Smoke 2013 trial available

[cgbier]

The trial version of Autodesk Smoke 2013 is now available for free download
http://usa.autodesk.com/smoke-for-mac/
It is said to be fully functional until the paid version comes out.

[HueyNRolf]

Mac only, eh?
Still, it looks really good.

[cgbier]

Been playing around with it a bit. Thanks to Larry Jordan's one-hour intro series on Autodesk's youtube channel the jump into Smoke is pretty easy. If you are used to FCS or Premiere, you are on familiar ground. The UI won't win a beauty contest in 5000 years. It's very functional and thought-out though, a bit mouse centric as is expected with a package like this. No three button mouse needed, trackpad works perfectly!

Editing is not Smoke's strong point though. It is simple to do, but not as fast and fluid as in FCP X.
There's a great audio mixer built in, but no SFX.
Titling simply sucks. Best to do that in Motion and import it to Smoke.

Where does it shine? Smoke is a Compositor/Finisher. Its main strength lies in FX. These can be applied to a clip from the timeline. The most powerful is the nodal FX editor though. It's easy to use for simple things, and the sky is the limit on what you can do.

I'm testing Smoke on my 2010 15" MBP. It has enough horsepower to deal with the stuff I've done so far - just a bit FX and minor compositing. Thanks to OpenGL Smoke is not very picky with GPUs. If your system runs FCP X, it also runs Smoke.

There's no capture function in Smoke. The whole workflow is file based. You either import your clips from a hard drive or FCP XML.

As said, I haven't done much with it yet, but I love it so far.... Where do I get 3500 bucks now?