[Keyser_Soze]

Xavier wrote:

But out of curiosity, since Flint is supposedly a “turnkey” system, besides a few Burn nodes, what do you need more?

Nothing more really. Just a lot of money. 😀

patdawg wrote:

You kids need to read up on OpenGL. Rendering OpenGL effects is done on the video card inside of the Burn nodes, not the processors.

I’ve got no idea how things work really. And I don’t care. I want things to be as fast as possible and if I hear something doesn’t use the machine to its full potential I want it to be fixed. I pay for it.

[Keyser_Soze]

Xavier wrote:

You CAN run Burn on dual proc machines. We are doing so at my company. However, not everything in Burn is multi-threaded (just like FFI). When you hear that burn doesn’t support multi-procs, it’s because all the OpenGL stuff is rendered through a library called MESA on Burn, and this library is NOT multi-threaded. However, sparks like Sapphire sparks DO use both CPUs in your render nodes.

Well I didn’t say burn wouldn’t run on multiple processor machines. It’s just sad burn doesn’t use their full power. Have you ever heard of 3d renderfarms that does not support multi-procs?
Lets just hope that Discreet will work some more on mult-threading, until then we just have to buy more machines, ie. more licences. I just can’t wipe the image of Discreet “laughing all the way to the bank” from my mind.

Quote:

Anways, Burn is expensive.

Yes, from the beginning Flinux looks very nice pricewise. But adding all the things you need to get a decent setup it always ends up more expensive than you first expected. Sounds like Discreet doesn’t it… 😉

[Keyser_Soze]

MovieMagicDUDe wrote:

I have been looking at animation software for a year now and i still havent been able to make up my mind. I’m planning to buy discreets combustion along with the whole adobe creative suite and also Adobe After Effects. I have looked at 3d max, lightwave, softimage, houdini, Maya and several more. They all have great reps, but which one is the best or is it just on prefence.

Thanks

Chase Keehn

Movie Magic Productions/ Uber vision studios

If you guys have any question pertaining my topic email me at:

[email protected]

It seems to me that you have to decide what to do before you do anything at all. Man, you are looking at totally different packages.

[Keyser_Soze]

kusanagi wrote:

Hi flamers,

what do you think is the best way for wire removal ?! i have a 2k project with many bluescreen shots where objects flying around and now i have to remove the wires. Sometimes the wires are over the object so i must clone that part of the image.
I think one way is to clean all the shots with the paint tool, any tricks how to remove wires in a batch or action setup ? is there a better way ? in combustion i have a better feedback because i can paint and key the same layer but in flame 8.5 i have to paint the clip import in my batch, key and action…blabla…this is not a very fast workflow, everytime i must return to my desktop and open the paint again if i want some changes.
I know in flame 9 the paint module is available in batch.. 😕

thanks a lot

kusanagi

It is not a very easy question to answer really. There are so many ways to do wire removal that you just can’t say one way is better than the other. And most likely you will have to use a combination of techniques to get the desired result. And this is why I think flame is the best tool cause it is the most “alround” you can get. And you have the playback so you dont have to wait for ram-previews and such. The modular- and master keyer are excellent. I like paint cause it is raster and not vector based, you don’t get the same smooth feeling with vector paint. Yes, it is nice with a paint that you can track and undo (like combustion), but i can do without it. And it is not so hard stepping in and out of batch is it? Come on!
Flames tracking tool is superior to for example combustions which suck big time! And you have extended bicubics and the warper which can be very handy when removing wires that moves in front of things that are complicated to paint frame by frame. So if you have the opportunity to use flame, do it!
I might consider combustion for the the advantages you get with vector paint, but i still don’t like the feel of vectors. It is not accurate enough. I actually use photoshop sometimes cause I hate vectors so much, hehe.
For “painting only” (at least that’s the only thing I would use it for) you have Commotion, although pinnacle won’t develop it anymore it can still be useful. I know there are some new paint packages around that uses raster paint but havent tried them yet. Curious gFX I think was one, maybe worth taking a look at. But these are for paint only and that is probably not enough to solve your problems.
Going back to Combustion that I have used for quite some time. It is interresting in many ways but I’ve found it very unstable (although it’s getting better). It is slow and if you’re working in 2k you probably need the best machine you can lay your hands on. So my first choice would be flame and the second probably combustion in combination with some kind of raster paint software (but the second choice wouldn’t be an alternative really I’d rather kill myself first, haha).
As for any tips on wire-removal techniques there are many. Avoid paint if you can, cause it is hard. Maybe you can track and warp still images instead. Use or create clean plates if you can. If you need to paint, be accurate!! I’ve found that using the “drag” brush can sometimes be quite successful. If your painting flickers, maybe you can use average. If the wire is moving you can sometimes in action offset a layer in time to get rid of that wire. Or mask the wire and use sep. front to offset the layer (same as cloning but faster). Well there are almost as many ways of doing things as there are wire-shots. These are just a few ways and there are probably no “one” technique that can solve them all. Although Furnace looks pretty interesting I still think that you will have to sit there fixing things up in paint or whatever in the middle of the night just before deadline with a big bowl of coffee and your head almost touching the wacom board. Good luck to you. Cheers.

[Keyser_Soze]

flamefx wrote:

If so….. what are your thinkings about it??..here in Spain we will not able to see it until march…maybe february.

I would love to hear opinions from you guys!!

Bye for now 😀
FlameFX

We’ve tried it both at IBC and a private demo. It’s responsive enough. For price/performance ratio it is really good. I don’t think that discreet are gonna sell very many flames after this. But you’ll probably want burn as well to cut rendering time. There is one catch though as burn currently does not support multiprocessor machines so you will need more machines, more licences… expensive. Discreet said it had something to do with Open GL (i think). It sounds weird to me that they can’t support multiproc. machines. I heard a rumour that it could be fixed in a future upgrade. Anybody knows?

Iggs wrote:

I’ve sat through the hands-on demo at NAB 2004 and found it to be quite slow …
Don’t know what machines they were running it on so that might have been part of the problem … I work mostly on Avid|DS so can’t really compare it to Smoke on SGI but IMHO it was slow: had only a few layers in Action and just trying to rotate/scale … etc. took quite a bit of patience.

I.

Don’t think you can run Flint/smoke on any other machine (apart from SGI) than specified by Discreet: “Dual Xeon™ IBM® IntelliStation™, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NVIDIA® Quadro FX 3000G, real-time 4:4:4 ITU-R 601 PAL/NTSC video I/O, with audio break-out box”.
I don’t think it was THAT slow, it was ok, not superfast but ok. You will want burn though.

Cheers.

[Keyser_Soze]

BergMeister wrote:

Hello Pary People,
For the last few days I have been trying to acheive a depth of field effect within combustion3.

To give you abit of background I’m doing camera movs on oversized images using the combustion 3D-Space, camera and lighting. What would be nice however is to be able to put some natural depth of field and focus pulling into the product. The problem is that there dosn’t seem to be any way to get combustion to write or show z-buffer infromation from its own camera. Does any bright minded people out ther (or in here) know if this is possible or if there is any other workarounds?

Cheers
BergMeister

You’ll have to fake the depth of field with a plug-in either with Combustions own blur or even better with a lensblur like Sapphires RackDefocus. Good luck.

[Keyser_Soze]

johnmont wrote:

Agreed 100%. I’ve mentioned to to anyone and everyone from Apple — it is really a shame. Must be all the metadata or something.

I always end up dealing with it using Terminal and access via unix. Not elegant or always practical, but at least there is a semi-workaround.

Yeah, I guess we’ll have to use the terminal for now. But what do the Apple guys you talked to respond to this? Will they try to fix it or are they just doing like everybody else… putting their hope to better hardware instead of writing fast code. And I can tell you, faster computers doesn’t help much, I’ve tried a dual G5 and problem is still there. Let’s hope that Panther will do something about it.

[Keyser_Soze]

spatspit wrote:

i have the same problem accessing my sequence. it takes me doubly as long since im using a single 1 gig g4. I love to know how to access my sequence using the terminal?

thanx for your help.

There are loads of unix/terminal guides out there, just google. Try this site for some basic commands: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/unix_guide/
You can also acces a manual in the terminal. For example, if you wanted more information about the chmod command, you should type: “man chmod” and enter. The terminal can be very useful somtetimes. Good luck.

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