What´s the best? Avid DS, Smoke or Piranha

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

This is my first post here. Since i love compositing and I´m looking for the best solution mixing Editing and Compositing features, i would like to know, what´s the best solution: Avid DS, Smoke or Piranha?

I would like to know your opinions.

cheers
Sonny

[Andre Pereira]

as my finishing weapon of choice SMOKE

effects weapon of choice FLAME/INFERNO

given i can choose only one at any price range

[christiansen]

Sonny,
It really depends on what you want to do. I use Avid DS myself, and I love it. It is a very nice ‘all-in-one’ box that has great editing features, node based compositing, and a great audio mixer and effects. The downside is that it is missing some key features that high end compositing software (like flame) has. There is no true 3D environment, the ability to soften individual sides on shapes, tracker isn’t great, and many other things that made us buy combustion for tougher shots. This is not to say you can’t achieve very complex comps in DS, I have done so in the past, but for the majority of the work we do, DS does a great job. I have never used Smoke or Piranha, but I know smoke doesn’t have node based compositng, and after using it every day, I couldn’t go without it now. It is great. Even for doing just simple super work, you can easily and quickly create some pretty cool stuff.

Also, price wise, Avid DS is pretty cheap compared to Autodesk. It also handles many different SD and HD formats and supports many file types. Comforming from Avid off-line machines and quite easy too.

I realize this isn’t very helpful for a decision for you, but generally DS doesn’t get to much credit, so I wanted to give you some input on it to help you make your choice. It’s a great box, but if really high end composite work is your thing, it’s not a good choice. If Editing or Conforming with doing some compositing, effects and super work, it’s great.

Research and make the best choice for you. Good luck with your decision.

Ryan

[Fusion CIStudios]

Another option is to utilize Final Cut 5 with Shake 4.1 – FCP is only as good as the video card you have in the computer. That is something to keep in mind. With high end Avid and Autodesk products they include powerful hardware to keep things clean.
The MAC approach is very affordable and with a Bluefish, Decklink, or NIVIDA capture card you can achieve very professional results. If you choose the MAC approach I suggest using eSATA drives and connections. Very affordable and eSATA on the G5 will give you a data rate of 300mbps. Which is ideal for uncompressed 8 and 10bit applications.

Overall I suggest using AVID as your primary editor, I prefer it over SMOKE. Mostly because I’ve been using it for 10 years and the UI is kinder towards editors. You may want a seperate compositing bay with Flame, Toxic, Nuke, or Shake. If you’re going PC – Nuke and Avid are great combinations.

[Javad Ghasemi]

and Nuke?

is really cool? I try to learn Nuke some months ago, but looks not so good yet. Shake and DF, both looks better than Nuke.

There are no paint features, timeline….

[Dejan]

sonny wrote:

and Nuke?

is really cool? I try to learn Nuke some months ago, but looks not so good yet. Shake and DF, both looks better than Nuke.

There are no paint features, timeline….

Don’t get fooled by it’s interface. Take a deeper look at it and you will realise that what you said it’s not true.

It does have paint (a vector one), per parameter timeline and a bunch of time tools that are great. And unless you’re doing motion graphics you won’t miss a timeline “overview”, believe me.

In the end it all depends on the type of work you’re doing. If it’s film compositing and/or 3D compositing none of the tools available on the market today beats Nuke for several reasons. Float point from start to end that works, awesome OpenEXR support, among many others.

Nuke is a bit like Houdini but in the compositing realm in some aspects, you do have to change the way you think in some ways. And once you do you won’t miss the old the way.

cheers,

[Kjell]

iraflowers wrote:

Overall I suggest using AVID as your primary editor, I prefer it over SMOKE. Mostly because I’ve been using it for 10 years and the UI is kinder towards editors.

you know, ordinarily i would agree with you about Avid’s superior UI for editors but as a guy who started out on Avid then moved to Smoke i find the smoke UI to be much more flexible. the gestural interface is crazy fast when you get accustomed to it and you can use all the traditional cut/insert/overwrite edit commands just like Avid but with the richness of being able to tumble your timeline elements around in a lot of different ways that to me seem more natural and intuitive.

for my purposes it is just a completely open interface that lets the user dictate how they work, not the other way around.

the big HUGE drawback to Smoke for my money is it’s lack of support for anything other than digitized media or imported file sequences. the fact they it cannot ingest Quicktime media natively is absurd in this era. if you are going to be working in an environment where you will routinely need to incorporate media from various other edit platforms (FCP, Avid, even Premiere) then i’d suggest going with the FCP or Avid platform. otherwise you are opening up the door to some profound headaches.

[rizko angga]

if you can afford it go for Smoke!

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