The editing Lie

[izznyce]

So far as I can tell this isnt any better an editor than smoke 2012. You just changed the interface around and made us live in a timeline and handicapped the desktop workflow. In fact its way more cumbersome to use with all the right clicks and little gotchas that are tripping up seasoned smoke artist. This isnt any more of an editor than the flame is at this point.

Connect fx is fun but man do you take a hit on the render when you get deep into it.

Instead of going after FCP 7 you should have went after well after effects and gave us a bunch of bells and whistles for the fx community like particles and light string presets and all that good stuff.

FCP was a joke, dont model your software after it.

[BKM]

It's true that the editing wasn't bad in 2012... but some, if not most people didn't know about it. So there is a lot of marketing aroudnd 2013 to get people to know that. The changes that were made with the libraries is significant and an improvement. Import/Export is 100x better than 2012.

Many of the desktop tools were removed, largely for simplicity sake, and largely becasue the timeline workflow is the direction in which the software, including Flame is headed. Actually to be more precise.... it's the Library/Timeline/ConnectFX relationship that is the overall philosophy behind the changes.

A Clip is a Sequence is a CFX setup is a Clip.

The editing workflow is still being developed...

[myeffigy]

Cameljoe speak the truth. Not speak with fork tounge of Marketing lies.


“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
― Spencer Johnson

[BKM]

Someone is excited about the new Lone Ranger movie. 🙂

[jmlaurin]

So many things have changed in the 2015 timeline... It is disconcerting. I am a former Avid FCP and Smoke editor. Switching from one software to the other hasn't been easy. But as i remember the smoke timeline in 2004, it was hard to learn at first but was so much more effective to work with than Avid. Here's why.

*** No Stylus, hardly ever any mouse. ***

Serious cutting capability was programmed into the hotkeys. You could do vast amounts of operations on a huge volume of clips in a very short sequence of clicks to get the job done. It was fast. It was fun. It was gold.

For instance, it was possible to slect a clip, or a range of clips by pressing ENTER on the clip in focus and rapidly highlight an entire region with the keyboard using navigation combined with CTRL or SHIFT. Then you could RAPIDLY trim, slide, slip up or down using the numeric keypad values. Slipping alll those shots and layers was a breeze... Bounding box clip selection behaviour via keyboard was wayyyyy more effective. Now it's just..... annoying.

In 5 seconds you could manipulate the entire timeline or range of clips to your liking. Using the LIFT tool to trim unlimited layers in 2 clicks. Mapping every possible button or function in a hotkey sequence. Sculpting your tracks instead of fiddling away with a useless GUI trim view no serious cutter actually uses. Ever. A good chunk of cutters work intuitively and directly in the timeline with limited commands. splice - lift - match - goto - overwrite. That's it.

Magic.

I have spoken with Autodesk staff and they answered that the way flame will continue to go is with more complex trim view editing since "every other editing software has it and we were the only ones who didn't.". I get it, but I still don't underdstand the point of a trim view editor. It's cumbersome, tedious and mind-boggingly ineffective. Trim view. What a singular waste of time and computational effort. OK so I am forced to regress to an old FCP-avid-style 1995 way of working when smoke used to possess something really effective. Cutting on a timeline is the rapid manipulation of graphically represented clips like tetris blocks. Insantly review almost while cutting. Not existentializing over the image appearing in the desktop player, and which exact frame to select. Who the hell cares. Can someone explain what slipping with a stylus is good for anyway ? Numeric slipping has been removed ! Well in the amount of time it takes to select a series of elements to cut, go into trim view, wait for the screen to refresh, manually add with the mouse every trim, go clik clik clik clik clik for exactly 27 frames of slippage instead of slip+27+left.... I have already cut 5 versions of a single edit in the old 2012 timeline behaviour and gotten the client to choose one and move on to the next manipulation.

Seriously, imitating Avid and FCP may be interesting for mass-market narrative cutters, but do not abandon timeline cutters... Offer the clunky storytelling workflow if you must, but please do not kill the old spirited timeline cutting workflow. I may be barking to the wind. Apparently it isn't ever coming back. That's a shame. That's why I will keep on cutting on my old 2012 smoke until it dies. Glad it's still hanging in there.

Not happy with these choices, but I won't die though. It's unfortunately one tedious clunky workflow hassle I didn't need to deal with in this industry. But I have other crap to keep me busy. Like endlessly rotoscoping fingers in 4K.

Other than that, very happy with the product. 2015 is a must have and offers many tools that are very worth it.

Cheers.

[BKM]

I would have to agree that 2012 timeline editng was smoother, faster and easier to work with.... once you got the hang of it... as SMoke had it's own rules.  Although there are many things about Smoke 2013/2015 workflows that I do like. The Library and media hub changes as well as timeline effects and CFX.

The major changes is that now everything is transition based selection and not clip based selection. I honestly think that clip based was better, but Smoke was the only editor that behaved that way. (as far as I know) The old Lock heads/tails/both and link cut, link dissolves were unique as well. And link dissolves I miss a lot.

Regardless of how things have evolved, there would be no evolution to the product if it doens't sell and have users. Aside from the odd decisions on how Smoke was sold and marketed in 2013,  the push to get more users and a wider audience was needed. 

Sure then there was the Flame backlash, and now the focus is on Flame at the moment. It will be interesting to see what happens in 2015 with Smoke and Flame. 

[mikeparsons]

Regardless of how the two products evolve there first needs to be a genuinely concerted effort to fix the insanely high levels of instability, bugs and simply confused saving mechanisms or no one will be even looking at either product by 2015.
The number one failing at AD right now is QC.

[A_Over_B]

I respectfully disagree - lots of new ground was covered in version 2015 & extension 2 bears the fruit of those labours.

Bugs creep in to new/revised software.

You know that.

2016 will be extraordinary & will have its fair share of challenges.

& what happened to the new contenders to the flame crown?

oh that's right - being given away for free - no qc necessary for free products...

[mikeparsons]

Seriously?

You know how long id be in business as a tvc finishing house if I said 'hey we tried something new but failed to deliver. Don't worry your next tvc will be great...'

Grow up - I'm not going to rejoice that 1000 bugs got squashed - it's a ridiculous proposition.

ad right now has the worst bug to feature ratio I've seen in 30 years in the business. I like my new flame but that's as much to do with the hardware as the software - the software is a constant world of workaround and kid gloves - hope it doesn't crash and make me start the whole day again...

What adds insult to injury is the fact that old fkame and smoke was a rock on which companies staked their lives. My current flame is living on the fumes of reputation. We made for it before this nonsense started.

It's the worst roll out since new coke, I'd love to see a similar resolution.

[A_Over_B]

ok then.

let's hope your next tvc is not for new new coke...

😃