Interesting post and consistent with a great deal of the frustration felt by some long term users. And as we head towards 2016 ext 1 sp2 the frustrations have reduced. The last two releases have started to fix workflow issues while adding long overdue core feature updates (tracer and increased contextual views) whilst also extending the hero box feature set with things like conform enhancements.
Is the new GUI still in many ways more laborious and slow to use? Absolutely. Does it still crash a lot more than classic Flame? Without question. But is it becoming more streamlined and more stable... yes and yes.
I think the car analogy worked when we had me and Brian tongue in cheek jibing about Ferraris and your dad's Oldmobile, but as amusing as it all was at the time the reality is the industry is rapidly changing from a facility driven one to a talent driven one. As it evolves/devolves into a cottage industry of self employed owner operators we all want speed boats. AD in this context is a large ship, doing its best to turn as quickly as it can - but just as with anything large it has momentum. A lot of momentum.
There were a raft of brain damaged decisions made in the 2013 adventure. They were made partly from a misguided belief of a position of strength based on total market dominance of a sector of the business but also from fear, fear that the industry was changing too fast for them to maintain relevance.
And relevance is where its at as a company. Its ok to lose or gain a few customers here and there as you turn and turn again, thats the nature of the game, but if you lose relevance you lose everything. You see a hero box or even a hero compositor (of which I have been one for over 30 years) is an anachronism in 2015. It doesn’t matter how good I am or how fast or powerful any box is when the size of most projects now requires 1000 compositors. AD was left in the position Quantel faced, Flame was still an island, still the exotic boat you can only use on special occasions, which doesn't have the jet engine of the speed boat and doesn't have enough bedrooms for a long cruise.
2013 sought to first fix the bedroom issue by moving away from a purely uncompressed workflow to allow much more rushes and longer form work to exist in a realistically affordable framestore (they didn’t go all the way and let us archive those projects but thats for another post). Once we had the room for all our friends to sleep it was pretty clear that the maid service wasn’t up to the new number of passengers. This got addressed by sorting out conform to let us get passengers into their rooms more easily and improving export. Once you start to move lots of things around at the same time, be they passengers or shots, you need to have a token system or you are back to renaming things all the time.
If you think of the token system and conform as the gates to paradise it quickly becomes more obvious that you need version control and some hooks back into the real world. This has led to python being added most recently but we are also waiting to see the real fruit from the Shotgun purchase. The hooks are all there, backburner, shotgun, python, token based naming, automatic reloading of cg elements and so on... Its going to all come together very soon - the AD travel agency for frames 🙂
I can keep the analogy going but I think its safe to say the point is there is a modern infrastructure almost complete below the surface which will make all of our lives massively better. Linked conform is the tip of that iceberg.
The problem that continues to exist is that much of these links to the outside world of necessity add SOME overhead to our day to day workflow in the one man band world. Which is contradictory to the one man band nature of the freelance world. Its like when Quantel added Picturebox to its broadcast workflow. No longer did a paintbox frame get a single one line name when you saved it, it also had a page of nonsense about project/show/artist etc etc. No one ever filled them in as no time. Today of course a project database could fill everything but the name in, but back then it was an extra confirm press every single time you saved a painted frame. No one ever filled in the info but Quantel never went back despite at least as much hand wringing as we see here.
Which brings us in a circuitous route to my next point. It might be just me. Or you. As a post house Harry artist I had very different needs in my Paintbox to the graphics department of TV station. I only wanted speed. I still only want speed. And about 100 other things. But mostly speed. Well ok speed and stability. Perhaps speed, stability and flexibility. So even I want three probably contradictory things. Add everyone else and I'd hate to be trying to make everyone happy.
Theres two things happening at the same time right now. The commercial industry is dying. It needs to. No one watches or believes tv commercials. It's sad but true. I made my name bought houses and raised a son cutting ads, but they are done. There's a few great clients I still work with who make classical big ads but generally even car tvcs (MY MARKET) now are retail crap '29,999 drive away no more to pay' it's a world of simple manufacturer supplied stock shots and after effects graphics with the offer of the day 'free metallic paint!!!!' and lies 'overseas model shown not available in all markets'. '29,999*' *not including tyres engine or steering wheel. Ads did it to themselves, they became respectable. When it was advertising and we all got smashed on whisky by 11pm it was full of characters, crazy driven directors and passionate art directors with acidic copywriters that made Lou Reed seem like a nice polite boy. But it transitioned into marketing and USPs and a world of 'testing' and 'conference calls' to make creative decisions. Marketing doesn't need a hero box. It doesn't need heroes. It needs a nice safe reliable delivery structure with version control and a robust token system. And that's what they've built. There will be more Flame suites in cubicles at ******* than in suites like mine with the 6 grand sofa, aeron chairs, balcony with city views and fully stocked bar and fridge.
Is that a bad thing? Well it is for me. I like a nice sofa and a fridge. But is it for the many new Flame guys working for the pipeline versioning facilities? Only in so far as they will never have a 5k lunch on expenses:) but I'm glad cocaine is no longer a tax deductible overhead on a client entertainment line item and I'm way too old to be sitting in the suite until 4am as people drink my Jacobs Creek while people shout 'I'm stuck in an edit suite!' into their cell phones, agonising over choice of font for a disclaimer.
But I said two things remember? At the same time as advertising revenue vanishes we are seeing Nuke take no prisoners in the feature film world. As film comps have blown from an average of 6 or 7 things on screen to a 200+ elements nightmare the Flame workflow dies. GPU driven speed matters less with dense multiple layers of EXRs with deep compositing the norm not the exception and a need to conform to pipeline layering for the inevitable Indian post stereo conversion. So where in the film world does Flame fit? Its for the shows that don’t have a million layers of VFX CGI. It fits just fine as a hero clean up bang out fixes box - just like it is/was in TVCs. Nothing can rip through 2D compositing like a Flame. But to get into that position it has to fit into a pipeline. Hell even in a modern TVC pipe it needs pipeline tools, if you look at any of the few big TVCs being built the timelines are so short now they have to be made by comp teams in Nuke and After Effects in the bowels of the earth to even get close to the budget and hit delivery dates. This means iterations and pipeline tools.
To summarise a very disorderly post I hate many of the same changes that you do, I hate a lot of the odd aesthetic choices made in the interests of being OS like (copy a clip and move a clip looking identical with a ghost left behind??? wtf) but the new guys have had almost no time to change the direction of the big ship. With a Mac version happening which we have all wanted for a long time (goodbye Red Hate) the new linked conform, the version token system, and the barely scratched Python tools its coming good. Give them a chance.
The industry has moved past heroes. And that’s ok. Im glad Autodesk has seen the writing on the exclusive club wall and is moving to a more inclusive product offering. It might just survive. The very fact that we are all still here still complaining so passionately means they still have our hearts and minds - simply because like it or loathe it - nothing does it better.
. And soon, you will not even have to pay that, there will be a student or learning version out soon (just like smoke on mac 13) that you would be able download and install without any proper student credentials (just like you did for the smoke on mac 13). It will be super free now, not a bad thing, but the end-casuality is the product' integrity itself which has already long been compromised due one after another bad and haphazard decisions 🙂