Smoke vs Avid DS

[angus]

Hi all,

How does the toolset and general performance of DS compare with Smoke? We were about to buy a Smoke but major changes in pricing are giving us pause for thought. Discreet were offering very attractive credits on an incumbent Symphony (which we have) but that deal no longer stands, in the UK at least. At the same time Avid has slashed the price of DS HD and are now offering a decent deal on trade-in. Six months ago this was a no-brainer, now, bercause of finance it’s a lot less clear cut.

I do have reservations about the whole Avid thing, the hardware dependant aspect worries me because in the medium term you can be left with a heafty investment thats pretty much dead in the water as far as upgrades go (this is the outcome with our Symphony). Also even if you bite the bullet and buy the new hardware it’s often very expensive.

But, leaving that aside, how does the real-world performance of thew two systems compare?

thanks

Angus

PS our off-line will be Andrenaline so workflow issues are also a factor, although obviously DS has an advantage as far as that goes.

[Anonymous]

I wouldn’t see the hardware as that big a problem … allthough you may need to buy new hardware for the DS – once in a while … the software upgrade prices of Discreet products are much higher … and as long you go for a silicon based system – cpu upgrades on discreet is way over what a new Avid box will cost. There are lots of “traps” in discreets way of doing buisness … like non original owner fee – and you can’t down and upgrade very easyli.

however the tools set is much diffrent … we have 2 ds’s and they are great in features … much more “nonlinear” than smoke and flame … and the DS’s workflow seems better than smokes. But we have some stability issue with our ds’s in the moment and is considering to swap one of them with a flint / smoke – allthough I think we would use the flint the most.

just my 2 cents

jonas

[patdawg]

Jonas wrote:

I wouldn’t see the hardware as that big a problem … allthough you may need to buy new hardware for the DS – once in a while … the software upgrade prices of Discreet products are much higher … and as long you go for a silicon based system – cpu upgrades on discreet is way over what a new Avid box will cost. There are lots of “traps” in discreets way of doing buisness … like non original owner fee – and you can’t down and upgrade very easyli.

however the tools set is much diffrent … we have 2 ds’s and they are great in features … much more “nonlinear” than smoke and flame … and the DS’s workflow seems better than smokes. But we have some stability issue with our ds’s in the moment and is considering to swap one of them with a flint / smoke – allthough I think we would use the flint the most.

just my 2 cents

jonas

Jonas, have you ever worked on a smoke? From your comments it sounds like you’ve never touched one, because your arguments against it make no sense to someone like myself who has worked on both platforms for years. My best suggestion would be to get a demo of them both and see what you like. IMHO the only thing the DS would have going for it in your situation is pricing, and the ease of opening your Adrenaline sequences in DS, but smoke reads Avid OMF exports just fine, and may make that argument moot. Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions about the differences.

[angus]

Just to update,

It looks as if I didn’t quite have the full picture as far as Discreet goes. There doesn’t now seem to be that much in it financialy.

Angus

[Iggs]

Hi,

can’t really speak about Smoke since I have not spent enough time working on one to judge properly, but I’m very familiar with it’s features and capabilities …
So I’ll just put in my 2 cents re: Avid|DS

Things I like about it:

– Works natively in YCbCr (8 or 10 bit, SD and HD) but you can still work in RGB if you wish to (up to 6K)
– Easy and almost seamless AFE conform from Adrenaline (way better then OMF)
– Vector based paint and titling (2D and 3D)
– Procedural node based compositing with interactive caching right there in your tree (there’s no Batch in Smoke)
– Advanced Expressions (coming in 7.6)
– Tons of plug-ins (Sapphire, Tinder, Monsters … etc.)
– Spatialy and Dynamicaly resolution independent (up to 6Kx6K)
– 4 channel pipeline (RGBA) so you don’t have to constantly worry about fill/matte
– Properly deals with Premultiplied and Not-Premultiplied images
– Per node Frame/Field processing selection
– Per node 8, 16 and 32 bit (float) processing
– 16 bit integer values go from -2 to +2 so no more clipped super whites and super blacks when converting from YCbCr
– Great media management and interactive caching
– Data conform from DPX files (using time code in DPX file header)
– Sample accurate audio editing with VST plug-ins
– OMF export to ProTools
– Photoshop file import preserves layers, transfer modes and opacity
– Illustrator (EPS, AI) outlines import with fill and stroke color
– AVI and QT reference files for sending to another compression software (they take no time to export and just link to files on the storage drive)

Things I think DS still needs:

– Better Scripting (right now it’s limited to I/O)
– 3D compositing environment (has a 3D DVE, but not as nice as Discreet, I’m not a big fan of Discreet’s Action either, crappy OpenGL … would be nice to see something with raytracing)
– Better integration with XSI (via a new 3D environment)
– Better secondary color correction
– some keying improvements (mind you, you can get Keylight2 … it’s awesome)
– some tracking improvements

Yeah, WinXP sucks and IRIX rocks but hardware is cheaper then SGI. Interaction is a bit slower on PCs but rendering is faster.

Our work is 100% commercial (Pepsi, Chrysler, Frito-Lay, Wrigley’s, FedEx … etc.). There’s always lots of people involved in the process and for us, DS really proved very flexible and fast in the stressfull world of commercial post. Plus, it provides us with a seamless workflow from offline to online and audio post. I run XSI on the same box as my DS in case I need some “3D support”.

Cheers, I.

[Anonymous]

Hi Igg’s …

Sounds like you’re a hughe DS fan. And I understand why. I’ve been on DS since 3.0 (before that I used flame) and really love DS for it’s workflow – which I think is much faster and straight forward than smoke. I share you good and bads re. DS. However we’re pretty close to skip one of our two DS’s … since we feel the amount of bugs and unstability is taking over … and we can’t live with that doing high end commercial with client attended sessions.

We are looking into flint on linux maybe with a smoke companion license. I see flint as a better online finishing tool than smoke – since it now got a timeline in batch. I really think that smoke NEEDS a BATCH TREE – before it compare fully with DS – that is why I would rather go for flint – especially if a new HD flint is launched at NAB 😉

I’m very interrested in your opnions on DS bugs and stabillity for high end use – and what you guys thinks is best smoke / flint or both … any feedback on the stabillity on flint would also be great.

A third option for us would be FCP and shake – but I don’t think it’s 100% ready for client attended session, where you wanna have fast feedback and a easy workflow.

[Iggs]

Hey Jonas,

yeah I like DS … it provides me with tools, speed and flexibility to execute the creative, I would not be using it if it didn’t … 😉

As far as bugs are concerned, EVERY piece of software has bugs … every piece of hardware with or without firmware has (some sort of) bugs, it’s the nature of the beast and it’s never going to change! Users will ask for more features and devs will put them in and software will inevitably go through a period where something is not going to work as planned or something that got broken in the process of adding those new features. We (users) should be aware of the bugs (known issues) and aware of the workarounds and devs should fix those problems as soon as possible.

The one issue with DS is (I find) that people don’t think of it as a “system” but rather as “just a piece of software” that runs on WinXP (“hey, that’s what I have at home” attitude). They do not take the time to set it properly and/or they load up tons of junk on the system and then wonder why it doesn’t work (not saying that’s what you did) … DS artist that worked here before me had Bearshare and Napster installed on the box … WHAT ?!? I’m sorry but … do that at home, not on a $250K (CAN) system. When installed and configured properly DS works like a champ … minus all the “known” issues … 😉

Cheers, I.

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