[christiansen]

I agree with Victor. If your DS is not stable there is a problem with the set up. I am a beta tester of the DS and I have always found it stable. Support e-mailed me once because I sent them a cab file, and they noticed my DS had not been restarted in over 1 month. That is stable.

As for the rest of this thread, what is better? it really depends on the work you do. We do only TV commercials SD and HD, and offlines are done on Adrenaline or Xpress Pro. There was one comment that all that comes across is timewarps. Very untrue. Many things come accross. Titles, DVE, dissolves, timewarps, and most other avid effects. Plug-ins have problems and so do animattes, but it is much nicer than using EDLs. The fact that you can conform quite easy, digitize at uncompressed 10bit storage, do your CC, and create effects in the effects tree, makes this very powerful. Sure, there isn’t true 3D, and many other little things that are missing, but if you don’t use them anyway, that it’s no big deal.

I don’t have any expreience with smoke, so I can’t compare, but I do know that there is no node based compositing, and that would not work for us at all. We do a lot of effects work in our DS suites. Most people only think of DS as a conform/online tool, and never experience what it can do. We used to have a DS artist that would turn down jobs saying they aren’t possible in DS, only to find our new artist we brought in has done the exact same thing on DS.

This isn’t meant to persuade you away from smoke, becasue I’m sure it is a great product, but so is DS, its just that most people don’t realize that. Give it some serious research before passing it over. You may be surprised.

That’s just my .02 canadian cents.

Ryan

[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

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