Can anyone give me feedback on using Smoke as an editor.
By that I mean using it to start and finish an edited project at full resolution (no offline-online), editing music to length, clipping soundbites, building nats loops, responsive bidirectional trimming etc
Then colour grading that finished timeline (render times etc)
I'm mainly comparing this with a Symphony Nitris at the moment.
Re: Smoke as an editor by moody glasgow on May 9, 2008 at 4:17:40 pm
I've never worked on a Symphony Nitris, and the last Avid I worked on was a Media Composer Adrenaline, so you can take what I have to say with that bias. I do have a background as an "offline" editor, so I do know what it takes to edit something together from scratch.
The Smoke is a great editor, as long as you have experience working on it (just like most editors). I always say the Smoke is hands down the best editor/finishing system money can buy. It has good editing capabilities, excellent compositing, color correcting, plus paint, etc. If I had a job to work on from start to finish I would rather work on a Smoke then an Avid or a FCP system. Unfortunately, a Smoke is expensive...
Re: Smoke as an editor by Bruno Sargeant on May 9, 2008 at 9:25:04 pm
Hi Moody, Trevor,
The entry price for Smoke a Smoke HD system, is ~$64k.
This is turn key and includes the HP8600 dual quad core workstation, with I believe 12Gb of memory, an Nvidia 5600 graphics card with SDI output, an AJA video card, Lucid Audio, Eizo graphics display, tablet extenders and cables
Re: Smoke as an editor by Trevor Asquerthian on May 10, 2008 at 6:13:36 am
Moody,
I hear what you say about Smoke being the tool you would use for a start to finish job.
Reading between the lines, it seems to me you are saying that the Smoke is not a *great* editor? Where would you put its weaknesses?
(I can say that your Adrenaline experiences are probably on a par with my SN experiences. I have to reboot at least twice a day and the timeline often gets dog slow.)
Re: Smoke as an editor by moody glasgow on May 12, 2008 at 7:07:07 am
Honestly, there are a couple minor things that make it not as fast as editing on an Avid. Like, not having trim 1 and trim 10 mapped to buttons for quick trimming of edits. (Maybe its in the Smoke also, and I haven't used it.)
Actually I don't really use trim mode in the Smoke, it's just easier to click and drag a cut point to trim.
As far as reboots or sluggishness goes... Reboots are generally rare. And the only time I've seen sluggishness on my system was when I've filled my storage past 95%, or when I was working some 8k x 8k files and doing some CC, garbage matting and some serious anti-aliasing... That was painful.
The specs listed on that system for 64k, is alot better then my system... I think I'm almost 2 generations behind that...
2 Dual Cores, 8GB RAM, and I only have just over 1TB...
Re: Smoke as an editor by Chris Borjis on Jun 18, 2008 at 8:16:16 pm
I paid just over $ 250,000 for smoke* 3.6.1 on sgi octane hardware with 1 hour of uncompressed sd storage back around late 90's.
An amazing system for what it did at the time.
Nowadays Final Cut Pro is much more suited to my needs as I can output to dvd, web or tape all within a few mere clicks. Can't do this on smoke* but thats not really what its made for.
smoke* has a much more difficult learning curve if you are used to traditional editing system layouts that everyone else employs:
A Timeline, Bins and source/record windows all on the same screen.
In that regard I can't really say I like the smoke interface, but
I would never question or doubt the stability and real time power it has. For that alone there are studios that have to have that.
