The Flame Learning Channel

In this video, you’ll cover compositing using the new Manager view in Flame 2020. The Manager is a much more simplified way of working with some of Flame’s tools. And whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Flame artist, the Manager will allow you to access a whole range of functionality without digging deep into the node flow graph. Other videos cover the Manager in the context of grading and rotoscoping.

In this video, you’ll cover rotoscoping or masking using the new Manager view in Flame 2020. The Manager is a much more simplified way of working with some of Flame’s tools. And whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Flame artist, the Manager will allow you to access a whole range of functionality without digging deep into the node flow graph. Other videos cover the Manager in the context of grading and compositing.

With the release of Flame 2020, OFX support has been expanded in the Flame products enabling you to use other 3rd party creative tools in addition to Neat Video. OpenFX works on both the Linux and Mac versions of the Flame products and integrates seamlessly into your Flame experience. Many common OFX have been tested but it is possible that some specific plugins may not work correctly. If you encounter any issues, please report them to us via Autodesk Technical Support. This video showcases the Sapphire OFX plug-ins in Flame but there are others that you can purchase and use with any OFX host.

In this video, you’ll learn about the new background rendering functionality in the Flame 2020 products. This is available on single GPU Linux configurations as well as dual GPU Linux configurations. This is currently not available on the MacOS platform. Also Known as "Background Reactor", the background rendering works on your local creative workstation and does not require a separate render farm. Background Reactor works with various supported graphics cards which are listed on the Flame system requirements page. You'll also cover Automatic Background Rendering which is only available in Conform, Timeline, Effects Environment and BatchFX.

In part 16 of the Effects Environment Series, you’ll learn about the new “Cache on Playback” functionality as well as the render indications which are now available in the Effects Environment with Flame 2020. So you’re now able to see the render state of each segment without having to switch to the timeline view and you can also interactively cache your renders as you work within this environment.

In part 9 of the Motion Warp Tracking Series, we take a deep dive into understanding how motion warp tracking works with Motion Vectors as well as generating the tracking information for each frame. We’ll discuss "Analysis" and "Integration" and hopefully by having a better understanding, you should be able to get the best performance out of the tools. We’ll also discuss the different methods of how this data is cached to disk as well how to render out Motion Vectors as a standalone source.

In the previous video on Motion Warp Tracking, we looked at the analysis and integration of Motion Vectors to track a logo to a t-shirt. You would use these techniques for a variety of scenarios. Now working with Motion Vectors is very powerful and extremely flexible, however the downside is that it is really processor intensive and the data sets can get quite big. So in Part 10 on Motion Warp Tracking, you’ll learn how to use a different render pass known as "UVs" in order to perform very fast motion warp tracking. UV passes are smaller and less intensive than Motion Vectors Data but they are also limited in certain ways concerning motion warp tracking. We’ll cover all of that to help you choose when to use "UVs" or "Motion Vectors" for your next Motion Warp Tracking experience.

This video covers a new emerging request whereby clients ask for their full resolution graded source material to be included with the final edited masters as part of their deliverables. To add to this, your source material may be a different resolution to the final edited master. So this video will show you a particular way on how to achieve these goals in a very efficient manner using Flame.

In this video series, you’ll take a look at animation through mathematics or better known as expressions. Starting with part 1, you’ll be covering the fundamental basics in order for you to get the most out of this timesaving tool. You learn about the channel animation relationships, perform some basic mathematics as well as cover the initial expression syntax in Flame.

In part 2 of the Expressions 101 series, you’ll start expanding expressions across multiple objects through an understanding of channel hierarchy in the animation editor. You’ll also learn to determine a value at a specific point in time. And finally, you learn an expression function which allows you to offset the start time of an expression across multiple objects.

In part 3 of the Expressions 101 series, you’ll carry on with evaluations but this time, you’ll be introduced to random generator functions which can create a varieties of animation super fast! You can than fine tune your noise functions by combining them with mathematics. You'll cover the "rand" and "noise" generators but please check the on-line documentation for a list of other generators available in Flame.

In the previous videos of the Expression 101 series, you have seen that driving animation based on a mathematical curve can very useful in a whole range of tasks. But sometimes after creating an expression, you may want to take the mathematical curve and develop it manually. So in part 4, you’ll learn how to take the curve generated by an expression and convert it into an editable key-framed curve that you can further enhance using keyframes.

In a previous video of the Expressions 101 series (part 2), you learnt about the animation channel hierarchy and this enabled you to drive the animation of one object off another. This was referred to as the "Controller" Technique. In part 5 of the Expressions 101 series, you are going to take this technique one step further and combine multiple animation curves into a single curve that will than drive your primary animation. This is possible through combining multiple expression curves or even combining an expression with a key-framed animation. There are plenty cases where you would use this. For example, controlling the height of a bouncing ball, Controlling the intensity of a camera shake or perhaps controlling the randomness of an object in a motion graphic.

In the first part of Light Wrap in Action, you learnt that light wrap is now a component of the Action 3D compositor. Because of that, you can apply light wrapping to any 3D object in the 3D scene. So in part 2 of the series, you'll learn how to apply light wrapping to a 3D geometry. This could be used for better integration or even creative effect in a motion graphic composite. Keeping it all live and aware of the 3D composite.

If you’re someone who does keying in your post production work, you should be familiar with an integrating technique known as “light wrapping”. This is a process of blending the edges of your key with a background. The purpose of this is to help give your composites a sense of realism. So the light and colour of the background should wrap around your subjects matching real world physics and the final result looks more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Now there are many techniques, node trees and shaders you can use to do a light wrap. However, it can be quite an involved process of creating edge mattes, performing multiple blending and finally recomposing everything back together again. With the Flame 2019.2 Update, light wrapping has been introduced as part of the Action 3D compositor. This means that you can light-wrap in the context of a live 3D scene and the light wrapping is totally aware of all the other objects within the composite. This can help solve some really tricky blending issues when images overlap.