Re: Does anyone actually edit in smoke ?

Gabriele,

I'm a video junkie, I write, shoot and edit most of my projects by myself. I find it important to have all the creative tools at my own fingertips - from the pen to camera, to editing, grading and finishing.

That has been my workflow: shooting, editing (FCP), grading (SpeedGrade), reconforming to FCP, compositing (Shake) and finishing the whole stuff in FCP with all the annoyance FCP can give you, foremost the infamous gamma shift.

I have done many TVC that ended up on Flame, hence I know quite well what Discreet systems can do to your projects. When I heard that Smoke is available on the Mac I instantly bought a licenses, didn't even try it before - and never looked back.

This is now my workflow: Shoot, transcode, Smoke - done.

Smoke's only downside as an editor is that all footage should match the projects resolution, including bit-depth. If not, a resize soft-effect will be added that has to be rendered all the time - a real show-stopper.

Smoke takes some time to learn. Editing is neither like FCP, nor like Avid - it's Autodesk's French-Canada style. I'm used to it now and like it - and it's fast.

The biggest friend when editing in Smoke is the LOCK button. It's the most used button in Smoke and has the most uncomfortable short-cut. I haven't found a way to create a new shortcut - if someone could point me to a comfortable solution I'd be happy to know.

Lastly a word to Smoke's conforming and sound design capabilities. I don't know how easily Smoke translates an Avid AAF but FCPs XML is so easy to conform that you hardly believe that. However, there is one rule: consolidate all footage to a new folder and place the XML in this folder.

Now sound. Smoke can edit sound like any other editor. It has good soundFX tools that surpass all what FCP offers. Sound mixing in Smoke is very easy and can be done very fast. I do all my sound design in Smoke. If you need assistance by WAVE plugins you can export an OMF and open it on the same machine in Logic for further tweaking. Please check the routing. All inputs must be assigned to channel 1& 2 on the output mixer for stereo work.

If your lose Audio in Smoke step into the ViodeIO and restart the AJA card by starting the ingesting module and closing it.

Give Smoke and yourself an extended testing period. In the beginning it maybe hard but then it's a revelation, seriously.

Hans