Re: Important Workflow Questions.

Hey Michael, I have used smoke, I worked with a demo for about 8 months. It has some cool features, but a very cumbersome and archaic workflow. It was Smoke for Mac, since we are still reliant on ProRes 444 and 422. Smoke for Mac does not have Batch, the real compositing engine for Flame and Smoke Advanced. I have met and talked with lots of Autodesk Pros, and they try to tell me what action can do, but I hate Action as a final compositor. Its horrible. When you have Batch, you don't have to use Action for much more than brining in Clips etc, but in Smoke for Mac that is your compositor and Its not up to todays pro level. As for the color warper??? Come on... Color Warper is to DaVinci Resolve as MS PAINT is to Photoshop. So yeah, I have tried Smoke, and if I was doing a lot of Online Editing it might be ok, but for grading its not good enough. Also whats up with the Price?? They always claim you can get 40% more work done?? But its 140x more expensive, so should they say you can get 1400% more work done? Autodesk is a still a costly investment.

This is not really an answer to your question (I'll leave that to much smarter people), but have you tried Smoke? It sounds like it may be a better tool for this kind of project.