Speedgrade makes RED POP

[jake blackstone]

How is Smoke working on the Mac? I had heard the pre-production software was running slow.

Smoke, like any modern software relies on good GPU and fast drive for cashing and rendering. I use Smoke with GTX570 and it's very responsive. The problem, is, that most of operations needs to be rendered. But so is anything you do in AE or Premiere.
Just download 30 days demo and try it for yourself.

 

[jake blackstone]

Most of the issues were with Premiere EDL yes, but strange issues like selecting a set of clips to render out and then the rendered files are too short or even wrong clips. I go back and render each manually and it's fine. Then when memory gets low it loses ability to save anything to your HD and never recovers so a force quit is needed and of course you lose all work. Sliders stick and you can't move them and they're incredibly non responsive. Undo causes periodic crashes (and there's not really a legitimate undo/redo function sometimes it works sometimes it don't, in fact a standardized menu File/Edit/Window etc. would be nice). Saved looks magically move around and I can never find them. Random "Error reading file" on clips that were working fine before. The whole FPS thing which is just weird and very confusing. Is it 23.976 or 24fps? Either way it doesn't seem to want to conform R3Ds properly. I dropped a clip onto the timeline by mistake and it shifted all my grade layers by a few frames, undo didn't want to reset it so I manually had to move each layer back to the original position (with over 200 shots not the best way to spend an evening in. Where's ripple-delete function when you need it?). What else.. working with the timeline really sucks and is not standardized, clearly is the result of buying 3rd party software and not bothering to make it an Adobe standard. And it's a mega memory hog, I mean seriously, really poor memory management and eats my entire memory until 2MB remains and I'm not kidding.

So yeah just a few bugs lol.

If SpeedGgrade was better integrated with PP and AE, I could then see why one would be tempted to use it. But the way it is integrated presently into Adobe suite you get ZERO advantage over Resolve. Actually, Resolve is better, as it works with XML and AAF in addition to EDL.
As far as the actual grading, stability,remote grading, updates, hardware support, tech support, etc. SpeedGrade is not even on the same planet. I just don't get it...

 

[Al Lougher]

If SpeedGgrade was better integrated with PP and AE, I could then see why one would be tempted to use it. But the way it is integrated presently into Adobe suite you get ZERO advantage over Resolve. Actually, Resolve is better, as it works with XML and AAF in addition to EDL.
As far as the actual grading, stability,remote grading, updates, hardware support, tech support, etc. SpeedGrade is not even on the same planet. I just don't get it...

I agree with you there Blake. I'm just waiting on a GPU upgrade before moving to Resolve. Perhaps Adobe's target audience is just people who have shit computers lol.

 

[Brad Crawford]

Ya... looks like I may be getting resolve soon.. to 'resolve' my issues.... ugh.

 

[Matt Doane]

Smoke is a serious contender for people doing all the work on one system these days. It runs well on my 27" iMac with a fast Thunderbolt array. I mean, really, really well. I used to work on the big SGI Smoke systems and the latest version on Mac is just as responsive. Really fun, and comprehensive, finishing system especially for the money.