Re: Smoke & FCP....

[Daniel Net] "I don’t have the storage right now to support uncompressed HD, and I don’t mined the quality of the ProRess. I just have the time right now to change out our san. "

smoke is an uncompressed system (from ingest to export) and requires a lot of storage to work properly (about 1.5 Tb comes with it and 16 Gb RAM helps although it will work with 8 Gb RAM). It is an elegantly integrated timeline based software/hardware system but it is difficult to learn. It only took a few days to use it but it took me over a year to become fully comfortable with all the plug-ins and shortcuts. Learning its system quirks can take another 6 months to a year. To finish an 8 bit 4:2:2 hour high definition program you need about 2.3 Tb of storage. I say this based on the amount of effects, timewarps, color correction, text and other features you will use in smoke. For every minute of program you can easily generate three times that in additional material to support that minute. smoke has excellent quality and works in 4:4:4 RGB at either 8 or 10 bit resolution.

I think the Autodesk salesmen can answer your questions but I would question why you want to buy smoke. You can finish anything you do in Final Cut Studio 2 and keep it in ProRes422 until you get ready to lay off to tape for airing or make a QT for other distribution. You can work in high definition from start to finish in ProRes 422 if you have 1.2 Tb local storage and about 8Gb RAM. It may be marginally slower than smoke but it costs a lot less. The integration with Motion and Color has improved and will continue to improve. Eventually I think you will be able to work in 4:4:4 10 bit without time and storage penalties as well. If you spend your money on more storage instead of new systems you will be set for several years.

These are my observations and subject rebuttal by those whose experience is different than mine. HTH

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org