AUTODESK SMOKE EDITING SOFTWARE. Your thought

[Guillaume Tremblay]

Hello guys,

A friend of mine who is more into editing than me suggest me to move to the about to be release SMOKE for MAC that has been updated in NAB 2012. I'm from FCP background. What do you think about this platform. For 3500$US. it's not that much. He told me that it was about 15 000$US last year.

 

[MichaelP]

Starting in July there will be a 60 day free trial/beta for you to download and decide for yourself whether it meets your needs or not. As with all NLE systems, they all have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you are trying to do. Depending on how well the conform is, I can see it as a very nice finishing and mastering system for the types of productions I do.

Michael

 

[Björn Benckert]

It's like you ask if you should go on using that type writer or if you should invest in a laptop as your proffesion is writer.
But then again Im a discreet head.

Buying a smoke is one step closer to flame... and thats a good thing.

FCP is great but i think its good to differ from the kids making skeet movies.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Its about the style of work you do.

I tend to get involved in projects with a lot of effects work that I composite.

I see Smoke as Media Composer with Nuke all rolled up into one.

For myself, its a smart tool that I am definitely evaluating. I hate After Effects, Shake is too damn old and Nuke is a bit expensive, plus I'd still have to do a lot of round tripping from my NLE to and from NUKE.

What I dislike about Smoke is that it requires AJA i/o. I'm a Resolve user, and I'm gonna stay that way. You can effectively color correct shot to shot, but you can't manage a full grade very well on Smoke. (Or Symphony/Media Composer) The fact that they do not support Black Magic means I have to have more than one i/o device ... and probably more than one computer.

Boo.

Also, I really like the control surface support in Avid products. Smoke only supports the Avid Transport and Color interfaces. Because Symphony and Media Composer support all their panels, I can much more effectively finish most of my editorial tasks in those products.

It really looks like I will be staying with Shake and AE at least one more generation. Double Boo.

Maybe Avid will buy Eyeon and include a full on node based compositor in Symphony? What? A guy can have dreams. I suppose they could revive Lustre and bring more grading tools and interface elements into Smoke. Really though, just adding support for Black Magic i/o devices would work for me. Especially if they support i/o via Thunderbolt on the Teranex devices, with all that hardware image processing goodness accessible from within Smoke ... yum!

Hmmm... those read too much like conclusions, but I haven't evaluated Smoke yet. Those are just my concerns going into the evaluation.

 

[Glen Powell]

I sat through a few of their seminars at N.A.B., spoke one on one with one of the reps and did some ham handed playing around with the system they had on hand. I'm on the list to try out the Beta when it's available later this summer - I think that it will be a great way to get closer to an 'all-in-one' NLE / colour / finishing type program that can do away with several steps of round tripping.

If you use FCP now - the new Smoke interface will take you about 3 minutes to figure out and be working… aaaand it's built with REDRAW R3D users in mind.

G.

 

[Mark Toia]

I loved it... but the biggest most annoying thing with it.....
NO OPEN GL..

Everything you did was a RENDER... render render render render... 5k RAW files was a hard slog and jammed it up alot.

I'm a AUTODESK / DISCREET FAN too... but without realtime playback render and grading... It's just to slow.

Thats siad. It's still get the best colour keyer in the business. Nothing beats it.

If they get some form of OPEN GL playback render playback thing going with it, I'd buy it.

 

[Glen Powell]

I loved it... but the biggest most annoying thing with it.....
NO OPEN GL..

Everything you did was a RENDER... render render render render... 5k RAW files was a hard slog and jammed it up alot.

I'm a AUTODESK / DISCREET FAN too... but without realtime playback render and grading... It's just to slow.

Thats siad. It's still get the best colour keyer in the business. Nothing beats it.

If they get some form of OPEN GL playback render playback thing going with it, I'd buy it.

Noticed that too - but I put it down to the iMac / macbook systems they were running it on at N.A.B. & the "We're not finished yet" quotes I kept getting from Autodesk. I guess it will be a bit clearer when the beta test version comes out that we can all test with our own footage / machine / workflow?

G.

 

[Mark Toia]

I hope so...it's got huge potential.
Smooth fluid time line means alot to me. Clunky is not good for editing.. Hence why I still like FCP and Avid.. You can't beat how soft and smooth they are when you slipping through the footage.
I just praying there is some form of Open GL or something like the adobe mucury engine that speeds it up and gets rid of the rendering pain everything time you adjust something.

 

[Dermot Shane]

Maybe Avid will buy Eyeon and include a full on node based compositor in Symphony? What? A guy can have dreams.

This has been announced, and should be in beta very soon, add the Baselight plug-in and it makes MC/Symp an amazing tool set, and far more than a match for smack, ahead in several key area's like 3D tracking (not avb in smack) and real gradeing.... if you need resoultion independance then the same tools will work in DS as well, as they are both written for AVX

d

 

[Dermot Shane]

It's still get the best colour keyer in the business. Nothing beats it.

Great keyers are everywhere now, five years ago you could make a point for the AD keyer, today you have the 3D keyer in DS, IBK in Nuke, and Primatte6 out in the wild, and a nearly ten year old keyer that is getting past it's sell by date in smack...

really, it's old, it's OK by todays standard, but not much more than OK.... and it's not a match for the best on offer.. times have moved on, smack's answer is to get cheaper, not better?

I'd leave it at 15K, but give it real gradeing, retain the 3D tracker and get a modern keyer, something like Primatte6 or IBK...

 

[shashbugu]

Great keyers are everywhere now, five years ago you could make a point for the AD keyer, today you have the 3D keyer in DS, IBK in Nuke, and Primatte6 out in the wild, and a nearly ten year old keyer that is getting past it's sell by date in smack...

really, it's old, it's OK by todays standard, but not much more than OK.... and it's not a match for the best on offer.. times have moved on, smack's answer is to get cheaper, not better?

I'd leave it at 15K, but give it real gradeing, retain the 3D tracker and get a modern keyer, something like Primatte6 or IBK...

The master keyer in smack no matter how old it is, is still the fastest most intuitive keyer available. The point based rotoscoping tools are not available in any other system. the renders in Smack are fast opengl databased and non destructive. Even with the new editor, the interface is still not that great for editing, Maybe for final conforming it might be for sure. Autodesk dropped the balled on the cool match mover one click 3d tracking, which they added to MAYA 2010 for free. Its not the best 3d tracker but it would have been perfect in Smoke. I'm not a colorist so i can't speak much for the difference between lustre and CCwarper, but I know for sure that a few thousand music videos and commercials have been graded in smoke. Probably more than any other system around.

I'm a hardcore adobe guy, but i always do all last minute tweaks and clean up in smoke. Lately I've been playing with IFX Piranha for mac, this is a real all in one tool for $995. Its fast real time 4k at 1/4 debayer. editing, softfx, cc, tracking, keying, scaling, re-framing..... the works. Not as powerful as smoke though. but for what most of us do. Its great.

 

[jake blackstone]

Great keyers are everywhere now, five years ago you could make a point for the AD keyer, today you have the 3D keyer in DS, IBK in Nuke, and Primatte6 out in the wild, and a nearly ten year old keyer that is getting past it's sell by date in smack...

really, it's old, it's OK by todays standard, but not much more than OK.... and it's not a match for the best on offer.. times have moved on, smack's answer is to get cheaper, not better?

I'd leave it at 15K, but give it real gradeing, retain the 3D tracker and get a modern keyer, something like Primatte6 or IBK...

Obviously, you're not familiar with modular keyer and pixel spread....

 

[jake blackstone]

The master keyer in smack no matter how old it is, is still the fastest most intuitive keyer available. The point based rotoscoping tools are not available in any other system. the renders in Smack are fast opengl databased and non destructive. Even with the new editor, the interface is still not that great for editing, Maybe for final conforming it might be for sure. Autodesk dropped the balled on the cool match mover one click 3d tracking, which they added to MAYA 2010 for free. Its not the best 3d tracker but it would have been perfect in Smoke. I'm not a colorist so i can't speak much for the difference between lustre and CCwarper, but I know for sure that a few thousand music videos and commercials have been graded in smoke. Probably more than any other system around.

I'm a hardcore adobe guy, but i always do all last minute tweaks and clean up in smoke. Lately I've been playing with IFX Piranha for mac, this is a real all in one tool for $995. Its fast real time 4k at 1/4 debayer. editing, softfx, cc, tracking, keying, scaling, re-framing..... the works. Not as powerful as smoke though. but for what most of us do. Its great.

CW and CW are pretty much useless and they have nothing to do with Lustre technology. Based on that, I doubt very much the claim of thousands color gradings of music videos and commercials in Smoke.

 

[jake blackstone]

I hope so...it's got huge potential.
Smooth fluid time line means alot to me. Clunky is not good for editing.. Hence why I still like FCP and Avid.. You can't beat how soft and smooth they are when you slipping through the footage.
I just praying there is some form of Open GL or something like the adobe mucury engine that speeds it up and gets rid of the rendering pain everything time you adjust something.

If you edit in HD and then finish at full resolution, then it is a moot point. If you care about Smoke performance in 4k, then you should investigate MacPro and not an iMac. iMacs were used at NAB in order to show dramatically reduced hardware requirements for Smoke 2013. It is obvious, that this point was lost on many Autodesk booth visitors.

 

[Glen Powell]

I loved it... but the biggest most annoying thing with it.....
NO OPEN GL..

Everything you did was a RENDER... render render render render... 5k RAW files was a hard slog and jammed it up alot.

I'm a AUTODESK / DISCREET FAN too... but without realtime playback render and grading... It's just to slow.

Thats siad. It's still get the best colour keyer in the business. Nothing beats it.

If they get some form of OPEN GL playback render playback thing going with it, I'd buy it.

Noticed that too - but I put it down to the iMac / macbook systems they were running it on at N.A.B. & the "We're not finished yet" quotes I kept getting from Autodesk. I guess it will be a bit clearer when the beta test version comes out that we can all test with our own footage / machine / workflow?

G.

If you edit in HD and then finish at full resolution, then it is a moot point. If you care about Smoke performance in 4k, then you should investigate MacPro and not an iMac. iMacs were used at NAB in order to show dramatically reduced hardware requirements for Smoke 2013. It is obvious, that this point was lost on many Autodesk booth visitors.

I figured that was the stumbling block to performance - that and it's not finished yet...

 

[Dermot Shane]

Obviously, you're not familiar with modular keyer and pixel spread....

i have a bucket load of seat time on AD comp'n, last few years on Nuke, still keep a toe in AD waters... i know the tools, and i said ithought it a decent keyer, just not the only keyer, or the best keyer,or the fastest keyer, or the keyer to deal with difficult shots... in 2012 that goes to IBK in my hands...

i could see "fast & intuitive" being a good point too, and still is, but it's no faster or more intiutive than Primatte6 or DS's 3D keyer, again AD resting on it's laurels.

The last truly new and inovative keyer from AD was in my Flame more than a decade ago, small tweaks since then, no big new idea's... while AD sleeps Nuke and other's step right past them.

really if you are investing in smack to get the best keyer..... well in 2012 you are getting a keyer that's similar and maybe not as good as Primatte that's bundled with DigitalFusion, and that in turn is running directly on the timeline in MC...

The tools are getting really good out there, ad's timeframe for domanance of compositing is in the past, they now are a subset of the pipeline workflow for a good reason.

Looks at calander.. nope - it's not 1999 anymore, and the modular keyer is not king-0-the hill anymore, good? Oh yea... the greatest thing since sliced bread? Not any more...

IMHO, but i do have seat time with all of them

d

 

[Mark Toia]

I use nuke. It has some great features. But it's slow as hell with 90% of 2d work.. AE is much quicker to use for majority of work.
I only use nuke If I have lots of 3d stuff coming in to comp. other than that it's slow arse!

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Obviously, you're not familiar with modular keyer and pixel spread....

Haha!

Hans

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

In the last 15 years most of my TVCs have been finished with Flame. But since over two years now I'm a hardcore Smoke user. It's an NLE with many of Flame's tools, leaving out Batch and a slightly crippled Action. This said, you can accomplish all in Smoke what I could 10 years ago with Flame and more. Smoke's tool set is very rich, enough for 98% of the task I have in my projects.

The learning curve is very steep, 2013 won't change much in this regard. I'm editing all my stuff in Smoke, even 45min. documentaries, incl. sound design.

Surely you have to render everything. But in PremierPro for instance, it is not really clear how fidelity will be maintained, how good the tools are, etc.... Smoke works internally with DPX, tools come from Flame, no questions here. To run it properly you need a high-end box with a fast raid, very good monitors and an AJA card. An iMac won't do it really. And surely it's not a laptop app. It's a finishing system and needs all the bells and whistles. The price point of 3.5k is ridiculous. Curious where all this leads to.

Hans

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

I use nuke. It has some great features. But it's slow as hell with 90% of 2d work.. AE is much quicker to use for majority of work.
I only use nuke If I have lots of 3d stuff coming in to comp. other than that it's slow arse!

I hate the import/export crap that I have when working with standard NLE's. And then the gamma shift of death. Or the dreadful, tedious reconformings... Smoke is a revelation! Rendering, so what. All serious VFX apps have to render sometime.

Hans