Some questions about smoke 2013

[benmolony]

Hi,

I've been trying out smoke 2013 ext 1 on my mac pro with a blackmagic decklink hd extreme 3d.

Things are mostly going well, but I do have a few questions.

1) When inserting to a tape (HDCAM) I set an in point and out point in the timeline around the clips I want to insert.

When smoke does the insert it correctly cues the tape but incorrectly puts the media at the start of the timeline at the selected timepoint, not the clips between the in and out points.

I have been making subclips and inserting these sequences to get this happening but just wondering if there was a way to do this correctly ... am I doing something wrong or is it how smoke does things?

2) About making subclips .... is it possible to predict where smoke 2013 will put the subclip. It seems to pick folders to put them into with no pattern that I can see.

Can I select a folder to make these subclips in, e.g. logging bin FCP style?

3) Also I was wondering about rendering text .... simple text over a black background ... it seems to take far longer than I would expect, 3 minutes for 20 seconds of unanimated text ... (FCP takes 5-10 seconds to do the same thing ... I know ... apples and oranges etc but just wondering )

More text questions:

4) Is there an option to make text bold?

5) I have also tried recreating text previously made in Photoshop and gotten very different visual results for the same fonts ..... is smoke doing things drastically different from photoshop with certain fonts? (american typewriter for example)

6) Zooming in .... cmd+,  zooms really slowly ... shift-z is great for zooming out but even ctrl +alt and dragging seems slow for zooming ..... any tips?

Thanks for any help / explanations of what is going on 🙂

Ben

[Grant.Kay · Accepted solution]

Hi Ben,

Welcome to the world of Smoke.

To answer your questions:

1) Currently, Smoke will always play an entire clip to VTR when outputting. As you have discovered, the in and out markers do not affect output and the only way to insert a specific region is to sub-clip it first and than output the sub-clip.

2) Sub-Clips should go into the selected folder in the mediahub. If not it should appear near the sequence or clip it is sub-clipped from.

3) There are always on-going efforts to improve the performance of Smoke in general for a variety of things. One thing I would certainly bear in mind with Smoke is that with text, there are various anti-alaising settings enabled in the text setup menu. By default it is set to auto-softness. I have no idea what value it is set to but you can change the settings.

4) Would you believe me when I tell you that when you press the B button in any other app, the text actually switches to a bold version of the font. In Smoke, if you want to change a font to bold, like arial for instance, go into the font browser and choose arial bold and that will do it. I know its not obvious.

5) There should not be any difference with fonts used as they are vector based and smoke should just re-create them as photoshop. Have you tried other fonts to see if you get the same issue like American Typewriter?

6) Command+ and Command - should just give incremental zoom in and outs. They should react pretty quickly. As for the CONTROL+ALT+DRAG, you can vary the speed based on which button you press on a mouse. For example, you can zoom much faster pressing the middle mouse button instead of the left mouse button. If you are using a pen and tablet, than the speed depends on how fast you drag the pen and the distance from point to point on the tablet.

Hope these explanations help.

Regards
Grant

[dennisfegan · Accepted solution]

I recorded a short video for you.

https://vimeo.com/75271778

You might try this work around for the text. Once you get the hang of it, you can do it alot faster than rendering text in Avid or FCP 7.

If your render speeds aren't as fast as the ones in this video you might upgrade your storage. I am running 6 drives striped at raid 0, and am getting upwards around 570MB/s, and I have also installed a Mercury Accelsior as my system drive. Which really seemed to speed things up. Smoke and Flame are all about fast storage. 

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID 

Smoke Classic Hot keys, used.
Alt+F+drag= copy selected frame.
Shift+Tab= Fx Tab.
Shift+3 = Timeline Tab.
Shift+4 = Tools Tab.

[benmolony]

Thanks for the responses!

It seems that whenever I select a clip/sequence for the source player and the clip is selected with a green arrow that that folder is the active folder? At least I can find my subclips now 🙂

I haven't had a chance to try and test the fonts since, busy week, but will give it a try next week. I think it was a problem with american typewriter being a font suitcase?

With CMD + & CMD - to zoom into a 10 second clip from a 1 hour sequence take 10-15 presses, in FCP the same happens in 5 or so ..... only a small gripe 🙂 I will try dragging the pen quicker 🙂

Another few questions :

Is there a way to review/alter strokes made in the paint node? I have used the eraser side of my tablet pen to erase (which is awesome) but just wondering if it was possible to see a wireframe view of what I have done / select / edit some of the strokes?

Is it possible to change a stroke from cur frame to all frames or does it just have to be re-done?

Can I change the feather of a paint stroke ... color and clone all seem to keep the same fether no matter how much I change the fade etcit stays the same?

About project archive, my archive is now 200GB .... I have told it to archive links only .... I guess I am doing something wrong?

It is 3 x 1 hour sequences, prores HD media and some offline sequences with no attached media?

Thanks again!

[benmolony]

Thank you so much for the video!

I will give it a try!

[Grant.Kay]

Hi Ben,

I'll pass your suggestions over to the team.

To answer your other questions:

- The paint node does draw with vectors however, you cannot see the wireframes or expose the strokes as objects. The only way to see a before and after would be to toggle between F1 and F4 on your keyboards to see the front input and the result.

- You have to set the paint duration before painting. So current frame or all frames must be chose first. However, if you're painting on a still frame and you use current frame, you could use a MUX node to freeze that current frame to the length of the comp.

- The feathering of a brush stroke is controlled by the brush shape. I dont think you can customise the brush in the paint node to what you want.

- Currently when you archive with links only, Smoke will archive the links to the original media however if you rendered any media, that is stored in the media folder and is archived. Hence the 200gig. The solution is to go through the sequences and unrender the effects so that you are just left with metadata and not media.

Hope this helps!

Regards
Grant