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In addition to the displacement, blur the area, that tends to help a lot.
You can also layer different warps/displacements and blurs together to get a more complex look.
Sapphire “color ops” can also give you some nice effects that’ll get you close.
Mostly it’s green, glowy and grainy for your basic “night vision” look.
The reason I’d avoid the cylinder is because it’s way easier to deal with the default mapping on a bicubic, plus you can bend it around easily.
I’d make a square pixel action (say 1920×1080) and pipe a circle you trust into the back (don’t use the old flame gmask “circle”, for example) The paint module’s ‘geometry’ will make a nice circle.
Then, looking down from the top view, add an extended bicubic, subdivide it once and move the columns of points and tangents around until you’ve got one perfect bicubic cylinder. If you’re in Batch you can drag the action into the lower right bin, in either Project or User favorites, or save the action and any time you need a cylinder, go to ‘load action’ and in the load menu tell it to only import nodes–all you’ll get is a bicubic cylinder.
It’s tied to the resolution of the incoming image, so if you swap out a PAL frame out for an HD one there’s going to be some pain.
also, hey man. Haha.
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 🙂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.Shutter, then lens i would think.
The lens distortion happens prior to the shutter distortion, so it makes sense that you’d remove the stuff added last first. Like peeling a banana before you eat it.
generally speaking, float color space is linear. Nuke’s really smart about this, flame a bit less so (but getting better) and I have no experience with Shake, Toxic, AE or Fusion in a float context. When the images are converted to non-float (tiff, dpx, cineon, whatever) they will need to go through a lut to convert them to the appropriate color space. Nuke, again, is the champion here, making the process almost invisible.
in float, 0 is black and 1 is white, so the math for an 8 bit image would be value/255 and for 10 bit would be value/1023 and so on. The images do not get increased steps in color values added to them when converted, but a native float image will have the extra steps.
the bonus of float is that you can have a value of 50, which would be 50 times as bright as white, in a similar way to the sun being brighter than anything else, yet will only ever be displayed as white in a daylight photo. The advantage here is you can move the brightness of the image around without killing the overall light values, so you change the exposure in a way similar to a camera.
cineons have a log curve so they behave in a way that exposes to film correctly while not banding up the way an 8bit image would. The sub-blacks and super-whites there for under and overexposure, giving you a higher dynamic range, though not as high as float.
When you convert them to sRGB or Linear (or whatever color space) in a non-float context you will clip all the values outside of what the lut cares about (95 to 685 in your example). When you convert the log file in a float workflow, all the sub and super blacks and whites are maintained, becoming values under zero or over one.
Nuke’s got a handy exposure slider to look at how a lot of this behaves, and flame has the Shift+E virtual slider that does the same thing.
I wrote a tip that would allow you to, in certain contexts, cheat this look into working over on the Area. I should re-write it for multi-outs in 2011, because it’s so much simpler now.
Generally when I’ve done 1:85 stuff, it’s actually done on a standard 2k frame (2048×1556) and just safe for 1:85
Since you’re already working at HD (1:78), your image is currently safe for 1:85 as-is. If they’re fine with getting an HD frame at the filmout lab, all good. Otherwise they may ask you to resize it.
As for getting a conversion to log out of AE, you have to render your files out as Cineons. In the Output Module, change the format to Cineon Sequence (this will also allow you to render out DPX files since they’re nearly identical) go to “Format Options”, then “Cineon Settings” and change the preset to “Standard” which will enter in a bunch of values and check the “Logarithmic Conversion” box automatically.
Then you can pick if you want to render Cineons or DPX’s. DPX’s are more common these days.
After that you should be good.
I’d check with whoever you’re delivering to about the image size though.
A few people brought this up on flame-news, and I agree that for a desktop action with a single output it’s annoying. Once you add other outputs, it makes a ton of sense, and it’s fantastic in Batch, but yeah, no fun for basic Action work.
hopefully a service pack takes care of it.
Never seen any for flame.
you know us flame users, always trying to keep everything secret. Haha.
I saw something similar in 2010.1 (soft-cut clips would forget their new names if the old instance was still on the machine) but I thought I saw that it was one of the 2011 fixed bugs.
I’d talk to Autodesk support about it.
@rand_mcnally 31385 wrote:
Any thoughts or tips for keying with Red? Should prod companies avoid shooting Red for GS shoots and stick with film?
In a perfect world, yes, no more Red.
I don’t even mind if people shoot digitally but spend the extra $2-3k or whatever the difference is to rent a Genesis or f-23/35 and shoot 4:4:4. It’s amazing how much time and energy goes into every detail of a shoot only to have the camera skimped on. Tens of thousands of dollars and you’re going to save some bucks on the one thing that everything centers around?That said, I’ve dealt with a fair amount of Red footage (blue and green screens) and been pleased with the quality of the keys out of the master keyer. The plates I got were decently lit, but nothing ultra special.
I don’t know about the lens stuff, but the one job I worked on where they did giant people they did splitscreens or quick keys on the day to line up the talent with the background. Even some previs in Maya should allow you to work out what your focal lengths should be pretty quick.
The biggest thing is getting the slow motion (there’s a formula for it in the first ILM coffee table book, which I don’t have with me, but something like for every doubling of scale you double the framerate you film at). For my job they shot the phantom at 1000fps, which was overkill, but did allow them to speed up the clips much more smoothly to adjust the scale of the people in editorial.