Toxik is here...

[dapeter]

finally!



http://www4.discreet.com/toxik/

[paul_round]

Not sure about having to buy a minimum of 5 tho'

Paul
Peerless

[TurboWidget]

Maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be. Where do you read a minimum purchase of 5 units ?

Cheers
TW

[TurboWidget]

It's not just my eyesight that's going, it's my brain as well :roll:

The 5 seat requirement is mentioned right here on fxguide. I was scouring the discreet link.

Can't see the woods for the trees !

TW

[paul_round]

Yeah, also there's quite a hefty cost for support. I'd love to see it take over from Shake, but, what with 5 seats minimum plus the compulsory $2500 support, that comes to over $40K. Sorry Discreet (oops Autodesk!), but that's far too much for most Filmhouses, especially when Shake is so well established. I could probably swing 1 here to start with, then people could get to see how it works, play with it, then the demand is there, but if I were to go to the powers that be and ask for 40K, then I know what the answer would be.
Sorry, just my 2 cents worth.

Paul
Peerless

[imported_johnmont]

Yeah, also there's quite a hefty cost for support. I'd love to see it take over from Shake, but, what with 5 seats minimum plus the compulsory $2500 support, that comes to over $40K.

That's true, Paul -- I imagine that they'll offer a single seat eventually. Autodesk lists an individual price for Toxik, but its simply not available at the introduction.

The support -- aka collaboration -- does raise an eyebrow, but if the collaboration features are really as impressive as they seem it might be worth it from a facility standpoint.

[eltopo]

It doesn't make sense as a one seat application, the whole idea is to share in realtime. If it has only one seat you don't need the Oracle database.... so I think it will be 5+ seats only...

[paul_round]

I disagree, with a new application like this you want as many people to experience it and produce the demand for it as possible. With such a high start up cost, this could be difficult, I know from experience that asking for $5k for a standalone machine is far more feasible than $40K, think back to when shake first appeared, it saturated the film market because it was so accessible, you could download a fully working version and use it in production for 30 days.

Paul
Peerless

[Pinionist]

I hope that this would change as it happened with Softimage|XSI package, which was at first offered at price of 14k $ and then (thanks to the competition), price was lowered to somewhat accessible standards, including XSI Foundation for 500$.

Seems very interesting piece of software though.

[TurboWidget]

I think it's really tough to establish what the price and minimum seat situation should be because it's a very unique kind of product.
The value lies in all the underlying technology that "glues" the Toxik stations together, and it's not practical to benchmark 5 Toxik seats against 5 Shake seats, even on shared storage. And it's equally impractical to base the price on the toolset. I've heard that combustion has a broader feature set than the initial release of Toxik will have (although it will grow over time). So who would pay $6500 for an app that offers less than $1000 combustion ? Having said that, it wasn't so long ago that combustion was a $5500 piece of software.
There's a lot of unchartered water behind and beneath Toxik and I think it's premature to start making assuptions before we've all had a chance to see the final release in action.
I also think I've contradicted myself several times in this post :)
Its been a long week
TW

[eltopo]

I don't think is that expensive. For a big house It is pretty affordable, the thing is that I don't think it would erode Shake's market, Apple is the 10000 Punds gorilla so it can do a lot of things including starting a price war that Discreet can't afford

[empi]

Turbowidget - you are pretty accurate in your interpretation

Standalone Toxik is planned just not part of the initial release. It requires extra R&D work to create. Since a lot of the toxik architecture was based on trying to solve data management problems that are really only relevant to multi-user environmenets, this is the way v1 is structured.

We agree that the lack of a standalone version will limit market appeal initially - but we have set our expectations that the first year will be a ramp up year anyway. We know we need a few more things (such as Linux support, which we are also working on) to broaden Toxik's appeal. We are not expecting to sell Toxik by the boatload or even that people will throw out their existing pieplines for Toxik - that would be really unrealistic on our part. Film pipelines do not switch rapidly and so Toxik uses open scripting (python) and data (XML) paradigms so that it can be more easily integrated to the existing workflow and grow from there.

This has generally been the case of v1 products for film. then as they mature their market appeal broadens. Today Toxik offers a few unique things that we feel might be of interest to help augment parts of the creative workflow at some sites. We will focus on broadening our base from there.

maurice

[TurboWidget]

Gathered my thoughts a bit more clearly.
What I was trying to say in my previous post is, we've had a variety of non-linear tools for ages, but post has largely remained a "linear" process. For eg, editing has still followed the 'off-line' - 'on-line' - 'audio final mix' path, which means that onlining had to wait for the offline EDL, and audio mix couldn't begin until the online had been completed. Likewise for vfx, basic wire removal would have to preceed blue screen keying etc before the plate could be used in a final comp. Toxik appears to be the first commercially available system that creates a "non-linear" workflow. It's a bit like having your own ILM - Sabre set-up !
Another positive report I've heard is that Toxik doesn't use the stone file system so you're not locked into using stone disk arrays. If you offset this against the initial costs of Toxik I guess you could put a kick-ass system together for a relatively reasonable outlay. Toxik is obviously geared towards the DI / film market and we all know that 2K/4K data eats up disk space at a scary rate.
TW.

[empi]

Yes, Toxik is sold as software-only and designed to work with standard NAS, SAN or local filesystems. Wiretap will also allow it to read data of other Discreet systems that use the stone filesystem.

Toxik also has a caching mechanism designed to provide greater interactivity to the artist workstation. The cache can be an internal harddrive, or if you want more disk-based playback performance can even be a locally attached FC storage array - the cache runs on the standard filesystem (NTFS in the case of a windows workstation). For stations that do not have sufficient bandwidth images are cached to RAM and region of interest can be used to focus to enable the srtist to maximize the performance of their playback whatever their configuration

[artisan]

any1 worked with Toxik Yet ?
if yes please tell us if it good to buy it or not :)

[opus13]

any1 worked with Toxik Yet ?
if yes please tell us if it good to buy it or not :)

it hasnt even been manufactured yet, much less shipped.

[patdawg]

Uhh, it actually has been manufactured and shipped to a few places that were beta sites.