Any Flame artists lurking around?

kai

kai

After FX Guru
I've been approached lately by a pretty prominent company about coming aboard, with the option of setting up a Flame suite if I want. Any artists on here? I already know it's killer (duh). Just wanted to hear from any members who do it day in & out.
 
You can edit feature film 2K resolution on a flame (REAL TIME) for the most part with basic FX. And do some killer spfx with it.
I don't use it, but I know people who do. They make over $100K a year doing it, but they really KNOW their stuff. They mostly do commercials, trailers, music vids with it.
 
Flame is the bigboy. It runs on SGI workstations, and the suites cost well into the $100k's. It's been used on just about every academy award winning effect for quite awhile now. Killer.

http://www4.discreet.com/flame/
flame.jpg
 
I occasionally use Combustion (Flame's little bro) and it's pretty impressive. If they're offering to set you up with a Flame suite, I'd jump on it. As Waverider mentions--this is a *very* marketable skill. Discreet has their own style of interfaces for software and I like it quite a bit.
 
flame is coolio...i love that car commercial by the way...

did a flame artist actualy create that wave? or was the wave an element created from a 3d app and they just comped it in flame?
 
Just think of flame as AE x 100,000,000 + 3. Yes, it's that good.

On a 500,000 dollar setup here in MN at Fischer Edit - everything was running in real time - masking was easy as pie... ohh god (orgasm).
 
I work as a producer in a Flame suite on nearly a daily basis. Yes, they are very powerful, refined systems. They aren't however as realtime as people think! Real-time seems to be a very relative term.

Here in Chicago they run $900/hr or so. They are worth their price because they have highly skilled artist/technicians and they have such a refined workflow and infrastructure that they are great for deadline intense projects. I feel way more comfortable doing my work in Flame and Smoke than say After Effects or a comparable software based system.

I think there is going to be a progression AWAY from these systems soon as I am seeing more and more post-houses investing in AVID DS for onlining because they are more cost effective.
 
That picture looks sort of like Apple's *Shake* & *Motion*. I'm sure it's way better, but we can still have high-end effects on a low budget. And the programs just keep getting better. ~reservoir~
 
nato - You said Inferno/Smoke etc. don't run in real time? They must be freakishly fast then (which warrants the 500,000 $ setup I'm sure) to be able to do all this stuff without noticable rendering. Could you elaborate?
 
Monte-

I have never done a project on an Inferno, but right now I use two suites one is Flame one is Smoke. All three are very similiar systems just they each have different "horsepower".

I work in uncompressed standard definition video and it most always requires some rendering. It does not render like After Effects however, it renders more like a high-end non-linear editing system would...rendering as you work. So after every set of changes we will wait for a bit for the system to catch up. Render times depend on the rez of the video as well as the complexity of the comp...much like in AE.

As far as justifying the cost of half a million, the system is worth it's weight in gold in it's dependibility and workflow. It's amazing how quickly things can be transported from suite to suite, to decks, to web compressors, etc and it seems to always work beautifully.
 
Reservoir,

Funny you should say that. It was a bunch of the guys who developed Combustion that were brought on board to create Motion.
At least, that's the story I heard from an insider.
 
Interesting. Also interesting to see what Apple releases at NAB. There's talk of a new "pro" application being released...
 
Hi Kai,
I used to work on a Flame for 3 years at EA. it is a very fast system but by no means real-time. It's learning curve is pretty intense. I used both AE and Flame in conjunction, as I liked the way AE handled text animations and the way Flame's Keyer worked.

Realize this was a few years ago. You can make great coin as an operator, but for me I couldn't stay in a gray room any longer...

Also very interested to see what Apple shows at NAB....last year was damn impressive for Apple at NAB.
 
THX1138 said:
Reservoir,

Funny you should say that. It was a bunch of the guys who developed Combustion that were brought on board to create Motion.
At least, that's the story I heard from an insider.
Click to expand...
Some of the Combustion programers may have worked on Motion, but it was based on the initial development of a product called Chalice from Silicon Grail which Apple purchased in 2000.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top