OT: Smoke 2010 shipping for Mac

[David Roth weiss]

[Dave Jenkins] “The software is intended explicitly for Snow Leopard, and costs $14,995 to license. For extensions, upgrades and product support, companies must pay another $1,995 per year for Autodesk Subscription. “

Wow!!! That’s cheap at half the price.

[Chris Borjis]

I wonder if Flame is coming next….

[Stace Carter]

For those interested, Scott Malkie has started up a nifty blog tracking the topic:

https://smokeosx.blogspot.com/

Cheers,
Stace

Apple Certified Trainer

[Alan Okey]

Nice to see that new tutorials are up as well:

https://area.autodesk.com/smoke-tutorials/about_smoke_essentials_tutorials

I’ve always loved the UI of the systems products. A UI should be clean, elegant and unobtrusive while making it easy to find the required tools at the proper moment. I’ve always found it strange that other developers haven’t copied this approach to UI design more frequently.

FCP and After Effects have terrible UIs, but they are cheap and powerful apps so we put up with it. Now that Smoke is so much more affordable, I think that quite a few higher end users currently finishing with FCS/AE will be a lot less willing to put up with the clunky UI and round tripping workflow that they’ve been stuck with.

Obviously Smoke can’t completely replace FCP or AE, but for finishing work it’s a no brainer. If Autodesk follows this up by eventually releasing Lustre for OS X at a similarly reduced price point, it will be a match made in heaven.

[Chris Borjis]

[Alan Okey] “I’ve always found it strange that other developers haven’t copied this approach to UI design more frequently.”

I find the smoke interface (at least the way my brain works) very messy.
I don’t like clips all over the desk area. I find the DVE very confusing.

I supposed if I’d started out on smoke and gone through all the training
I would have a different opinion.

[Alan Okey]

[Chris Borjis] “I don’t like clips all over the desk area. “

The edit desk view is fully customizable and has many more viewing options than the FCP browser. I wish FCP had the ability to custom resize thumbnails, for example…

Smoke edit desk UI tutorial:

https://area.autodesk.com/training-tutorials/ui_tour_editdesk

You’re right though, it probably just comes down to a question of familiarity. Smoke’s UI can definitely seem a bit strange at first when compared to the Premiere/FCP paradigm. Autodesk actually added a traditional source/record dual-up window display mode a year or two ago when it was requested by users.

[Dave Jenkins]

WOW those tutorials are awful! If you judged Smoke by those tutorials I wouldn’t by it.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.8GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCS 3 OS X 10.6 QT 10

[Devin Crane]

I’ve always been intrigued by Flame and Smoke after watching some demos at NAB years ago but what’s the big deal for a product that costs $15k. What does it do that AE can’t other than being able to edit in the timeline? Looks like a cool product but just wondering why it merits such a high price.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Devin Crane] “Looks like a cool product but just wondering why it merits such a high price.”

On the PC side it came with hardware components that made everything happen much faster than with AE. But there’s not a whole lot you can do in Smoke that you can’t do in AE. Just AE takes longer.

It’s just a different tool to achieve the same results.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
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Biscardi Creative Media

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[Devin Crane]

Thanks Walter, probably won’t be getting it anytime soon but nice to know what different options are available.