Fuelling Fire
- Article 5 of 6
- The Post, November 2000
From where you're sitting, it looks the same. Nothing too special, really. Yet there's the editor singing the praises of his or her new gadget as though it could cure all known ills. Just why the excitement over an upgrade?
Enter Derek Moore and Russell Shaw, just two of Rushes’ Fire editors who have been testing the latest version of Discreet’s editing system (still in development) over the summer. “It’s the best available at almost everything,” says Moore. “There’s not a job I wouldn’t rather do on Fire than Henry or even Inferno. Currently, it’s better than any other system in town.” And Shaw adds: “Henry is dead, God save the Fire!”
Clients who have been taking advantage of the pair’s Fire skills over the summer have seen the two making use of several of the new system’s capabilities.
“The biggest enhancement,” says Shaw, “is in the timeline. It’s been adjusted so it functions like Avid’s. Now we don’t look at an eight-layer conform with mixes on mixes and start running for the door in blind panic, simply because we no longer have to pull the edit apart.”
“It’s getting much more effects-driven, which is what we wanted,” chimes in Moore. “We’ve now got the same paint module as Flame which means we can create content and hand-draw everything now if we want.” Since Rushes is one of the select worldwide beta-testing sites for the next version of Fire, Moore and Shaw’s requests for additional features always get a hearing from Discreet, which means the final product is more geared up to what they – and clients – need. Says Shaw, “it also means we can offer some great new features of the software to our clients way before our competitors.”
For one client, Shaw took advantage of the effects in the new Fire to mix Super 16mm footage with a film trailer and give the 60-plus shots all the same letterboxing. Instead of doing everything manually, he was able to select the shots he wanted and change them with just one keystroke. And Moore was able to composite successfully a group of animals shot with different lighting and perspective in the mountains of Austria and France and even change their order. “They all said ‘that guy in London’s a genius!’ when they saw it,” he says.
With Inferno being updated, too, Fire’s getting many of its high-end sibling’s old capabilities – including colour correction to almost rival a telecine’s. “We’re getting Inferno’s hand-me downs!” Yet the commonest question Moore gets is “What’s the difference between Fire and Inferno? My commonest answer is that Fire’s quicker. With Inferno, everything’s 100% perfect. Fire gives you 90% - but really fast.”