Autodesk Smoke 2010 for Mac

Smoke on Mac: It’s Here

Big news: Autodesk has released Smoke on Mac. Smoke is Autodesk’s editorial finishing solution. It combines editing, color correction, and compositing into one application.

This is an important release for a couple reasons. Firstly, price: what used to be available only as a $150,000 turnkey Linux system is now available, software only, for just under $15,000 (around $50-60k with new hardware). Secondly, QuickTime: Smoke on Mac uses the QuickTime libraries, so it can understand QuickTime acquisition/intermediate codecs (ProRes!) natively, instead of forcing users to transcode to image sequences. Thirdly, workflow: Smoke can live on an Final Cut Pro edit system, import FCP timelines via XML, and reference the original FCP media with transcoding.

I went to a demo earlier this week in New York, and seeing Smoke in action was impressive. The demo emphasized the Final Cut workflow, basic keying, and motion tracking. The workflow is tight, the rendering is fast, and the output is beautiful.

The Business Case

Watching the demo, Smoke didn’t strike me as being more capable per se than my existing tools; there wasn’t anything there I couldn’t accomplish with my Final Cut Pro / Cinema 4D /After Effects / Color tool-chain. However, it is way faster, and way easier at many finishing tasks, especially pulling keys and motion tracking. It’s also all available in a single application, so baking effects, round-tripping, and managing edits is greatly simplified. While Smoke won’t automatically make your projects look better, it will simplify your workflow and reduce your finishing time.

For shops whose primary business is editing and compositing, or who frequently do client sessions, this is almost a no-brainer. For shops like mine whose work is more graphics-driven and unsupervised, I’m not sure Smoke would become a daily part of the workflow.

For freelancers, I’d suspect that this release will create incredible demand for talented Smoke artists, and there is no time like the present to get up to speed.

There are just a few things that give me pause about the system, and that are keeping my Amex in my wallet. There are currently no plugins (called “Sparks” in Autodesk nomenclature) available, limiting what Smoke can accomplish natively. I imagine this is temporary, and I’m eagerly watching GenArts and The Foundry to see how they react. Smoke’s built-in color corrector, with a primary and three secondaries, strikes me as a big step down from Color. Also, Smoke is qualified only on NVIDIA Quadro cards, and Apple Color prefers ATI Radeons, so it may be necessary to maintain multiple finishing workstations, defeating the point of the “all-on-one-box” approach.

This Is Not iSmoke

Smoke is the first product in a long time targeted at the middle tier of post-production. Its price, system requirements, and learning curve put it beyond the reach of many low-end shops and freelancers, but it is well within range of serious small shops as well as the larger houses.

It’s worth noting that Smoke on Mac is not a watered-down version of its turnkey Brother. It has the same feature set as Smoke HD; it’s only missing Batch from Smoke Advanced.

Where There’s Smoke…

I’m really curious to see what the ramifications of Smoke on Mac turn out to be. Is Autodesk dipping their toe in the software-only water, or would they like to exit the turnkey workstation market? Will we ever see a Mac version of Lustre? How will other high-end developers react?

Autodesk has released a 30-day demo of Smoke on Mac, so please: ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

This means that the application can access more RAM, which will give us a huge productivity boost in our widescreen, ultra-high resolution work. Larger image buffers, longer RAM preview caches, better image caching during renders—while we’ll have to wait and see what performance boosts result, the workflow improvement will be big and immediate.

AJA Ki Pro

I am a big fan of Apple’s ProRes codec; their marketing line is “uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes.” We’ve been using it in-house for video since its release with Final Cut Studio 2, and we’ve been really pleased with the compression.

I am also a fan of AJA’s Kona line of capture cards; the quality and level of service is unsurpassed.

Needless to say, when AJA announced the Ki Pro, a digital recorder that accepts component analog, SDI, and HDMI and records directly to ProRes files, I was intrigued. This device previewed very well at NAB, and should be available for sale by the end of the month. I can’t wait to see how much this will smooth out digital workflows from acquisition to post.

Flow is a revolutionary piece of software for designers—a visual workflow manager. It tracks files as you work on them, keeping tabs on the different versions and dependencies. It promises no more lost files, no more version hassles, and no more dependency nightmares when one project relies on changing media from another project.

OpenCL Diagram showing integration between CPU and GPU

The Khronos Group announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL spec earlier this week.  OpenCL is a new industry-standard framework that will allow the powerful but specialized chips on graphics cards to be used for crunching numbers, just like the general purpose CPU in a computer.

That’s a lot of geek-speak to say that a lot of time-consuming multimedia tasks are about to get a lot faster.

Today’s graphics cards are capable of some serious mathematics, but they’ve always been restrained to using it to push pixels live to the screen.  Essentially, a graphics card contains thousands of cores, all of which work on a small piece of the screen image in parallel, or at the same time.  A general purpose CPU, on the other hand, typically has fewer cores (today’s most powerful desktops have 4 or 8), so they must process operations serially, or one after another.

With technology like OpenCL, a GPU’s raw processing power can be harnessed for some general computing tasks which can be broken down into independent steps which can run at the same time, like complex simulations or video compression.

The next version of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6, expected for release in 2009, will feature this technology.  The upshot for media producers like myself is that sometime in the next year, we will spend less time rendering and compressing our work, freeing up more time to perfect the design itself.

LG Commercial Stretch Display

In live events, we use non-standard, wide aspect ratios all the time.  3:1 (three times as wide as it is tall) is not uncommon.

Now, LG Electronics has released two extra-wide LCD displays.  The LG “Stretch” series introduces 29″ and 38″ models, with aspect ratios of 2.85:1 and 3.43:1, respectively.  They feature RGB and DVI inputs, and RS-232C control.  Resolution on the 29″ model is 1366 by 480, and the 38″ model is 1366 by 398.

Designed specifically for signage, I expect these displays will be popping up in retail and hospitality very quickly.

For events, they’d be perfect for digital agenda signage as well as delay screens for widescreen shows.

Dataton Watchout 4 Recently Released

Dataton has recently released a new version of Watchout, a software-based multi-display system. This latest release introduces some great new features for live events.

Compositions—Cleaner Timelines

One of the biggest new features is compositions. You can now build a composition in Watchout that’s just like a comp in After Effects—a collection of animated media elements that functions in the timeline as a media element itself.

In prior Watchout releases, making show flow changes in the timeline was very time consuming and it was too easy to make a mistake, because you had to drag around dozens or hundreds of cues to reorder them. Now, cues can be grouped together into compositions based on the show flow, so the show’s main timeline may only have a handful of elements.

Also, because compositions work like any other piece of media, it’s now possible to build free-running animated loops directly in Watchout. In prior releases, you could easily build loops, but they couldn’t run independently of the main timeline, so it was a major challenge to exit loops cleanly and proceed with the show.

Alternative Timelines—Animation Anytime

Watchout 4 for the first time allows the creation of alternative timelines which can be started at any time, running on top of the main timeline.

Watchout has always run on a timeline metaphor, where one cue flows into another linearly; trying to jump around the timeline made jarring on-screen cuts. Video switchers like Encore or Spyder, on the other hand, work with a preset metaphor; all the cues are unordered, and it’s up to the operator to call the next cue.

Watchout’s new alternative timelines allow the programmer to build animations ahead of time that can be called up over the main timeline at any time. It could be a logo build, or a movie cue, or an entire presentation. An alternative timeline could be a safety to use to transition between segments if there’s an in-show change to the show flow.

There are big possibilities here, because one of Watchout’s biggest weaknesses in live events—being stuck in a timeline—can now be addressed with a little forethought and design.

Export Movies—Approvals & Archives

Watchout used to be the end of the line with respect to content flow. Once you built a show in Watchout, there was no way to get it out.

Now, Watchout exports movies. This will be a huge time saver during pre-production.  No more previsualization in After Effects or low-res previews captured with Camtasia—now we can build an animation in Watchout, export it, compress it, and send it out for client review.

Keeping content for archive just became doable, too.  A widescreen show can be exported at high resolution, then scaled down, cropped, or pan-and-scanned for reuse elsewhere.

External Control—Playing Nicely with Others

Watchout can now send show control commands over serial ports, TCP/IP, or DMX.  Since Watchout is already timeline-based, it’s a logical place to put show control for scripted sequences.  This feature is certainly nice for live events, where you could synchronize lighting, but it’s critical in multimedia installations, where Watchout can now run the entire show.

Top to Bottom—Turn that Timeline Upside-Down

One of Watchout’s frustrating historical quirks has been its upside-down compositing order. The bottom-most layers of the timeline actually appeared on top in display, and the upper-most layers appeared in the background. This makes sense in a node-based compositor, but it’s backwards for a layer-based system.

In Watchout 4, this is finally flipped around, making it consistent with other layer-based compositors, like Photoshop or After Effects.

Summary

I think this is a really important release for Watchout, especially for live events designers like myself. Dataton has addressed some of the system’s major shortcomings for use in events, and I’m looking forward to putting Watchout’s new capabilities to use.