@Walter Soyka

Great response walter s., and yes, I totally agree with pretty much everything you said here. It is certainly friendlier looking from a bringing in media perspective and a right clickable perspective. I agree that these are all big advancements for smoke.

I was just saying that from an editing perspective, of a source record monitor and the actual using of the timeline, it seems pretty similar despite some new icons and menus.

ConnectFX does seem like a big improvement from the desktop/action workflow which drove me crazy. You can composite your shot in action, then you realize you need to add grain to your plate. Wait, there isn't a grain node in action. You have to kick your plate out to desktop, add grain, reimport it into action. A confusing and unnecessary step.

I also agree, I want to download in June and give it a shot. One of my biggest worries is the support and back end. There are three are four support programs to control the gateway, the backburner, etc. etc. that came with prior smokes. We often had trouble connecting to network drives and always had to restart the gateway. I know they improved that in one of the 2012 revs, but it would be great if it is all totally gone from 2013. I was a smoke assistant in 2005, then we eventually switched to FCP and AE workflow. I thought returning to smoke for mac 2011 and 2012 it would finally feel modern and like it made sense. It didn't. Hopefully 2013 will.

I've discussed smoke with long time smoke artists and engineering staff from my previous company. They all said, "oh I love smoke", then you ask what about the inconsistencies and support end. They all more or less say, oh yeah "it is retarted, but powerful as hell" haha. And, "you need a full time engineering staff to troubleshoot it". Again, these are my biggest concerns, not how hard it is to learn. I can learn it if I think it does what I want and in a smart modern way. In 2012 I didn't. It felt just like 10 different apps, just like fcp to ae to mocha to photoshop type workflows do. Maybe less transferring of media, definitely, but different workflows per module that were developed over 20 years and "tacked on".

I have all of the respect for Walter and his integrity,and advice so like others here, I will wait and see what has made him so impressed.