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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
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
This is a good start for the differences between Flame, Flint and Inferno:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Media_and_Entertainment#History
Jeff
Some thoughts:
1) Whose accounting? We all know numbers can be made to work in many ways. Make sure this is exactly spelled out.
2) How to protect yourself from jobs that are seriously underbid or even freebees tying up the room? How involved are you in these decisons that directly affect your compensaton?
3) I have heard tale of people burned when the owner decides arbitrarily that the job should be billed so that the bulk of the job is attributed to say telecine, leaving you doing a ton of work with a percentage of little or nothing.
4) Is it possible to run a simulation either on last year (if an existing job) or on the first year showing how much better this system would be for you? That will be the sales pitch, that it will be better for you… so have them show you. That way in a year if it is tremendously off the mark you have something to raise a flag about. Ask for a review of the system at benchmarks.
5) Do some math yourself… hourly rate for room… how many realistic hours can be billed per week, per year?
6) How much time are you committing to selling yourself?
7) I have seen this system result in serious acrimony among competing departments – when the facility goal should be one united front to service the client best.This method seems to me best designed for someone who brings in 100% of their own work and is always busy, at full rate. That seems like a small group of people these days as facilities usually try and downplay a star system that creates nightmares for them as stars grow.
All that said, I’m sure it can work and would love to hear from more people on this subject.
Jeff
PacificArtist your email is bouncing – please email with correct one and I will update.
Jeffhttp://www.fxphd.com is the online training site created by fxguide.
Term 1 was completed a few weeks ago and term 2 starts soon. Some Term 1 courses are also being offered in Term 2. Check out http://www.fxphd.com for all the details.
Jeff
A common complaint for those familiar with After Effects first. Some I know turn Auto Key off but then you have to explicitly set every desired keyframe and any long time Flame operator that follows you on a shot will go insane. 🙂
Jeff
fyi, SGI posted a press release in our NewsWire section:
http://www.fxguide.com/press-380.htmlJeff
Check out our new training site http://www.fxphd.com.
Check out this tip http://www.fxguide.com/fxtips-197.html on the subject
Jeff
I know this is not the answer you are looking for but Burn is by far the best answer… even two burn nodes will be faster for most everything and let you keep your seat working on other shots while it renders.
loops wrote:If you want to stay inside Batch, you can use three CC nodes to do the same thing as Seperate – plug the clip into the Front of each, and change the Rewire popups in the CC Basics menu to extract a single channel, for example to get just R set them to “R <- R", "G <- R", and "B <- R".Or use a Mono node and select the desired channel R G or B. I keep a group in my custom nodes with one Mux input feeding three mono nodes, with three outputs.
Jeff