OT: Smoke 2010 shipping for Mac

[Bjarki Gudjonsson]

I think Walter hit the nail on the head when he mentioned the hardware/software combo. Smoke is definately a very powerful tool, and even if it is a little dumbed down for the Mac (by removing Batch), it’s appeal will be to users who do more than one thing. Online editors who do graphics and coloring and compositing might see their jobs done faster when they get to grips with Smoke.

At the same time, I think that the system running Smoke has to be powerful enough to run it very smoothly. That is the Smoke experience. Snappy, responsive interaction. I’m really curious to hear how well it’s running for you guys.

B.

[Erik Lindahl]

I’m not 100% sure what Smoke on OSX will offer compared to Smoke on Linux but the demos I saw at IBC this year where pretty impressive. Think of Smoke as having the FCP editor inside of Shake or something like that. You have a full, flexible, editor and you have a full, flexible FX / compositing architecture with a lot of hardware accelerated things happening. It’s not “realtime all the time” but instead of as in the FCP world you:

1. Edit in FCP
2. Export your Edit to Color
3. Grade in Color
4. Export your Grade to the Finder
5. Reconform the Graded Edit in FCP
6. Do effects / compositings / clean-ups on select scenes in AE / Shake / Nuke
7. Reconfrom the scenes in FCP
8. Finalize your Online

The Smoke world, for a lot of things would be:

1. Edit in FCP
2. Export your Edit to Smoke
3. Finnish your Grade / FX / Compositing / Online in Smoke
4. Finalize your Online

Sadly I can’t test the Smoke trial at work as we’ve yet to go over to Snow Leopard but the idéa of it is very nice. The UI I presume is efficient when you learn it, given it looks hideous at first glance I’ll just have to take peoples word for it. Now, if the OSX-version of Smoke is limited in the compositing / FX scene we have an issue cause that limits the function and value of the package tremendously. What FCP lacks to be a “full online suite” are things like:

– Solid keying
– Solid compositing
– Solid tracking
– A larger array of effects
– A far more stable and predictable rendering engine
– A far more stable and functional key-frame system

But FCP is an editor with certain online / finishing “tricks”, its not really a “finishing system”. Smoke is and I hope it hasn’t been crippled too much on the OSX scene. The FCP / Color / AE / Mocha combo makes an “FCP system” a “finishing system” but you’re jumping between 4-5 applications then and it’s not very integrated.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Alex Harding]

[Erik Lindahl] “I’m not 100% sure what Smoke on OSX will offer compared to Smoke on Linux”

i think the main advantage is several tens of thousands of $…

that and the fact that it opens it up to people who are happy living in mac world and don’t particularly want to venture into linux world with all of the technical idiosyncrasies that come with it