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

Thanks for the videos but that looks like Smoke to me. The timeline is different and it's great that Batch is more or less in there with Connect FX but if anybody believes they're going to learn this thing over night I have some bad news. Maybe the timeline but if you've never done node based compositing I can tell you it takes a while to get your head around that, and the Action module, and animation editor aren't walks in the park either.

The good news is that they are offering a really great package for $3500. Unthinkable a few years ago and I've felt this day was inevitable as you can't justify $100K boxes anymore except for serious feature work. And more good news at least for me as I've felt for a number of years that FCP de-professionalized by flooding the market pretty crappy software from a basic video point of view in comparison to the non-linear stuff I used to use. Really bad scaling, no pulldown/field tools, mediocre color correction, terrible keying etc. Smoke is top notch at all of that and hopefully this ups the demand for people who know what they are doing.

I'm not trying to be a downer, I think this is awesome but when I hear how easy it will be to learn and how much better it is than everything else I'm afraid my BS detector goes off. This is a great all in one package and maybe the best all in one package available but doesn't necessarily do anything you can't do with other apps.

Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist - FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Pro

http://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos