Autodesk Inc. recently announced Smoke 2013 on the Mac. According to the literature they have decreased the price from $15,000.00 US down to $3499.00 US. They have expanded the “authorized systems” that it can run on to include Macbook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Minis. They have brought the single most sought after feature from flame to it (node based compositing environment) , and they have redesigned the interface to make it easier to learn for non smoke users. So as a 15 year avid/fcp editor and a 10year flame/smoke artist what do I think of all of this?
My initial thought when I heard the news was, it’s about time! In the last 3 years or so my computer world has gotten smaller and more portable. So just the ability to run this on my macbook book is worth the cost of admission to me. Whether it can replace FCP or Avid as my creative editor is yet to be seen and I will certainly run it through it’s paces to see how good the new media management stacks up. Although I didn’t see any mention of multi-cam which would defiantly be a deal breaker for larger projects. Not in the fact that I couldn’t use it at all just in the fact that I couldn’t use it as a creative editor.
The new Media Hub seems promising but until I run a few hundred to a thousand clips through it I’ll no idea if it organizes as well as Avid or FCP.
The CFX which I’m assuming is what is called Batch FX in Flame will hopefully be just that, Batch FX, with a different name as to be able to differentiate the products for marketing. But if it’s some weird stripped down version that only kind of does what I want it to do, or has some weird limitation like you can only use 6 nodes or something ridiculous like that I will not be a happy camper.
Everything else seem to be the same which is great because at this price point it should be put on every box that has FCP or AVID which I’m sure is what Autodesk is hoping for.
All in all I’m very excited to get my hands on it and see how well it runs on my macbook pro. It may just be the thing that replaces my FCP .
