Flame for longform projects?

[roricam]

Hi,

Is anyone using Flame for longform projects, especially tv documentaries?  Are there any limitations to Flames timeline in terms of duration?

Thanks,

Rory

[Grant.Kay]

Hi,

No there is no limit on the duration of the timeline.

In the past, people used to shy away from doing too much long form in Flame because it only worked in uncompressed. So you needed a ton of storage and performance to achieve that.

Now days, there is support for compressed intermediates like DNxHD, hardware performance is much better and storage is definitely cheaper…

I don't see any reason why you couldn't now.

Regards
Grant

[roricam]

Thanks very much Grant.

[Beau_James]

At my last place, we did a few long form documentaries, a couple episodics for the discovery channel and 3 full length features.  Mostly were the following workflow:

Flame (conform/cleanup/prep for color) > Lustre > Flame (beauty, addtl cleanup, etc) > Export.

The only real issue we ran into was storage space, but an addition DH took care of that.

So yes, Flame will work in longform and it has been done.

[A_Over_B]

My first TV show conform was on fire 1.0 in a basement in 97 i think.

It was PAL: 45 minutes long.

Nightmare.

I conformed an 84 minute show on Monday on flame.

It has 1100 events, 300 something visual effects shots.

It is broken into chunks/reels because it's much harder to hand off 1000 things to someone and say fix all that - they kind of melt.

Handing off chunks of 200 or 250 things is still a tall order but it brings out the puffed chest response.

flame doesn't seem to change if it's a gigantic timeline or a 20 event commercial.

It might seem slower at loading the timeline but in context it's because it's fifty something times larger.

With uncompressed material like single layer DPX files it's fantastically responsive.

With many CPU heavy task like soft transcoding from R3D, ARRIRAW it can feel like you're in molasses but once the transcode takes place it's pretty interesting.

120,000 frames of uncompressed 2k or 3k or 4k in realtime is always an interesting sensation for a user/artist/editor