Flame Assist / looking for solutions and/or suggestions

[davidblanc]

Hi guys,

I have been now using Flame Assist for the last few months and in many regards it is excellent and superior to past versions of Smoke. To my horror though I discovered 2 major "bugs" that have seriously hindered our workflow.

1. Our deliverables to our clients include HDCAM_SR master tapes with 12 ch of audio but Flame Assist vtr input/output function is limited to capturing or outputting only 8 audio channels eventhough the interface allows you to select 16 and the hardware interfaces (AJA & BMD) recommended are fully compatible with a SDI signal containing 16 embedded audio ch. Autodesk answer's to us was so far:

“The issue reported it is not a bug as the software was developed to support only 8 audio channels. We logged a new improvement to support 16 audio channels on SDI output: SMOK-24730 “AJA ioXT support 16 audio channels on SDI. The software is limited to 8 channels”

My question is why does the interface still allow users to select and engage 16 audio ch if indeed it is not a bug as the software was developed to support only 8 audio channels, this makes no sense at all and looks more like a massive oversight rather than an intentional pairing down of a feature. (see pic attached)

2. When using the insert mode in the vtr output section, I simply cannot do a video only insert as the machine will drop frames, I have to include audio for this insert to work properly, as you can imagine having to insert audio when wanting insert video only can bring its own set of problems.

I would even mind if it had been our own choice to upgrade to Flame Assist but the Autodesk UK & Ireland territory reps came over to our premises and assured us that Flame Assist would do and I quote "everything that Smoke 2013 does and more". They were obliviously very misguided or not knowledgeable enough, either way it makes them look very bad.

I believe the reason we were recommended Flame Assist is because of our daily use of Sparks Plugins not being available in Smoke 2015, but i'm reading conflicting reports about this.

Is there anyone out there that can shed a bit of light on these issues for me?

Could I potentially switch switch over to using Smoke 2015 and avail of the 16 audio Ch output to vtr and the use of Sparks plugins?

I have attached a few Screengrabs to illustrate some issues and show my system's specs.

Thanks for your time.

[Grant.Kay]

Are you able to upgrade to Flame Assist 2015 ext1 to see if these issues are resolved?

Regards
Grant

[BKM]

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@davidblanc wrote:

Hi guys,

I have been now using Flame Assist for the last few months and in many regards it is excellent and superior to past versions of Smoke. To my horror though I discovered 2 major "bugs" that have seriously hindered our workflow.

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Just wanted to point out that you are using Flame Assist 2015 SP1 which is the same as Smoke 2015 SP1 (Perpetual) - Both of which are superior to previous 2013 versions.

[frenetj]

Hi David, Regarding the first issue, the app currently restricts the I/O to 8 channels on the AJA ioXT since earlier versions of this board would corrupt the audio when enabling all 16 channels. I'll see if there something we can do in future releases to unlock these additional channels for new boards without breaking the older ones. Jasmin

[davidblanc]

Hi Grant,

I am going to upgrade to SP1 (or SP2?) very shortly but it looks like it's not going to fix the audio channels issues...

Thanks,

David.

[davidblanc]

Hi Brian,

I thought they were identical, so thanks for the clarification.

They are indeed superior as onlining/grading tools and don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy a lot of the improvements.

The problem is with Autodesk removing some of the features that we took for granted with Smoke 2013 and that were essential to our delivery process and not informing us about it. Neither the Autodesk distributor nor the Autodesk reps were aware of this.

[davidblanc]

Hi Jasmin,

you are actually the first person to give us a clear answer on why the feature is not available, so for this I would like to thank you.

Realistically speaking do you think that unlocking these additional channels is something that is likely to happen?

Would Autodesk consider this to be important enough to use human resources and fix this issue?

We are currently looking at finding alternative software so that we can output to tape all the audio channels (12) required for our deliverables with our current hardware (AJA ioXT), but it is messy and leaves more room for error.

I know that the head of our post production department is looking at moving away from Smoke/Flame Assist in the near future if these issues aren't fixed, which would be a real shame.

David.

[Grant.Kay]

Hi David,

As you heard from Jasmin, the hardware from the IOXT was corrupting the channels hence the reason for blocking it.

We need to revisit the hardware and hopefully updated firmware to see if the issue is fixed on the AJA side first before we could look at re-implementing it in Smoke or Flame Assist.

Unfortunately this will not be fixed in SP2 because it needs to be coded and validated etc by our teams and that does take time. The SP2 has been working on other things for a short time now.

Just to let you know, Smoke 2015 and Flame Assist 2015 were more or less the same when they were released. Since then Flame Assist has been given an extension with the rest of the Flame Products which makes it extremely different to Smoke 2015 right now. So in short they are not the same products any more.

But it won't contain the fixes to the audio issues you have reported.

Hope this helps.

Regards
Grant

[davidblanc]

Thank you for this update Grant.

[frenetj]

Hi David,

I have made the appropriate changes to support all 16 channels on the AJA ioXT.  According to our preliminary tests, the current firmware properly handles all audio channels.  I will do my best to get the fix out in the field a fast as possible.

Best regards,

Jasmin

[davidblanc]

Hi Grant,

is there a download link for Flame Assist SP2, I can't seem to find it...

Thank you.

[Robert.Adam]

Hi David.

Here's the download link:

http://efulfillment.autodesk.com/pub1/CF_2015.0.2_5914/autodesk_flameassist_2015_SP2_english_MAC_OSX...

Here's the MD5 checksum in case you want to check that the file has downloaded properly:

http://efulfillment.autodesk.com/pub1/CF_2015.0.2_5914/autodesk_flameassist_2015_SP2_english_MAC_OSX...

Normally, users receive the download links via the release announcement e-mails we send out on release day.

I've noticed that your e-mail address is not in our database and the only other contact associated with your company is not set to receive such e-mails.

Would you like me to add you as a contant and enable you to receive release announcements?

regards,

Robert.