Flame is 20

In 2012 Flame turned 20, an amazing achievement in film and tv where the average life of any hardware or software product is 3-5 years. A feat matched only by Avid and Davinci as far as I can think of.

As part of its celebrations Autodesk had a ‘Flame memories page’ here is my contribution which featured on the front page of the Flame 20 website..

In early 1992 Asia Pacific Videolab, APV of Malaysia bought one of, if not THE first PAL Flames sold. This was at a time when Gary Tregaskis was still using Complete Post’s phone number and long before Rushes got involved. The first manual had Gary’s phone number written on it in blue pen.

It ran on an SGI 4d70 GT – no Onyx back then, or action, or batch, or for the sake of this story, real time capture.

Image capture was carried out by loading footage onto an Abekas A60 or an A64 when it wasn’t being used by an edit suite as it had a longer duration if we used both disks, and then loaded to Flame by Ethernet.

But it didn’t really work too well. So about 3 weeks in Gary flew to Kuala Lumpur and came to Apv. The problem was he didn’t have an A64 to test so he sat on a Personal Iris in our cg room and typed, out came the PAL Abekas A64 drivers. That’s all it took, Gary in a corner typing code.

The coda to this story is about 6 years later when Andy Stanton (funnily ex Abekas) came to see us as he was now with Discreet Logic. “You guys should get a flame” he said, “we already got one” we said. The Discreet guys with him became flustered, they were certain we had a cracked flame. We showed our receipts and Gary’s hotel bills. After a bit of checking it seemed during the move to Animal Logic and then Canada some records of the earliest days had been lost.

After more checking we then found we hadn’t received updates for 4 years despite annually sending cash to keep our maintenance contract current. Oops.

Discreet Logic was amazing, they sold us an ex demo Onyx as the 4d70gt was no longer supported and a free update to Flame version 4. My main memory as a partner of the company of the transaction was paying for the used Onyx and disks still came to 1 million US$ and that we paid US$50,000 for 2 gig of dual interleaved ram!

We did a big press conference in Singapore with Me, Trevor Sims, Geoff Millichamp, Andy Stanton, Peter Barber and a whole heap of other people, where I was particularly proud that I got the Asia Image girl to dutifully report that my main motivation for buying the Flame was that the new version had a powerful flux capacitor that helped speed up post.

And that’s my best Flame story, how Discreet Logic forgot a customer and how APV got its second Flame. What’s funny is how back then we didn’t even think it odd that we hadn’t had a software update for 5 years. Simpler times.