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
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?
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 !
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.
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…
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 !
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.
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 !?!?
Couple thoughts here. First, there’s zero difference between flame and inferno aside from the hardware - the software is identical. inferno has a higher throughput and can handle film resolution playback in realtime (neither package is a realtime compositing solution, unless doing simple operations). Take into account the SGI hardware and disk arrays make inferno 550k, whereas flame is 250k … only because of hardware.
Trying playing back uncompressed 10 bit 4:4:4 footage in shake realtime through hardware (not flipbook or PFClip, which are RAM based systems that require caching).
I’m starting to love shake myself as well and am considering that it may be a nice addition to have a shake seat next to a flame seat. There isn’t any comparison between the products though, because there is no setup you can get on any machine aside from an SGI or the latest Linux boxes running FFI that can handle the IO required for film and broadcast work. A Tezro box has 1.6 GB throughput internally for graphics - there’s nothing else out there short of a supercomputer that can do this (definitely no PC or Mac). This is also why the Avid Nitris DS systems have their own hardware boxes, to really be able to handle that type of processing in an edit suite. So, you pay hundreds of thousands for this capability that one cannot get through a system like shake - which is a software solution, not a hardware/software solution.
Shake is becoming quite the powerhouse for VFX and film work but it will be a very long time - if ever - before it truly is in the same category as software/hardware solutions like FFI. There are an incredible amount of hardware capabilities that can be used on a flame system that shake just can’t handle (such as specular shading with normal interpolation in 3d).
Still, there are many things that make shake an incredible addition to any VFX pipeline.
there is no setup you can get on any machine aside from an SGI or the latest Linux boxes running FFI that can handle the IO required for film and broadcast work. A Tezro box has 1.6 GB throughput internally for graphics - there’s nothing else out there short of a supercomputer that can do this (definitely no PC or Mac)
Not to be nit picking, but this is just perpetuating myths.
The tezro figues are just meaningless statistics. Listen to the podcast on fxguide, the guy from dicreet admits that the performance on the new dual core linux flames is a ‘nice improvement from the tezro’ Not equal… faster. Therefore why would this same hardware run so much slower with other people software !!? Look at the ammount of 2k grading systems that are based on ‘destop’ platforms ! The exclusive days of SGI and FFI are long since over ! Sure post houses love to bill their clients for sessions but as for NEEDING one of these machines …
As for the ‘requiremnets of broadcast’. HD IO and playback is fine on mac with a disk array and a good IO card. I have used it to final TVC’s in SD (PAL therefore high demmand than NTSC) many times.
You mention feature film, plenty of large production companies perform fine without large discreet boxes. Where I work now we happen to have two infernos, one smoke and one flame. But everyone here knows if its a film job (2k Log) then only the desktop tools are gonna be used !
As Aneks said, this is bogus info someone fed you. Flame and Inferno are both already running on linux. Also an Avid Nitris DS is not their own hardware, it is a IBM or HP windows box with a DVS HD card in it (same family of card that Tremor, Cyborg Flint, Flame, Inferno, etc… all have been using). PCI express is equally as fast as the Sgi bus these days.
[http://www.dvs.de/](http://www.dvs.de/)
Anyways, Cyborg was doing much of what flame/inferno was doing on windows/linux 3 year ago, up untill Autodesk/Discreet bought them and burried it in a 6 foot hole never to be seen again.
Shake can do this with recent plugins and older macros, also DF5 and Nuke already does this. Hardware rendering 3d in a compositing environment is not that big of a deal these days.
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