Flame vs Shake

#1

Hi guys,
This is not a flame war question. I am a Shake and DF user. Recently I came upon some facts and want to know what is it that makes Flame powerful than Shake. The reason for this question is that I heard the price of Flame is many times more than that of Shake. Apart from the difference of one comes with a dedicated hardware(which is not a cost at all now), in terms of software tools, what is Flame has that Shake doesn’t.

I want to start learning Flame if it is that powerful. For me, I started of with Digital Fusion, then studied Shake when the job required it and then it has been like that for the past 2 years, mostly Shake and some DF. I always thought Flame was the same and just over priced but didn’t think of a lot of price difference.

Like Hugh said in another post, there MUST be a reason for people spending this much money on Flame/Inferno when Shake and DF exist.

I have seen a lot of effects done in Inferno. For example, effects in ‘SYNDICADE’ part of their demo reel was duplicated in Shake by one of my friend. Not to the exact but close. It is some work by the way! but what is the difference? Some of the effects in Inferno can be done in Maya-with-Shake with very little effort. Fluid Dynamics in Maya is probably the most powerful that I know for such things (time consuming in rendering stage though).

I have no intention of starting a flame war here. This is just a knowledgebase for me to know the ACTUAL FACTS before I start learning Flame.

Thanks in Advance:)

#2

I have never used Flame, but, as I heard, seems that the most diference is that Flame work real-time. So, as I heard, you don’t need to render your work, as it is already rendered.

Again, I’m not sure on that, just have heard that. Does anyone know if this is true? Am I saying anything stupid?

I’m very curious on that too!

Thanks!

#3

Deke (beaker) and some others covered this topic very well a while back. I know its a cliche but at the end of the day it all comes down to the artist and using the right tool for the job:

These are two very different tools with very different user requirements. judging by your nick you know something about 3d. The comparison of shake to FFI is not like comparing max to maya or combustion to digital fusion. These tools were designed to do the same thing. Shake and flame were not. I can crap on all day about 3d cameras and editable bi-cubics but thats not the pont.

Keep in mind I have used both of the systems in a porfessional environment and think both of them are excellent.

FFI (flame,flint,inferno) are very heavily focused on client sessions, dedicated suites and the broadcast and TVC market.

shake is much more about teams of artist, backroom work and film visual effects.

It is not a fair comparison to say may and shake can do X and flame can do Y. In my experince the majority of elements composited in flame originated from maya also.

People don’t buy flame so they can comp some shots they are working on. They buy a suite because it is an essential part of their post-production companies business model. They spend the HUGE ammount of money necessary ( in this region flame runs in excess of $500K and don’t even ask about inferno !) because they have workflows built around a big finishing machine and because CLIENTS demmand and pay for it !

We are talking about a very specialised tool.

Shake is designed to be a compositing tool used by a team of artists in a post prodction facility (generally on film projects). You don’t buy shake to do some motion graphics work. You buy shake to set up a vfx compositing department that can handle very complex integration tasks that need huge flexibility and lots of control. You buy shake because of its awesome integration of different formats and colour spaces and its increadibly open design and functionality. You buy shake because your ARTISTS/ or COMP Supervisor demands it and uses it everday !

Either system in combination with something like Maya can produce almost any effect you can think of. But the way in which you do this work, the kind of structure you have in place governs your choice.

#4

Awesome and right to the point.:thumbsup: Thanks Aneks. 500k!:eek: guess I won’t see that in near future. Right now all of us here are obsessed with Shake and DF.

Thanks for the tip again:)

#5

Aneks, is it true that Flame works in real-time? I mean that you don’t need to render it?

Thanks!

#6

After digging in a little, I found out that it is the raw muscle power of flame. The power comes from the power of the hardware. It seems that the hardware itself is highly priced. It is Much more you pay than if you were to buy a high spec hardware. For example, in theory I could make my shake run much faster than the realtime Flame/Inferno for 500k. HOWEVER, unlike Flame, Shake CANNOT utilize more than certain processors (2 I think) even if I were to make such a system. Obviously, if Shake/DF were to take that restriction off, the difference is just that!

One of the guys at Apple told me this:
Shake was initialy made for Mac and is very old. During the development, the idea of implimenting a software architecture to support running on super computers (today we call those super servers:D) was out of budget that time. 8 years ago you would have to be millionair if Apple did that. However, today it is much cheaper. With 60K hardware, you can make things very much possible.

Like Aneks pointed out, the use is very different. In a production house where many people work in team, this power is emulated by different means. Thus we have more people to work on project and at the same time power to back it up intead of one artist on one machine whch would be a short time project which actually cut down the cost in the long run.

Thanks for all the info. It is amazing that all this time I never looked into the difference even though it was there for years. There is always something to learn from everything:)

#7

Hey,

matomaya : Thanks for your kind comments. A coupe of clarifications though. flame hardware is fast and can acess numerous procs. but for years it was the bandwidth throughput of the sgi graphics subsystems and the poenGL implementation which gave these machines an edge. Nowdays these are’t such a factor. The graphics bandwith of GPU 's like those made by nvidia are now being used by sgi anyway.

A major factor in flames speed is its framestore and other dedicated hardware. Yes you could get shake to run fast with these extra bits for less than $500k… nothing real did and it was called tremor. Unfortunately apple killed that along with windows support and a level playing field pricing approach.

Pretorian : Hell no. FFI garuntee real time ‘playback’ of certain resolutions in certain configurations. and can perform somefeatures in near realtime but real time compositing without rendering … forget about it ! Using burn and background rendering you can commit nodes to render in the background… kind of like ‘clusters’ in fusion and the net result is almost no rendering.

Last year I was working on an SD project on a HD flame built on an Octane2 with 4GB ram and beleive me there was still plenty of time to kill while it rendered my batch scripts.
Where I am working now the inferno they have is increadibly fast and suped up. On this last job, which was PAL sd, once the compositor got to really heavy comps, 20+ layers and heaps of action nodes, there was still a need to walk away while it rendered.

I don’t know who you spoke to at apple, but I remeber a time when a little company called nothing real were the ones making shake. From what I heard and read, and maybe beaker knows more about this, it was always the aim of the shake dev team to make a product which existed on desktop/workstation hardware without the need for big machines. This is what made shake different from systems like cineion and illusion… to which it owes a massive debt in terms of design and paradigm.

#8

Hey both of you, thanks for the answers! :thumbsup:

#9

Ahh, maxtomaya, your making me want to tear my hair out, bad/wrong information everywhere.

Yes SGI hardware is high priced, but it doesn’t really make it that much more expensive then any other turnkey system on windows. Avid DS, flint and smoke which all run on pc hardware cost over 100k-300k each. Shake can use more than 2 processors, there is no limitation of this anywhere.

Whoever you talked to has no idea what they are talking about. Maybe they worked at the Apple Store or something. Shake did not even come to mac till 2 years ago. Shake is only 6 years old. Also it runs on the same exact machines flame runs on.

#10

I can tell the interface of flame is not good enough, i always get lost in flame. Shake is much better.

#11

Yea, great post, simply because you don’t know flame very well, say that shake’s interface is better.

Please don’t post such a one sided comment unless you have full experience in both packages. It makes you look silly.

#12

You are right beaker, it was the guy in the Apple store here in New York City. I wouldn’t know much about Shake’s past apart from what people tell me about. My bad. Sorry of the 8 years part in the post.

However, I do say this; the hardware itself is not worth that much if they were to lookfor different means. 500k for a real time rendering? May be a great deal until end of 2002, but nothing more than a single sided control based on software now. I have seen realtime rending of millions of hair strand dynamics done in realtime and that is in 3D with all calculations done. That also without official OpenGL support where certain things were done in software mode. NOTE that I am only comparing the actual processing power required to calculate the effect. I am not concerning with the data trasfer of the media which is a different issue.

Also, beaker, 32 bit OS systems cannot utilize more than certain processors unless you can make a cluster but cluster is not one system. This is because of the os architecture MS and some Unix derivatives created. Proprietory OS such as Solaris, AIX et… are exceptions. There is also a Memory limit of 4Gig and this is why discreet decided to go with systems that doesn’t have all these limits. You have to consider the fact that 64 bit PC (AMD came in a year ago and Itanium was there but still new) is new considering the fact that MIPS architecture has 64-bit working as early as 1999 at full range. And only Unix was running on it.

I hear that the Flame’s UI is very different from Combustion and people who have used it never want to get away from the system. I would love to see it in action once (working on it would be fine too:))

#13

You are right beaker, it was the guy in the Apple store here in New York City. I wouldn’t know much about Shake’s past apart from what people tell me about. My bad. Sorry of the 8 years part in the post.

However, I do say this; the hardware itself is not worth that much if they were to lookfor different means. 500k for a real time rendering? May be a great deal until end of 2002, but nothing more than a single sided control based on software now. I have seen realtime rending of millions of hair strand dynamics done in realtime and that is in 3D with all calculations done. That also without official OpenGL support where certain things were done in software mode. NOTE that I am only comparing the actual processing power required to calculate the effect. I am not concerning with the data trasfer of the media which is a different issue.

Also, beaker, 32 bit OS systems cannot utilize more than certain processors unless you can make a cluster but cluster is not one system. This is because of the os architecture MS and some Unix derivatives created. Proprietory OS such as Solaris, AIX et… are exceptions. There is also a Memory limit of 4Gig and this is why discreet decided to go with systems that doesn’t have all these limits. You have to consider the fact that 64 bit PC (AMD came in a year ago and Itanium was there but still new) is new considering the fact that MIPS architecture has 64-bit working as early as 1999 at full range. And only Unix was running on it.

I hear that the Flame’s UI is very different from Combustion and people who have used it never want to get away from the system. I would love to see it in action once (working on it would be fine too:))

#14

maxtomaya , great reply.

beaker, I’m, sorry for one sided comment. I am silly and

I just wonder why i have to exit the batch for output clips.

I just wonder why i have to have to seach the nodes the the batch, there are no nevigation windows and shotcut.

I just wonder why there are at least three places to set the image size in flame.

I just wonder why i have to seach the channel in channel editor when i make animation in flame. when I use the filter in the channel editor, it hanged.

I just wonder why i have to back to desktop to use wraper and paint.

I just wonder why I have to add soucre to move the matte against the front image.

I just wonder …
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#15

Anyhow, there are some unique great tools in flame such as 3Dkeyer and tracking tools.

#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?