Cut in Adrenaline or FCP, Finish in Smoke?

[Michael Phillips]

Unfortunately these tend to end up using EDL’s, one for each layer. What is lost is anything not supported by an EDL. smoke claims to support AAF as they are part of the AAF Association and they showed an XML workflow from FCP. Reports seem to be that neither one work very well. The best thing for you to do is to take a sample project from both FCP and Avid and see which works best. Try XML, AAF, OMF, and EDL’s…

GOod luck!

[Oliver Peters]

[OneMatchFire] “We are looking at getting Smoke for finishing and cutting on Adrenalines and/or FCP 5 (working with HD, on HDSR, HDCAM or DVCProHD, depending upon which project)……
My question is on conform. How does this work. …..
Also, anyone use Clipster instead?”

Rachael,

Although I don’t cut on Smoke, I’ve looked at it pretty thoroughly for magazine reviews and it appears that these are the options. There is EDL and OMF support. I’m not sure how solid the OMF transfer is from Avid to Smoke, but I’m sure someone on the Smoke forum can fill you in. In the newest release, they’ve added FCP XML support. This means you can go from FCP to Smoke; but you could also, for instance, go from Avid to FCP via Automatic Duck and then from FCP to Smoke via XML. Not sure why you would do that, but it could be helpful.

In all of these cases, the metadata for effects doesn’t come across completely and everyone has to take a “best guess” approach. AD and Autodesk both have documentation that will tell you which effects and to what extent complex effects will be transferred, but you can assume that all composites, color-correction and titling at the very least will have to be rebuilt.

I’ve also looked at Clipster. It seems pretty solid, but targeted at film finishing, i.e. DI conforms. Is that part of your business model? It doesn’t offer the kind of sophisticated effects tools as do Avid DS, Smoke, Quantel eQ, Sony Xpri and so on, which makes it pretty useless if the system does work in a client-supervised environment.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Onematchfire]

Dear Oliver and Michael,

Thank you both very much for your data. This is for use in our own facility on our own projects so we don’t have to worry about clients, just about whether or not it works well for us.

We are doing DI’s, but that’s not all we’re doing. We also shoot video (Digibeta switching to some form of HD soon) but mainly the smoke would be used for finishing projects shot on film and then either telecine to HDSR or 2k scans (most likely most projects would be put on HDSR with an HDSR master, offlined on Adrenalines or FCP and then finished on Smoke). That’s the idea but we don’t have a Smoke yet or FCP to be able to test it out.

Does anyone have any experience with either FCP or Adrenaline going to Smoke or some other comparable finishing system and which line is easiest/fastest/best? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. That effects whether or not we cut in FCP 5 (HD) or Adrenaline DnxHD for our film projects.

DsNitris is an option too, but Smoke seems to have a lot of cool things that DsNitris doesn’t have and DsNitris per the Avid guys themselves is not yet capable of really handling 4:4:4 RGB, but Smoke is, right?

I’ll try asking a simialar question in the Smoke forum but it would be great to have your experiences outside of Smoke as well.

Thanks!

OneMatchFire

[Oliver Peters]

The differences between Smoke and DS are mainly subjective. DS Nitris will give you true hardware-assisted RT effects, while all Smoke effects require rendering. This may affect your turnaround time for color-correction. This will also vary whether we are talking Smoke (on IBM with Linux) or Smoke DI (on SGI Tezro). Remember that to get the kind of tracking info (like edge numbers) in Smoke, you will have to get Smoke DI which is more expensive than Smoke on Linux or DS.

I have tested an FCP sequence to Smoke and basic transitions come over. I have moved Avid to FCP and had similar results. I have moved Avid projects from Xpress to DS and nearly everything came over as desired. The same would be true for Adrenaline. If you want the most seamless integration in edit information then you’ll be best off with an Xpress/DS or Adrenaline/DS combo. You really have to get a demo of both DS and Smoke to see which best fit your workflow.

The whole DI business is largely a roll-your-own approach these days, so there is no “best” or “fastest” method right now. Since your checking things out, you should also look at Quantel eQ, Assimilate Scratch, Silicon Color Final Touch and even an all Adobe Premiere Pro system.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Digitalcutter]

Ok….Now i dont think there is need for such big confusions…its just simple ….generate an edl of each video track with a blck title in the biginning so that when the edl gets imported into smoke and wanna punch it in to smoke time line ..it will go and sit exactly in positions….otherewise there cud be a chance of misplacements…………and then the audio can be exported as aaf or wav from Avid and imported into Smoke…….yes the titles and effects have to be recreated…ofcourse simple tranisitons will be read by edl and feeded to smoke…….and then punch in the audio……thats it…