The Flame Learning Channel

In this video, you’ll learn about the updated copy and paste behaviours when working in the timeline. This is a small setting but it can make a big difference as to how you’d like to end up after performing copy and paste.

In this video, you’ll learn about another retouching tool that now comes with Flame 2019. This tool is known as the “Washer”. The Washer is not as powerful as A2Beauty but it uses a faster calculation allowing you to maintain a faster degree of interaction when doing various clean-up work. The results will differ from A2Beauty but you can decide which one works best in different scenarios.

his video shows off a small performance enhancement for browsing media in the MediaHub. When typically browsing your media, you’re exposed to a wealth of information to ensure that you are well informed when making any input or output decisions. So ideally the directory and media browsing is designed to fit in with any production workflow. This is why you should actually refer to the MediaHub as a clip browser, rather than a standard file browser or file explorer. So each piece of media display loads of information at any given point. However the slight downside is that when it comes to the masses of metadata, there is a small-time penalty in order for Flame to read the information from the various media and then display it in the user interface. This could also be compounded by having to scan a large number of files in a single directory and Flame reports the metadata on each file. Admittedly this may become frustrating if you are trying to fly through directories and scan files pretty quickly by eye. So a new viewing mode has been introduced to enable fast and quick browsing.

With the frequent release of Flame updates, it's very easy to accumulate multiple project archives from older releases of Flame. Now if you are continually working and archiving a project, or perhaps restoring an older project for updating, archives created in previous versions of Flame are normally read only. This meant that you couldn't add to them with a later release of Flame. So in order to have an archive with all your amendments, you would have to restore everything and make a new archive with the latest release of Flame to have a writable archive. However in Flame 2019, you now have the ability to convert and upgrade old Flame archives to the latest release. This means you can "freshen up" the old archives and this also allows you to amend or add new media into the archive without having to create a brand new one each time. This is a massive time, space and money saver when it comes to archiving at all skill levels.

In this video, we’ll cover how to setup, render and exporting OpenEXR multi-channel media directly from the Batch node flow-graph. This can definitely help you in multi-channel workflows within a Flame project. But facilities can also take advantage of this in order to have a multi-channel pipeline between various applications throughout their production.

In this video, you’ll learn the workflow to clean up your images using 3D Shapes and Projections. In a lot of cases, this might be a lot quicker than the traditional 3D tracking and projection technique. Now we’ll be covering two methods and they differ slightly when it comes to projecting the clean frame. Areas covered include: cloning in paint, 3D shape generation, planar tracking and projection.

The previous A2Beauty videos mainly focused on skin examples. So you could revitalise skin by removing spots, moles and wrinkles or you could age skin by inverting the functionality of the SelectiveFX shader. In this example, you’ll move away from skin and examine the effect of A2Beauty on a different texture. So our focus will be clothing but you should try it out on other textures and hopefully you’ll be surprised by the result. This is part 4 in the A2Beauty Series.

In the previous videos, you were introduced to A2Beauty in Flame 2019 and shown a few workflows perform a variety of skin retouching. So A2Beauty’s main purpose is beauty retouching but with a few different settings it can offer you a lot more than just its original intended purpose. In this video, you’ll use A2Beauty to do the reverse of beauty work. You can make skin look a lot worse than it really is and this can be used for ageing effects or enhancing special effect prosthetics like monsters and zombies. This is part 3 in the A2Beauty Series.

In this video, we'll expand on another Effects Environment workflow where you'll learn how to version your grading and VFX using segment connections in combination with the Effects Environment. This exciting workflow will allow you to try multiple variations of your effects and then you can switch back and forth when choosing the final version for your production. This gives you great flexibility during a session and it’s very fast to use. And by the way, you can do all of this without having to use the whole Connected Conform Workflow! If you have not seen or used the Effects Environment before I suggest going to the beginning of this series to give you a great start!

In this video, we’re going to discuss Segment TimelineFX versus Source TimelineFX in the Effects Environment. This means that you decide whether your Image TimelineFX appears in the regular FX pipeline with all the other TimelineFX or you can apply it at the source media level with your format processing and colour management tools. For the most part, you’ll probably stick to the default segment FX processing pipeline. But there might be the occasion where you see it necessary to first affect the source media before injecting it into the segment as part of a sequence. For example, you might want to do technical corrections on the source media, like white balancing, and then perform your creative work on the segment using the segment’s TimelineFX. If you have not seen or used the Effects Environment before I suggest going to the beginning of this series to give you a great start!

In this video, you'll about the workflow of applying grading and VFX above your edit, instead of working directly on each segment. For example, Perhaps you prefer to build your effects and grading in separate stages or maybe for versioning purposes, you need to keep everything separated out instead of all in one segment. Whatever the reason, you’ll use gap segments in the sequence to achieve this. If you have not seen or used the Effects Environment before I suggest going to the beginning of this series to give you a great start!

In this video, we’ll look at the new multi-channel support within Lustre and how this influences the Connected Colour Workflow when combining the dedicated grading from Lustre with the VFX finishing capabilities of Flame. In previous releases, you had some of this capability using Matte Containers but with the Multi-Channel support in the 2019 release the workflows have been enhanced and that will be covered in this video. So we’ll start in Lustre and bounce back and forth between Flame when needed. For those of you who are using this workflow, the same can be achieved if you’re using Flare instead of Flame. Please note, that all the software needs to be on the same workstation in order to use the Connected Colour workflow. And as an additional benefit, a Lustre hotkey profile is also available in Flame if you prefer to stick to one set of keyboard shortcuts.

In this video, you’ll explore a new look development tool in Flame 2019 known as Physical Glare. This SelectiveFX is designed to help you create and customise various lens glaring artefacts that occur naturally with various light sources directed at the camera. So depending what you’re shooting, you may want glare or not. But adding physical glare with Flame 2019 allows you to add to or enhance what you already have.

So the previous video taught you how to use the general Physical Glare SelectiveFX to create additional glare and starbursts through the camera lens. This was all done procedurally and there are so many variations you could experiment with. However, if you can’t find or create what you’re looking for, the next step is to use a custom aperture or lens noise pattern to design the look that you may not be able to achieve procedurally.

In this video on Physical Glare, you’ll use the Action 3D lighting to help you create lighting effects including the physical lens glare. The use-case for this scenario, is what if you wanted to add glare to a light, like head lamps for example, but the light source was never there to begin with? So you’ll use 3D lights to position where you want the lighting and then through the Physical Glare SelectiveFX, you’ll create the light and introduce the lens light artefacts.