Re: Why Smoke may never export FCP7 XML, and what to do about it.

I don't think that Company 3 or any other house using Resolve was too happy when it dropped 100K in price a few years back either. Right now, you can get arguably the world's greatest color application for free and it has a way better tracker than Smoke built in.

The hiccup for everyone on this new Smoke system is going to be doing great color and using great tracking -- the way you would in Resolve.

The other hiccup is having all your source material become DPX image sequences which necessitates a lot of fast storage (hence the promo picture of a Thunderbolt RAID next to the iMac). BTW: you can't get 160+ MB/s from GbE for shared storage to handle using this system over GbE network the way most shops like Walter's are using nowadays. DPX image sequences are bandwidth intensive. So that means fast local storage -- not GbE for working on a project in Smoke.

Smoke 2013 is a move by Autodesk to stay relevant. It looks like a great start. It's a dreamy idea to stay in the timeline and switch between modules. I am looking forward to testing it. But it's a matter of time before Autodesk will have to give up even more.

I do hope they will let users get XML out so you can go to Resolve. But it will be less powerful than having all your layers separated so you don't have to track and create as many secondaries. And who wants to deal with the media management of going to another application? I think the promise of Smoke is not having to do this.