Autodesk announced that its Flame compositing and visual effects software can now be purchased as a standalone software-only application. The company will stop selling hardware-based systems after January 16, 2016. In addition to permanent licensing, Flame is now also available through rental licensing (monthly, quarterly and annually). According to a related FAQ, Autodesk plans to continue to sell perpetual licenses of Flame, though it also plans to discontinue the ability to buy upgrades for those licenses on July 1, 2016. Also of note, Flame for Mac will be available soon, with the release of Flame 2016 Extension 2, expected November 24.
Flame Family 2016 Extension 2
The extension will bring new format support and significant performance gains in color grading workflows. Lustre Reactor will offer new GPU acceleration to color grading workflows and significantly improved performance when using blur, keying and softness controls for both preview and rendering operations. Other enhancements in Lustre include 32-bit floating point GPU rendering locally, via Shot Reactor and when using Autodesk background rendering software; performance enhancements when working with Open EXR source media with embedded mattes; UI support for high DPI monitors (4K); and new Print View and Print LUT support when using AJA SDI output. Across the Flame family of applications, when importing media, artists will be able to take advantage of new support for the full DNxHR media family by using either QuickTime or MXF containers, as well as updated support for R3D media files including R3D SDK 6.0.3, allowing Flame to directly support the new Dragon 6K sensor and Rec 2020 color space. When exporting media, the extension supports Sony MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Studio Profile (SStP) encoding in an MXF wrapper, supporting a variety of formats and presets.
Read a FAQ and find out more on Autodesk’s website.
Good news. Such a shame they can’t continue to sell Maya and Max licenses.
It`s good news, but the changes comes way to abrupt. Autodesk suddenly make big changes, and the users have to adapt immediately, in this case the freelancers who rely on the turnkey system. Previously Softimage users got screwed. I understand that they are a public company, but what is wrong with a roadmap? You know, like Intel … AD is 100% dedicated to professional customers who rely on them to get their job done, and the unreliable behavior is just not acceptable.
I am the de facto “software guy” at my company, and I will never choose Autodesk software for this reason, no matter how good it might be otherwise. Unfortunately we (and especially myself) are dug very deep into 3dsmax, which I am certain will prove to be a curse one day.