Smoke 7 Official – Spill the Beans

[BKM]

OK… now that Smoke 7 has a press release, someone start talking about it. What other features not mentioned in the release are available?

How much better is it in 64bit? Clip history? How? Text on timeline? ANy other text module improvements?

Someone tell us all about it?

BKM

[Andy Milkis]

I don’t do that much intensive HD, but the 64 bit does seem a bit more robust in HD.

Clip History: Not nearly as robust as what is in flame, but still very nice. Working example: You do a comp in the DVE, and drop that render into your timeline. If you need to revise the comp, just double click the clip in the timeline, and you’re in the DVE. Make changes, exit the DVE, and your new revised comp is automatically rendered and in the timeline.

Motion-Based TW: Absolutely rocks. I’ve worked with the motion estimator in Inferno for years. It was good…this thing is great. There is a pop-up setting for “resolution” — This may be a bit deceiving at first. All of your renders are at “full res”. This setting determines how many samples the motion TW will use to create the in betweens. Obviously, the more samples, the longer the render. The default is 1/4 res, and that seems to work well for most situations.

T/L Text: Very very nice to have this as a soft fx! There is a soft fx style set of text buttons, but the text menu is a bit clunky to navigate, given the amount of screen space you have to work with. What I prefer to do is add the soft text in the T/L, then click on the E next to the soft fx button. This takes me into the full blown text editor (just like the E next to the CC soft effect).

Gap Effects: IMHO, the best new feature in 7.0. Say you have four clips in a timeline. Add a layer to the TL, and you can add any soft FX to the “gap” above the clip. Voila! Ever wanted to add an overall CC to 5 TL clips that have already been CC’d? Or have a colour correct fade in? Forget containers! Howabout a slow push in over 10 edits! Great new feature.

Burn from the TL: If you have a burn render farm, or are considering one, Smoke 7.0 has Burn as an option in the process menu. Select some unrendered clips, click Burn, and the renders are sent to the farm while you keep working.

Cleaner Support: One of the export image options is now Cleaner. You run cleaner on a dedicated PC. You then export clips to “cleaner” and have them end up in any format that you need: MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, QT Sorenson, etc.

Keycode Support: Keycode information that is encoded in film scanned files (DPX, etc) is preserved as metadata when the images are loaded into Smoke.

Image Repeat on Import: You can select a still image to import, and repeat it on import. Select a .tif file with an attatched alpha, and select a repeat length of 10 seconds. After importing, your fill and matt clips for that image will be 10 seconds long (a 10 second soft TW is applied to the clip on import).

That tops my list… all in all, a very smooth development cycle.

Enjoy!

-Andy

[BKM]

Thanks for the info… I was able to get a little of this info out of Stephane on the forums.

A few follow ups, if I may.

1. Clip History.. that’s a cool feature that it will jump into the DVE, process, and auto replace in the edit. I wasn’t aware it would auto-replace. What if the clip is on the source area? It just gets replaced to? If you wanted the first version I assume you would just make a copy if it first.

2. Gap effects is starting to look like “containers – uncontained”. I hope there is more to it. For example, If the Gap effect effects everything below it… can you have 4 logos/graphics on screen in 4 layers, each with and axis effect, put a gap over them with another axis and have it work as a global? Now… the question is, is there a “stop gap” where it won’t effect the base/bkg layer? I am probably asking more than was the design.. just trying to see where the limits are.

Can you a mattes to gap layers? Can you container them and double up spark effects?

The main problem with containers was that you couldn’t container mattes, when you did the background went black and you no longer had pass through. Does Gap help this, I assume?

3.Soft Text – When you enter the E, to edit the text, is it as full as the full text module? Did they modify the text module so it will output mattes and unpremultiplied video, or “fat keys”?

Can you extract a matte from the soft text to use it for a spark on the timeline?

Thanks again for the help. I love new toys, and can’t wait to get my hands on it.

BKM

[Andy Milkis]

Clip History also works on clips in source areas. For example…

Lets say you load a clip from tape. You load it into the colour corrector and process. You take the result into a spark and process. You take the result of the spark into the DVE and process. If you select the result of the DVE, and select VIEW HISTORY (cannot remember the hotkey off-hand), the timeline will be replaced with a flowchart view that shows you the steps involved to get to that result clip. You cannot replace steps, like you can in Batch in Flame, but it is still very useful. I believe (I will check on Monday) that the “auto-rendering on exit” feature is only for clips copied into the timeline. History setups, BTW, are archived onto your Digibeta video archive with the media.

Gap effects — Yes on the “global” effect, but no on the “Stop Gap.” I’ve never tried to add a matte to a gap effect, but I dont’ see why you couldn’t. What is really happening under the hood is that everything below the gap effect is “merged” before the gap is applied. It is not really merged, mind you, I am only using that as an example. I have never tried to container a gap effect, but I am sure that you can.

When you click E on Soft text you get the full text module. You have the option of rendering RGB or RGBA, so you can have the alpha there for whatever you want to use it for.

HTH,

Andy

[BKM]

I’m giddy like a young school girl!

Thanks for the update… I’ll just have to wait a little while longer, but seems like a great update. Ranks right up there with v6 mixed rez.

Thanks for all the help and info.

BKM

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