug??

Sign up to the Autodesk Webboard HERE and ask the question.

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