Ten years in the making.
For the 9th time Discreet’s users gathered for the FFFIS users group meeting. With word of private showings of new technology, attendence registrations were up almost 50% on last year. It is now 1.55am and the fxguide crew have just returned from an array of product demonstrations and future technology previews.
The good news is that there are impressive new technologies coming for Inferno/Flame and Fire/Smoke. The bad news is that we can’t discuss all ofthe new technology showing, past points highlighted in Film & Video Magazine this month.
This was the tenth anniversary of Flame, so the night was peppered with user demo reels showing from the last decade. And as they pointed out from the stage the old work stacked up really well. Strangely missing from the “tribute to past demo reels” was the 1999 lost woman demo reel.
The new forward looking stuff for Fire was workflow improvements such as a reverse match feature (select a source clip and find where it occurs in the record timeline), the addition of the Colour Warper to the fire toolset, multi-resolution, and switchable wire storage arrays.
Combustion showed great particles – of course – and amazing performance at HD resolution in 3D space with cached real time multi-layered clips.
The highlight of the evening was the effects demo. The biggest news was an obviously polished and mature showing of mixed resolution within inferno (see the various proxy sizes in the image). This will be a part of the 5.0/8.0 releases.
Other effects features:
A surprising addition in batch was the appearance of an editing timeline — on first glance very similar to a one-video layer fire timeline. In and out points, cue marks, ripple and drag and drop editing will be possible in batch.
-You can edit clips of various resolutions into a timeline and they will be resized into the timeline according to the project settings. The resolution flexibility also leads to the ability of switching projects on the fly without restarting, since the resolution doesn’t really matter anymore.
-Action now has multiple cameras. A channel editor value will determine which camera is active.
-Batch will have the same great LUT tools but on a per clip basis in batch. All clips…not simply clips that are being imported from the unix filesystem.
-You can swtich the batch processing pipeline from 8bit to 12bit and back when needed.
Toxik was shown , but a recap of that is in a different article.