The Flame Publish Workflow: A Tool for the Modern Multi-App Commercials VFX Micro Studio
When Flame first started to dominate the commercial VFX market, it was a complete system
Companies bought the software, hardware, and all the bits in between. To guarantee playback for client-attended sessions, it ran on its own filesystem called Stone and Wire. As disks got faster and modern operating systems became more sophisticated, the dedicated playback system was no longer essential, though it still offered advantages. Having clips loaded into the filesystem at the start of a job allowed Flame to operate as a closed shop with virtually no 'on-the-job' asset management — perfect for fast commercial jobs. However, archives were oversized and there was a growing need to make clips more accessible for modern collaborative workflows.
Cue the Write Node and Publish Sources Feature
At first glance, it didn't seem significant—not much eye candy there—but this feature effectively turns the Flame ecosystem inside out. Live assets are shared to NAS while you work, with metadata keeping everything hooked up. Working this way has opened everything up.
Here's how it works…
Conform the whole job to a single shot list
Flame's Connect Conform is a great way to link up edits, and it provides a Sources Reel that can help you condense multiple deliverables down to the bear essentials. It's complex to set up, but if you combine it with Publishing, you end up with a user-friendly folder of clips that covers your whole job. You get a bird's-eye view from the start; you can spot duplicates, combine short takes, address awkward time-warps, and mark mis-matched frame rates, oversized resolutions, unusual camera aspect ratios and so on, and address them before the VFX gets started.
Colour Management is simplified across the job.
For the simple scenario of one or two cameras & no CGI, the job could be done in the log file format & we might skip publish altogether. For everything else, it's a great idea to address the colour management from the outset you might publish everything to ACEScg. Once it's done, you have a simple colour scenario and can get on with the job, but you have the full dynamic range of the camera, as well as linear math to create blends & blurs with vastly superior realism.
Batch Process External Operations
WIth the Published shots available, I can move the processing tasks around. I could hand off a batch of Neat Denoise to Nuke for processing on my PC, where there’s a GPU build for the task. It will sprint through the bunch leaving my Mac, and me, free to focus on what’s next. Maybe I need a bunch specific of proxies? Or a just-in-case render of some motion vectors to speed up the comp tasks later.
Pattern Browsing & Open Clips help the Iterative Multi-app Workflow
If Publishing Sources makes shots available, then Pattern Browsing and Open Clips go at least some way to automate their return. When we kick off a VFX render, a ‘version stack’ begins. I can jump from shot to shot and leave things rendering as I move. Every render that hits that version stack will auto-update every shot in every edit across the job. Assets auto populate comp setups too, not just edits. It's a terrific time-saver—if a graphic takes 10 minutes to tweak, the fiddly export/import process could easily take another 10. Skipping it entirely removes the friction, and the momentum keeps going.
These workflows are at their best when you have the complete setup—multiple machines and apps—and I've been surprised by how effectively it complements the NAS workflow. Network Attached Storage will probably never sound cool, but it dramatically eases the bottlenecks.
The Next Wave is About To Begin
That Flame has thrived is an incredible story - a hardware based compositor that has crossed the divide - and the Publish Workflow is part of the progress. But not everything needs to be published. There’s hyped new tools everywhere now and there will be significant further developments, all of which builds & contributes to the gradual process of better-looking shots.