[Sinan]

chufta wrote:

well… a poor worksman will blame his tools, won’t he?

clip history/segmentFX is an exception. We have given so many tries to use it, but it is not working in the real world. It has sooo many bugs.
But as the users, we want to use it. It is a great workflow!

[Sinan]

We tested the clip history, the first time it appeared in flame9. but we had the same issues, and after a few tries, we now totally ignore clip history feature. And we also ignore its cousin: segmentFX in batch.
As far as I remember, to recover a non-working project, I once selected commit->desktop->history.
It might help you to get rid of the history of the clips on your desktop 😉

[Sinan]

loops wrote:

Flame can’t work internally in float. I think maybe what iraflowers is getting at is that if you have the right kind of 3D viewer LUT, you could work in such a way that superwhites and subblacks were preserved, which is a big advantage of true float processing. For example, if you work on log images with FilmVis turned on, what you see on the screen is only a subset of the full luminance range in the image – you can bring (some) detail back from the shadows and highlights.

Maybe someone could make some custom LUTs which could allow you to work with 10 bit material in a 12 bit space, with the extra two bits used to quadruple the dynamic range instead of just providing finer quantisation steps like they usually do. This is all conjecture, and such a setup would likely make colour correction controls work even wonkier than they do in linear, and layering look even worse than in log!

All the compositing tools in flame, work in linear space. So the contrast function in the color corrector, is not adjusting the contrast as you would expect when you apply it to a log image. This also applies to blurs, blending, etc… What you should do is, you have to convert your log images to linear space, and do your comp, CC, etc… And at the end, just use the inverse of your log2lin lut, to convert the resulting image back to log. And when comping/color correcting the image, you should always use a 3Dlut preview for your monitor. This way, you might get a close preview of the 35mm projector.

But this log2lin process is not lossless. Because 10bit log data, can not be converted lossless to 12bit lin, and converted back to 10bit log. We would need at lest 16bits for representing 10bit log images in linear space.

So I sometimes work on log images directly. But if I really need the comp tools work correctly (like blur, blending modes..), then I convert the images to linear for working in flame/inferno.

[Sinan]

Alfafa wrote:

I’m working with 8.5…

And there is no info about 3D Lut, neither in the CC chatper nor CW chatper.
Alfafa.

3Dlut support has started with inferno_6 / flame_9

[Sinan]

A good video monitor, I mean the Sony BVM series.Good audio amplifier, and speakers.
Get at least 12×9 tablet in size. You will need a PC, to assist for file transfers, emails, etc… Get a low noise PC, nobody likes noise in a flame suite.
If possible, get a CRT graphics monitor, like GDM-FW 24″ Sony.

[Sinan]

if you want to record the pointer on video output, onyx hardware won’t do that. But tezro also puts pointer to gvo.
You can also play with config files, to output the menu side of GUI. Tezro is the hardware to do that, probably octane2 also. I can’t say anything about linux, because I have only seen SD flinux till now. Probably linux boxes can do that too, or even better.

[Sinan]

The O2 can actually blit YUV or RGBA encoded pixels to screen. But the problem is, flint stores frames as RGB24 bit images. But you have to convert RGB24 to RGBA32 on the fly, to blit it to screen. That is the bottleneck in O2 realtime playback. So it doesn’t matter, even if you put dual 4G FC arrays to O2. You can not get realtime playback, when using discreet software.

However I could play realtime from Media Illusion, either YUV or RGBA, on my O2. Probably 10 yrs ago something…

[Sinan]

Now in the newer versions, I guess above flame v9. You can change that image, but the software will still overlay a flame text onto the image you prepared. And you can not change also the logo, which is put on flame desktop. Now the clients know, what version they are working with, when they watch your desktop, while do your composite. 🙁

[Sinan]

on inferno 6.2 / flame 9.2, you can render the front view. Don’t know if it still works for flame 2007. And also on flame 8.5, I think that front view didn’t work. Just try to hit process while you are in front view, when you are in desktop action.

[Sinan]

Doesn’t matter if the box is flame or flint or inferno technically. But socially, people think that:

inferno > flame > flint

And they think that, the bigger box has bigger capabilities. Which is not so true! Flame does almost everything that an inferno does. Flint does 99% of the other do. But there might be another reason that makes people think like that. Facilities seemed to put juniors on flint, seniors on flame, and the best people they have to inferno. Beacuse in the past, inferno was faster than flame, and flint was very sloooowww. And the better artists always wanted to use the onyx boxes. Since the very best guys were always on inferno, clients tought that, inferno has better abilities than flame. I think that is the story.

Today Autodesk still tries to preserve these brands, but now all run on PC. They just limit the number of processors the softwares use. Inferno is a very big brand on all around the world.

Go for the more ffi experienced facility, if you want to learn the ffi way. And want to work with clients.

[Sinan]

Has anyone seen that flicker and banding problem with 30″ Dell monitors?

[Sinan]

If it is varicam, then the tape deck always records 60p. Even if the camera shoots at 24p, deck records the frames, while repeating some frames. And when it comes to editing, those frames should preprocessed via software or special Panasonic hardware.

[Sinan]

I just want to know for linux systems, if it does help to break up a complex action, into smaller action nodes, and comp them in batch. Or does it even get worse?

[Sinan]

I also want to see, how AME will differentiate the product line on linux in the future. Where will flint/flame/inferno be (I’m sure that it is also a hard situation for AME marketing)? These are really popular brands, commercial clients/agencies just book inferno, for whatever they do. It is still the most popular solution for clients needing fast jobs. We finish almost every high budget commercial on flame/inferno(mostly on inferno) here in Istanbul. However this has started to change just little by little. I use ffi for 10 years, and now I try to learn fusion.

Inferno was the only good tool for interactive paint, but now we paint out 2K dust/scratches in combustion, because inferno advances to next frame in 2 seconds! If you have a back layer with a slip, it takes 4 seconds! But with combustion, it works almost with no delay, because it works with ram cache… So important, when you work on a full DI feature.

But inferno still sits in the centre of our workflow. And it will be there for many years, it is 64bit for almost 1 year. Which is very important when dealing with hires images. In the near future, I expect AME to rely on GPU processing technology, do many of the compositing tasks with the GPU.

About onyx2 vs tezro: I see the difference with lots of hires action layers. If you have big texture memory like RM11, and many raster managers, V12 gfx with only 104MB texture memory, and lower rasterization speed starts to become an issue. However if you are a batch freak, with lots of CPU processing nodes, tezro 4CPU is a lot faster, because onyx2 processors are limited to 500Mhz. But in the end, linux platform work with intel/amd processors, which run around 3Ghz! So when you compare mips processors with intel, there is a huge difference. I can’t wait to upgrade onyx to PC! 😯

[Sinan]

sidewalksurfing wrote:

* add moblur to gmasks

moblur for gmasks came with flame v9, so AME has changed something with gmasks?

[Author]

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