Flame vs Shake

#16

I get the feeling that you are experiencing the typical flame blues. You gotta look at where ffi came from and when they were built.

There are serious design limitations in the ffi architecture. If you really want to start a heated discussion you should go ober to fxguide throw some of your questions to that group. There are some total evangelists on that list.

I used to get very frustrated in flame but a lot of things you are describing. Source nodes, psuedo node based systems. You cant imagine my supprise when I first got onto inferno v4.x and found out it was not resolution independant !!

You can’t ask a compositing system to be all things to all people. I have used shake enough to get through my days without having to use UNDO. But tell a digital fusion person this and they will stare at you like you’re insane ! But your right for the money one pays for a discreet system sometimes the limtations are really hard to bear.

After a while I gave up looking for the perfect peice of software and just started trying to get as good as I can with the apps I know.

#17

Aneks, I agree with you… totally

#18

Maxtomaya,
I’ve been using Flame and Maya exclusively for about 5 years So I know your interest in this strange and wonderful software.

Much like yourself I was intregued by this “high end” software which costs more than a nice house.

PC’s and MAC computers are primarily designed for the Consumer, SGI systems are not. They are specifically geared towards Broadcast artists and budgets, like sony cameras and filming equiptment.

Flame is the same, it is totally no frills, Broadcast Production software, There are no Dancing paperclips found here, it is as serious as it gets. In Brisbane Cutting Edge rents out their Flame Operators on system for $ 440 p/hour last I heard, for TV and Film work. So learning it thoroughly can get you into the Bling Bling.

As far as realtime is concerned, SGI octanes have awesome Open GL graphics boards which just show the final Composite image on the screen. If you press play though it might jitter at 1 frame per second, so you render the timeline to the framestore to see it play smoooth.

As for the Framestore it’s simply a SCSII hard drive plugged into the back of limitless size. 20mb per second exchange rate so you can watch uncompressed frames at 24 per sec.

The interface is set up beautifully like a Robust tool. swipe bars allow quick access to info and options and the full screen is filled with Image at most times. Overall it makes software running on PC and MAC look like it was made for Uni Kids.

SHOULD YOU LEARN FLAME, most Definately Yes. It is the best Piece of software I have used bar none. Plus it runs on the OS (UNIX) that never dies on you.

You can learn flame with a minimum of an OCTANE MXE sgi system and it is taught at AFTRS in Sydney and Discreet locations worldwide. After you’ve looked at Flame check out Smoke as well.

#19

“Flame” is a much cooler name than “shake” if that counts for anything.
How different is AVID DS and flame? I got to work on an Avid DS once and I noticed how fast it was compared to desktop compositors I have used, mainly in the tracking area. Everything else was about what I was used to speed wise.

#20

liam:

20 mb per second for sure is not enough to play back uncompressed pal/ntsc.
a flame normally comes with one or two dual-port fibre-channel cards which push quite some more than those 20 mb/s :wink:

i don’t get what’s so special about octane’s v12 board. it’s really well supported within the software, that’s probably what makes the difference - other than that, accumulation buffer maybe? but i didn’t notice it being used extensively inside flame anyway.

the interface is something to argue over but i guess as a full-time flame operator you’re so married to your app that it will always be the most comfortable to you. even if it’s gui design is from the stoneage, sometimes confusing, often limiting. important knobs well being hidden behind a swipe bar, etc etc.

now: since irix/mips roadmap seems to end in 2006 and that makes the tezro the last of the line of irix workstations, what will be the new platform for ffi? is linux/ibm intellistation up to it yet? or will they go prism and stay proprietary?

#21

Rumors abound about Linux Flame to follow on from the Linux flints now available. Certain folks have been talking about Apple’s new commitment to Dual Core dual-procs and serious open GL cards (Quadro fx 4500), as a sign that a OsX port of discreet is now a certainty. Who knows ? A lot of people saw the screen shots of lustre running on a mac. Could this be so different !

Discreet are keeping any such development plans very secret so I guess that the only people who really know the anwers are bound by NDA’s.

I read on one compositing web board that certain folks were testing SGI Prisms for playback and ‘other’ video related funtions and that they smoked anything out there. For that money they should.

I personally would love to see flame on the g6 for less than $200k !

#22

Just thought I’d chime in on our shake compositing box here. Well first off we have it hooked to a 15 TB xsan, dual 2 Gb fibre channel for an aggregate bandwidth of around 300 MB/s. The mac is a dual 2.5 with 8 GB of RAM. 2 Render nodes are also hooked into the xsan.

So several things that beat flame there. The framestore is a local collection of hard drives. You want a SAN like xsan? Prepare to shell out for a Stone Share $$$. Its silly the premiums that people pay for non totally realtime hardware. Inferno I can understand. But if you’re going to make a client wait 3 minutes to see a 30 second render no matter what, you can get the same level of impressiosity (a term coined here at 3V ) from a highend mac system.

I’ve sat down at Flames, this system is faster, and not nearly as limited. It hasn’t failed yet in wowing clients and it gets the job done.

#23

Our flame does ~330MB/s. Stones are not that much more expensive (if at all) than an xsan config that you just described (lacking the san featuress though) Shake on a mac still feels rather slow. The overall workflow is different, and in my humble opion much better in flame. But that might be a matter of taste.
What flames did you work on? Most people these days seam to measure their FFI experience on old hardware. You cannot compare an dual octane1 to a 4 CPU tezro…

-k

#24

Is it really worth having this sort of discussion. Re : shake/flame performance ?

In this country broadcast clients will not pay the sort of ‘suite’ premiums to sit infront of a shake box. period. The agencies and directors know all the brand names and love the feeling of knowing that they can sit on the comfy couch, play on the opps’ PSP and have the cute girl from catering bring them coffee. They also love the feeling of paying $700-$900 an hour to have a ‘name’ inferno opp working on their job. Beleive me the post house loves finishing jobs here for that reason too ! Shake is hampered by a lack of I/O and limited audio tools. For this kind of work shake isn’t an option.

I do vfx compositing on HD and film. I use shake and I sit in VFX with the other shakers and the 3d team. In this environment FFI is hampered by its lack of support for many formats and true resolution and bit depth flexibilty. I don’t care how fast playback on your “Quad 1ghz 16GB of Ram Tezro v9.5 of Flame” is if I can’t deal with zDepth passes and lots of other things we need to do here. I could not do client based sessions in this environment, nor would I want too. For this kind of work FFI just isn’t a viable option.

Performance test and workflow aside, these are different tools. Anyone doing production knows this.

I have done, ‘front of house compositing’ on a mac, with a broadcast monitor and a RAID before. It was fine. But it wasn’t a high pressure inferno session. These are different beasts. I can’t turn around to my client and say “sorry I’ll need to render this and re-import the file before I can paint that because the paint tools in this version of shake are buggy !” Nor will I expect a client to ask me to wait while I ensure all my colour corrections are concatenting properly before adding my film grain node. FFI can’t do that.

There should be no Flame vs Shake discussions. Its like comparing apples and oranges !

#25

lol well again I’m going to to disagree. I think shake/fcp/motion vs flame/smoke is a legitimate discussion. shake/fcp/motion vs inferno is definatly definatly not. I’ve had clients walk because we didn’t have an inferno, but then I’ve turned around and rented out our shake/fcp suite for 700 an hour without an operator.

It’s all about the impressiosity, and while I admire the skills that are needed to successfully “handle” an in client session. I honestly believe flame/inferno operators don’t give themselves enough credit. The hard part in such a session is just dealing with the client and making them feel like they’ve got the absolute best, while still using the tools to create something brilliant.

As far as what flames I did work on I got a couple evenings way back, a few years ago, what struck me even the was that the major issue was disk bandwidth.

In any case hey if you can make a viable business model running autodesks gear wonderful. I know NY and LA definatly don’t have nearly the price pressure on high end content that vegas does. So whatever works.

#26

Yes the are much more expensive. Xsan with a Xraid is 1/4th the price just because of pure component cost. Stones are usually Fiber Channel or scsi raids and Xraid are SATA drives. 1/4th the cost right there. Then the stone “tax” on top of it.

#27

Depends. If you want to have really high bandwiths you have to go with lots of disc, which make the xraid rather expensive cause they are bigger than the discs in a stone. So for your money you’ll get much more GB in a xraid but not bandwith, if that is critical.
Plus you have to pay for the xsan, you need a controller mac/pc, etc.

-k

#28

Well yea, the xraid only gets 200 MB/s, but you can pair up two, xraids(not sure what the speed increase on that is, probaby not 200%). Apple’s fiber channel card is only $500.

#29

For starters there’s nothing that flame can do that another compositor can’t - in terms of the final output flame doesnt have anything mega or wow that makes the difference. What it does well is operate smoothly in front of a client as everyone mentioned - the way most people work in flame at this stage is actually really close to shake (from a compositing perspective) using the node system called batch. The workflow is no where near real time in most cases - you’ll generally tweak aspects of a comp one by one (Ie in the keying operator / colour correction operator / sparks & filters operator) til the client is happy with it and move on to the next aspect - if you want you can pre process the result of each operator and move on to the next stage but most people I know leave everything until the end and process the entire comp chain in one go - in this regard it’s no quicker than an after effects box or a shake box pulling all its footage from a raid.

In terms of cost, flame was the first turn key system to offer a lot of nice things like tracking, good keying, masking etc and this was back in the day when everything in post was bloody expensive - people invested in really nice rooms for the systems so clients could sit on an operator all day an tweak stuff and charged them wads o cash. The operators generally were invested in heavilly too with discreet training or the such and commanded a lot of money - effectively the whole thing was a huge investment and as a few people mentioned there was a certain kudos about doing a job in flame or being an operator. Discreet have held this up to a certain extent by always keeping the software quite forward thinking in terms of features but it’s only the investment and reputation keeping the price there.

In terms of career I reckon it’s a good move to learn flame. It’s a tough one to get into as people generally dont want the down time for someone to learn it - flame ops have to repay their wages and machine costs so their suites are normally fairly tightly booked. What’s good though is the profile it gets - you’re sitting there with the client and director, they see you doing the work. With a shake or after effects compositor they dont always so you mightnt get the credit you deserve. as a flame op you’ll also have to put up with more nonsense from clients and if they’re the type of people that will walk out of a post house cos they dont have an inferno then you’ll earn your keep dealing with primadonna cunts like that…

From a comping point they’ve nothing better than a big shake (unless you like the workflow) from a career point they put you in the spotlight a bit more.

#30

i work at hydraulx and we use flame/inferno to do all of our comps. it’s a great tool. we also have several shake boxes 3 on linux and 1 on a g5.

i use both, but i mainly finish everything in ffi. plus in flame/inferno you can build 3d object and map textures to it. it’s a better package then shake. don’t get me wrong, i like shake and combustion.

i think combustion is only good for clean up and roto.

just my 2 cents

#31

I’ve used combustion for literally hundreds of effects shots at 2K and for my money it’s good for much more than just clean up and roto. I’ll take ten artists sitting infront of 10 combustion workstations over a single FFI system. (about the same cost)

But that’s just my opinion.

Regards
Alan Bell

#32

i think combustion is only good for clean up and roto.

Until recently I had a pretty dismal view of combustion, but was offered a job as lead on a feature all in Combutsion 4 on Windows. Have to say that it does have its bugs but I was AMAZED at how well it performed. There was a lot of wire and rig-removal work, as well as some tough 3d matte shots and it performed very respectably.

Having just returned to normality (ie Shake now version 4) I am well disapointed with the bugs and shortcommings I am experiencing, as well as the less than complete 3d multiplane feature.

Doesn’t pay to be too biased in this marketplace. If I was would have missed out on a great job opportunity !

#33

I am seriously taking a look at DF5 as it seems to contain the best of both shake and C4.

I agree it pays to have an open mind.

Alan Bell

#34

As long as you don’t have to do any scripting. As soon as scipting comes into play then Shake kicks them all in the jimmy since C* doesn’t have any and DF’s is still pretty sad.

#35

true enough Deke. But fusion 5 has much better scripting and all.

Everyone knows I love my shake and thats what my job description lists… but its giving me serious irritation at the mo’ . paint in v4 is so craptacular. apple support did give us a good response but still no real fix. Multiplane is very incompltete comapred to combustion,fusion ae and nuke. Cache node is useless ! Roto is better but nowhere as good as combustion.

What amazes me is that despite all these problems I still like is soo much !?!?