Smoke 7 Roundtable

In this week’s fxpodcast, we discuss the recent release of Autodesk’s Smoke 7 editing product. Our two guests were beta testers for the release and are able to provide insight into the product as they have been using the product for months. We also talk about Smoke’s support for the Final Cut Pro XML standard with Stephane Labrie of Autodesk. What exactly is XML and is it simply an industry buzzword for a text file?

Part one of the podcast is our Smoke roundtable. We speak with Andy Milkis of Spontaneous in New York and Patrick Hausler of Evil Twin Productions in LA.

In part two Stephane Labrie, product designer for Smoke and Fire, chats with us about the support of Apple’s Final Cut Pro XML. This feature has been in the software before the recent release, but has really caught on with facilities using Final Cut Pro systems. For some of the more technical nitty gritty, you can find out more about Apple’s XML interchange format at the Apple developer website.

Labrie also talks about what exactly XML is. In reality it is simply a text file, but written in a way in which it is easily readable and navigable. Manufacturers such as Apple, Autodesk, Assimilate, and others which don’t begin with the letter “A” have been actively promoting XML support such as writing their files as text. Yet it is only as good as the manufacturer’s documentation of the standard as well as their support of another manufacturer’s standard. Unless you have a staff of in house coders who can help read, translate, and use the data in the XML files for other purposes.

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