FLOW is still in beta at this time, so some things work and some things don’t, but overall things look really nice. The number one issue right now is simply application support, but the folks at GridIron assure me they have plans to expand that list greatly. At the moment it works with mostly Adobe products, and so I sat down yesterday and broke out After Effects and Premiere to run FLOW through its paces.
The project I set out was just a simple one. I had some footage from fxphd of a kid riding his bike up to a building, and I wanted to make the building all beat up. The goal here was to tie in several assets and applications into one project to see how it all – FLOWed. Sorry I couldn’t resist.
As I worked my way through the various steps of the project, I would save and then alt-tab back to FLOW to see how things were forming up. FLOW did a very good job of following along so to speak, and each time I added a new asset it showed up in the “map” as they call it. I was especially impressed when I rendered out the video from After Effects and FLOW correctly mapped it as an output node from AE. I didn’t expect that. FLOW seems to be smarter than your average bear in many respects. For example, in my AE project I had brought in three single image assets, but only used two of them. In my FLOW map, I could see all three assets as inputs, but if I clicked on the AEP file node, the unused asset would grey out, indicating I assume, that the asset wasn’t being used. Amazing.
When all was said and done, the final project consisted of several images created in Photoshop, a comp in After Effects, and then a video created in Premiere with the output of AE and some more Photoshop files. With only one or two expectations, FLOW put everything where it belonged and provided me with a very nice visual display of that project’s assets. I then took the completed map and used FLOW’s packaging feature to package it all up.
So let’s break it down shall we?
The Good
The install goes very smoothly and after a quick reboot, you are up and running with the software. There is no need to fiddle with settings and knobs with FLOW, you just start working and it does its thing. There appears to be two sides to FLOW. The application itself, inside of which you view your maps and assets, and the Dashboard which seems to serve as a sort of lightweight interface to the application. In the dashboard you can search for assets quite easily. The dashboard can be really great for finding assets you need based on things like keywords and attributes, though it annoyingly falls short of perfection by not allowing you to take a located asset and drag and drop it into a program.
Navigation inside of FLOW is very simple and intuitive. Everything is almost too easy as at first you stare at the screen wondering what to do, but as soon as you open any file you start seeing your graphs.
Flow takes whatever file you load up, and maps out how that asset is used through a project by drawing input and output connections and neatly arranges everything in columns that indicate various stages of the project. I noticed that all my inputs to After Effects where in one column, then the AE file in the next, with the rendered output in yet a third, and so on down the line of the project. It mimics very well how you would think of the files in your own head as you move through the various applications in your project.
The versioning system is excellent and something I am a huge fan of. “Save often, and save revisions” is always the motto in a project, and FLOW does an awesome job of saving revisions for you when working in software that doesn’t necessarily make that easy to do. Anyone who has ever had a piece of software crash – while saving – knows how important revisions are.
The Bad
One thing FLOW does in order to track files is create bazillions of little index files on each drive for all the assets. It does this in a FlowData directory at the root of the drive. I have to say i’m not too big a fan of this While i’m sure there is a reason they chose this method over a central library system, i’m not sure of what that reason is.
The Dashboard is supposed to protect assets in ways such as if you delete an asset, the dashboard will pop up informing you of your mistake and let you recover the file – presumably from the last version saved. This doesn’t seem to work for me on Windows however. I tried it twice, with no intervention from FLOW. Amusingly if you delete the file, FLOW remaps itself to reference the asset from the windows recycle bin, but then if you empty the recycle bin nothing happens. FLOW just loses the file and doesn’t offer any option to restore it. At this point I no longer had access to the assets versions, so I couldn’t even manually recover it.
Most of the work I do as a compositor involves frame sequences instead of video files. FLOW provides no real support for this other than simply grouping all the image files together into a group. I would love to see FLOW actually treat these like a frame sequence and provide a preview as well. I’d almost bet this is a byproduct of their Macintosh roots here, as most people in the Mac world seem to work with quicktime files instead of frame sequences.
Some of the judgments the software makes to determine what are inputs and outputs sometimes isn’t quite what i’d agree with. For example, the internal preview and cache files created by Premiere show up in FLOW as assets in the tree. Another was when I had one PSD file that I modified and saved out as a new file, yet flow connected them together and put the output file on another level. Ok on the one hand I can see this, but on the other it was kind of weird. I wish I had a way to tell it to handle this situation different, because while the whole map pretty much mirrored how I looked at the project in my head, this ONE file was outside of that image and it just kept annoying me.
The Ugly
I know this is a beta release, and things just aren’t perfect, so take this section with a grain of salt. With that said, my absolute number one complaint right now is performance. On Windows XP it is just downright slow as molasses going uphill in the winter my grandfather would say. Even opening the application takes a few long seconds of nothingness. If you click on a node that you haven’t clicked on before, the whole app just freezes sometimes upwards of a minute or two as it processes that node, and i’ve had several instances of “click and go make coffee”.
I don’t quite get what the packages are actually doing, other than relocating assets together, but the creation of a package is another function that takes a very long time.
What I’d Like to See
FLOW does an extremely good job of providing a visual reference to how all your assets are used in a project. It also does a very decent job as an overall asset manager, but i’d love to see it go the rest of the way. Anyone with a large amount of assets knows it can be a pain keeping track of them all and finding what you need. FLOW gets me 90% of the way to taming those assets. It allows me to see how they are used in projects, and it allows me to easily find assets based on very deep searches from tags to meta data, but once found it doesn’t provide any easy way to use those assets.
I’d like to see FLOW and the FLOW dashboard provide drag and drop support for bringing those assets into my applications once found.
Support for image sequences, along with the ability to preview image sequences like videos, would be very nice as well.
When you package up a map, all the assets are conveniently collected and grouped together for easy distribution or archiving. I love this. However the various project files used by the applications still point to the original assets. It seems to me that FLOW is able to read these project files, and in turn it would be very nice if it could also modify these files in the package to point to the new location of the assets in the package.
