@Paul Carlin

I'm not sure about a dramatic price drop. CS Production Premium costs $1699, and so does Sapphire for After Effects. Avid Media Composer costs $2495, and Sapphire for Avid costs $2800.

So at $4000 for the $3495 Smoke, a $500 premium isn't that far out of line with pricing for other hosts. We'll see what happens when Smoke actually ships later in the year - maybe a few hundred dollars less?

But that's okay with me. Sapphire is Sapphire and deserves a premium price. When I worked at Boris FX, we had a difficult time at first finding traction with Continuum Complete, even though it was nearly half the price of Sapphire.

Continuum now has plenty of traction of course, but the fact is that I don't know of too many Sapphire sales that Boris displaced. Quite the contrary. I discovered when I started work at Avid that most of the people I know who received Boris Continuum Complete BUNDLED FREE with Media Composer STILL BOUGHT Sapphire.

Thanks to a supremely robust effects architecture, you can DO more with Sapphire in Smoke than most other places....but based on the relative price to other hosts, it's hard to imagine the price coming down much further.

The good news: 5-6 months to start saving before the new Smoke is released!

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou