Re: @Walter Biscardi: Yes, Autodesk Smoke 2013 Changes Everything

In AE you just drag it up or down. In Smoke I'd want to shoot myself.

In Smoke 2013 you have both tracks for changing layer priority and nodes for changing effects order. It's been greatly simplified from Smoke 2012 which was not user friendly at all. That's the point of Smoke 2013, it's been redesigned to make it much more user friendly as you can see in the videos I just linked to.


In Smoke you can build things 50 different ways in and out of various modules that all can have settings saved in different places if at all - except if you use batch or have batch.

Everything in Smoke 2013 starts in the timeline so you should be able to work from project to project, artist to artist much more easily. I have had to fix plenty of badly organized AE projects to know it's just as easy to have folks make it very difficult to share those projects too.


I like Smoke but in my world all of the coolest design stuff and the sheer volume comes out of AE and Smoke/Flame gets used more for shot based compositing for features and commercials.

No doubt AE is the kind of the Motion Graphics world because it's the most widely used tool for that. But with Smoke 2013 it's finally in a price point where more people will start to get their hands on it. As that happens, we'll see the way the tool is used expand.

We saw that happen with FCP and it exploded into the standard for NLEs for a very long time.

We saw that with the Canon 5D that was never designed to shoot film and television projects.

Autodesk has simply put this tool into reach for many more folks to use. What they do with it is purely up to their imagination.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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