Re: The Fog Thickens

[Chris Kenny] "And Smoke? Honestly, I want to find some excuse for us to buy it -- it's now in that sort of ideal price range where it's cheap enough for us as a small post house, but expensive enough that most people won't buy it for themselves, meaning some people might conceivably give us money because we have it and they don't. But I can't quite figure out what we'd use it for."

You said it, brother. It's why I started the "Does this change anything" thread. Looking for the same excuse. Let me know if you come up with it.

Bottom line, in its case, seems to be converging toward the fact that it would still need to support some kind of round tripping and shared metadata because I use MochaPro for perspective tracking and Resolve for grade. And even from what the evangelists are demonstrating and blogging about, the Smoke tools aren't in the same league. The only thing I can see it useful for is its integration of true 3D compositing and then it becomes just another graphics/composite tool -- and although Shake is now well beyond its best-before date, I still find it amazingly useful. Its my #1 diagnostic go-to simply because it is so close to the core code -- I'm not interested in glossy interfaces, holistic databases, or any of that ultra-sophistication that only serves to hide basic functionality. You could say that about the AvidMediaFiles source media model, which has been complained about ad nauseum the same way that Final Cut's "anywhere" media management causes clips to go offline. If that's a deal-breaker for picking an NLE... alrighty then.

BTW, I'm getting really tired of this "where the puck is going to be". Its just a bad analogy, of the many, casually re-purposed by someone who apparently doesn't/didn't understand ice hockey in much depth. If you were to check out my geographical location, you would see that the guy who actually coined the phrase played here for quite a while. And while its nice to think that it alludes to some kind of prescience or Hidden Understanding, you also have to comprehend the degree to which the game bent to his individual force of gravity, that was like the Einsteinian "warped space-time" which really means that the puck position, like gravity, was a tendency that found Mr. Gretzky, and why not if you are the leading scorer of all time? I accept there is some Heisenberg uncertainty in the causality exchange, but pretending to know how the great debate of how media production will be executed in the future is making some hard-to-support assumptions.

Off-topic, of course, but while on the ice, its profoundly discouraging that the game in question has evolved to deal with the "skill" players with a strategy we know now to be called "concussion". But that's Darwin, right?

"Are we not men?" Arrrghh.

jPo

You mean "Old Ben"? Ben Kenobi?