Interesting and informative read, thanks!
I'm glad you pointed out that Smoke is not a grading app in the strict sense:
Is the Color Grading as good as a dedicated grading app like DaVinci Resolve? No, which is why they have Lustre, a dedicated grading app. Of course, the image quality is just as good, and there’s really not much you can’t accomplish with Smoke’s Grading tools, but you can generally work faster, and achieve complicated grades with lots of secondaries, and do things like versioning much easier in Resolve, or Lustre.
I think this is a very important point to recognise. Yes, you can grade in Smoke and get good results but you can grade a whole lot quicker in a dedicated grading environment.
So from that point of view, although it's a useful tool for doing a whole range of different things under one roof, it's still a compromise solution, albeit the best compromise we're likely ever to see.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
