The 'Ol Subscription Support Run Around

[ryan]

Contacted my support hotline a few weeks ago because, like many on this list; my upgrades were missing from the Subscription Center.  In response support said to hang in there for a bit as there were download issues being resolved with many Subscription Center accounts.

Logged in today after waiting a few weeks.  Now every single link to any page beyond the account splash in my Subscription Center account is broken and errs out, regardless of browser used.

Found the support hotline in an old email thread (since link to it on Subscription Center was broken) and reached an agent who told me there's nothing he can do because I reached the tech support department.  I asked if he could simply upload my upgrade via FTP.  He said indeed he can, but he won't as he's not allowed to do so.  He then gave me the "proper" number to call for my issue, but not before asking me who previously acknowledged Autodesk was having issues with the upgrades - in one of those Scotland Yard voices.

I called that number (during business hours).  On the other end of the line, a brief recorded message closed with "goodbye" and hung up on me.

So I called back the support hotline and said the number didn't work and to send the upgrades now.  The agent (a different one) is uploading the upgrade to me via FTP.

About a year ago I had a similar issue with my Subscription Center account, where every link in it led to the wrong page or was broken.  That matter took about a year to get fixed, no kidding... paying for Subscription for a year but the webpage didn't work most of the time and the support hotline was rarely answered when I called.

So here we are at the crossroads of Smoke on Mac being decompatibilized with the rest of the systems product line amidst resurrecting old support issues.  My subscription policy is up at the end of next month.  Is it worth renewing???

[BKM]

Not sure about your runaround issues. But regarding renewing your subscription. 
The Maintenance subscription you were paying does't really apply anymore going further as Smoke will be a subscription based program.  So when the next version of Smoke comes out... Extension or 2016 then you can pay monthly/quarter/year for that version then. 

Unless your reseller or sales rep has some special deal I don't know about.

[ryan]

Thanks for the reply Brian.  I'm aware of the rental but confused regarding the perpetual license and Subcription Program.

I'm repeatedly getting emails from Autodesk asking that I renew my subscription policy before it expires at the end of next month.

Are you saying I shouldn't renew it since it's no longer applicable to the new Smoke for Mac licensing policy?

Will I still be able to receive upgrades as a "perpetual license" holder without having a paid subscription account?

Thanks,

Ryan

[BKM]

To be honest I don't think anyone really knows yet. So I would make sure you talk to an Autodesk Rep at some point.
2015 is the last perpetual license for Smoke.  There may be some Service Packs and they will be free to all with 2015 perpetual.
There might be an Extension. But I have know idea how they would work that.  If there is an extension then yes, you would need to be on subscription. 

In May the Desktop Rental for Smoke will happen, and all new licenses will be rental. Your subscription would most likely get rolled into that program. 
But since you can rent Smoke month to month and therefore skip a month, I don;t think it is needed to be on a yearly subscription to get updates.

Again, check with a Rep. but based on all that I know, there is no more Maintance Subscription for Smoke.  If you are getting email, they are most likely Automated. If they are from a reseller, then the reseller probably hasn;t been informed. 

I'll bet that when Smoke Desktop is released and in the Autodesk Store. This will all make sense.  But right now, it's clear as mud.

[chismoke]

I'm in the same muddy water...subscription runs out in a month, I have spoken with my re-seller but not sure if i'm any clearer on the matter.

[mikeparsons]

They just need to incentivize the renewal process. Act now get this free smoke pen. Don't delay if you renew today you get a free tshirt. Etcetc it's what my gym does for far less money and I keep renewing even though I use the gym possibly less than I use 2013.

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Ryan.

I'm sorry  to hear about the issues you've had with the Subscription Center. We did have some technical issues updating certain user accounts to Smoke 2015, but they should be all solved by now.

Could you please send me your serial number via private message as well as the name of the Support tech you spoke to the other day? I'll look into this to see what the issue is.

Many thanks!

Robert.

[hansvons]

Just for the record: my substcrionscenter shows only 2013 ext.1 SP1 

Clearly, licensing and provinding upgrades of software is not Autodesk's strengths. Had delayed upgrades and non-working licences with all Smoke on Mac yearly uogrades so far sond since 2009. None of them worked as expected. There is much room of improvement. However, Smoke 2015 is a great piece of software.

Hans

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Hans.

I'll look into that ASAP.

Thanks for reporting this.

regards,

Robert.

[moreymichael]

My 2015 upgrade was also MIA until yesterday. Suddenly appeared on the download page. Don't know about your renewal at the end of next month, but mine expires officially on May 5th, and I've already paid for the next year. So my renewal is as per the old plan, not the new monthly. But I guess your reseller can tell you what's up in your case. Good luck.

Cheers, Mike.

[hansvons]

Hi Robert, 

Still nothing 2015ish for me in my subscription centre.

Regards,

Hans

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Hans.

Apologies for this. I had checked your account in our database last week and Smoke 2015 does appear there. I though you had received it and that's why I didn't post an update here.

I'm surprised it still does not show up in your Subscription Center account. Do you have a different personal account from your company account?

I will contact you via e-mail to send you your 2015 serial nubmer and a download link.

Regards,

Robert.

[hansvons]

Hi Robert,

since I'm under subscription and the Ext.1 is out I like to get this issue sorted out. In my subscription shows the latest 2012 update. No Smoke 2015.

Could you be so kind an check this out?

Thanks and warm Regards,

Hans

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Hans.

Note that yesterday's Extension 1 only applies to Smoke Desktop Subscription software, not to the perpetual license software. You will not see Ext 1 in your Autodesk account page if you don't have an active Desktop Subscription.

I'll have the team investigate as to why your Smoke 2015 Perpetual does not show up in your Subscription Center account.

Best regards,

Robert.

[mpixls]

Robert:
Any chance of refunds for those on "Perpetual®? There are many users who feel very short-changed with this whole deal.

[jkfriesen]

I think it would behoove Autodesk to grandfather the remaining perpetual subscriptions out there to desktop status so everybody who has paid for a subscription will get the upgrade in accordance with the terms of the subscription contract.  Then when they expire at the end of the year (mine's on December 17th) customers could decide wheter or not to continue.  I do consider this a breech and will give this major attention when renewal time comes near.

[mikeparsons]

I was going to give you kudos based on the word behoove but then I thought I'd toss my 2 cents in.

This is film and tv we are working in. Things change ever single day. Whats seems a great idea to become the biggest thing in editing one day sucks the next. You know this is true, so does Imix, United Media, Central Dynamics, Videomedia, CMX (both Orrox and Chyron), Ampex, GVG, ISC, Paltex, Montage, Dvision, hell even toss Kodak in the list.

I think the best way for everyone to deal with this is to TALK to their Autodesk dealer. The time for grandstanding on Smoke is gone, I did my share of desk banging but it just didn't work. They tried, it didn't work, now they're trying something else. But if I know two things from my long and often arguementative relationship with Autodesk it these;

1- they won't have breached any agreements, they won't have done anything thats in contravention of any license agreement. They have a team of lawyers that argues contracts out with clients like Boeing for Autocad, they know legal. We can't even get them to tell us when the next bug release comes out they adhere that strictly to legal advice.

2- they take care of their clients. More than they are legally obliged to... In my own personal case that was helping me upgrade to a flame working closely with Comgraph my local reseller. It cost me a lot of money to do so but that was my way of dealing with the changing circumstance and the continuing reality that the AD online tools, kicked, bruised and beaten as they currently are, continue to be my clients main choice for my daily work. Your mileage may vary, you might need to ask for a different kind of help or decide to not do anything, only you can decide.

As a company of individuals there will be some scope for the people you do business with to help you within also ever changing guidelines. I know this because I run a company based around selling mine and my people's time and my machines to clients. Me and my people discount my rates, they allow an overrun, we toss in free dubs or really nice pizzas. What my people can't do is make me work for free. I do work for free way too often, but that's an executive decision based on some change of circumstances that changes the direction of a job mid stream, a blue screen that's just beyond use, an insane end client demand or a problem shoot that's about to kill my client if I don't help.

Do I think they handled the move to desktop well? No of course not, but at the price point people paid for Smoke on Mac and the stress and damage it was causing the Autodesk reputation I'd have probably just killed the whole product, deleted this forum and just denied it ever existed.

I don't work for Autodesk, a lot of days I don't even like them, but the PEOPLE who work for Autodesk are driven and passionate individuals who like anyone on earth willl be much more likely to try to be helpful if you talk to them nice rather than threaten them. We work in film and tv, it's a business of relationships - I'm pretty sure if you talk with the guy who sold you your Smoke he will push your agenda to corporate and get some kind of response. I know this for a fact based on 30 years of editing and watching the world go to hell in a basket, then recover, then go to hell and recover few more times, things just change and everyone deals with how the cookie crumbles. 

It upsets me to hear people talk about the time they 'wasted' learning Smoke as if none of the knowledge translates to whatever you use next be it Flame, Nuke Studio or whatever the hell comes out next year. I haven't wasted a single seond on any system I've used, there's tricks I worked up in Cineon I still use totday, paint skills I developed on Harry and so on. Its the only job I've ever had, it's bought houses, educated my son, fed my family and bought every single object I own. But more than all that its been the best fun imaginable. I've gone from 2inch vacuum tubes, compressed air tape paths, stacks of betamax machines, computers with boxes hanging out of them, fridge sized single user computers, rainbow coloured SGIs (why was there a purple AND a green Indigo). But more significantly I've met so many amazing people with brains the size of planets and been more drunk at more trade shows than anyone should ever get - luckily what happens in Vegas...

It's been a blast. And you know what the biggest blast has been? Change. Constant, constant, relentless, exciting change. Keyers that do magic, automatic colour matching, sparks, action, timelines, gestural editing, 3d cameras, motion adaptive optical flow. The new Adobe max stuff with defog and time of day color correction is exciting. Nuke studio is exciting, BMD buying Fusion and their changes to Davinci are exciting. But so is Autodesk, Reactor 2, dual screens (controversial in a HUD system), and a lot of other cool stuff I signed NDAs on made me bet the farm on buying another Flame, incidentally for about the same price I once paid for a 2 gig ram upgrade for an Onyx...

Like many here I was more excited by Smoke on a mac than I had been about any new box for years. I hate redhat, I hate unix shells, I'm a lazy typist and I hated Irix and I have a special level of I start kicking things hatred for Windows. Smoke on a mac, tab to Avid or photoshop or Nuke - that was cool. But the smoke on mac i wanted was flame not smoke. So many of my gripes couldn't be addressed in the plan to attract new users that Autodesk had, so I never upgraded to Smoke 2013, or 2015. In fact yesterday I finished yet another TVC in Smoke 2012 SP4 (4 worked great for me so I never installed SP5) I didn't do it in Flame as I'm waiting for the newly released extension to be put in before I throw it at clients in anger... 

I love the speed of my new flame, I'd been mentally fooling myself comparing my Smoke in mac with the Tezro/9600 era Flames I'd been using before my year off supervising a feature and running Nuke. Next year I'll upgrade the computer to a Z840 and make this flame a flame assist box or maybe turn it into a Nuke studio but for now its plenty fast for 4K. Hopefully the new extension fixes most of my gripes - but more likely it will make me half happy and leave me a pile to complain about - but **** it if that isn't half the fun. Any yes I still hate Redhat and I despise Dolphin but what you gonna do - it's fast.

Ended up a bit more than 2 cents worth, but the short version is talk to your sales agent before you talk to a lawyer, you'll be happier.

best regards

Mike

[A_Over_B]

flame - it's the way, right?

dot clip publishing, shotgun integration, great great software...

[mikeparsons]

I'm a bit different to most flame guys in that i never stopped editing, I love offline and online and I love Avid 8 and I cut everything in that. Everything. 

I've loved flame for near 20 years and I tolerated Smoke on mac as I couldn't afford a flame when I was setting up my current company and as a Nuke user I figured the bits missing in smoke I could fill with Nuke. It worked welll and I made a reasonable living for 2 years.

Then smoke 2013 came along and basically ruined smoke's reputation in my market. My clients still didn't care what I use, most never come to the sessions except for the last day and supers so I stuck with 2012 and nuke/after effects/mocha etc. Then I started getting clients again who insisted on Flame, I dry hired a box running on a z800 and was quite impressed. Yes it crashed, yes it felt awkward but it was a lot quicker than I'd been fooling myself my Smoke on mac was.

I know Autodesk have a long way to go to regain the trust of some people - but I've never waivered in my confidence they will get it right eventually - you just have to shout at them long enough. So I put my money where my mouth is and bit the bullet. It hurt like hell, we paid cash and that meant no beer or spare cash for several months, my wife doing an extra feature in Canada and sending every $ home and so on. Then literally the day after I paid the deposit I got a one month stereo conversion job that was pure Nuke which made me so short on cash I had to have a chat with my landlord.... Fun month.

Then the flame arrived, and my god its fast. 5k red job into ultrahd master and it didnt skip a beat. It crashes though right now so I've only used it unattended. The new extension goes in this week and I only held off as I had a lot of TVCs to offline or I would have upgraded to the beta that Charles assured me had resolved every database issue and a lot more besides. 

I'm no clairvoyant and I will naturally buy Nuke studio having already used it on jobs in beta but its not the same thing at all. Nothing is. I've been on flame more than half my career now, I look all the time for the next big thing, I've done films in Cineon, TVCs in Cyborg, I was a Shake artist on features and with Nuke. But if I just have some shots to bash into shape in a limited time its Flame. The only thing that ever came close was Smoke and for me that's just not an option anymore.

I will add this though, for flame to be the future as well as the present they need to engage young editors. My generation only has a few years left before we fade away and are forgotten, fame is fleeting, the past is always a foreign country where they did things differently. I feel tremendously fortunate that my career spanned one inch and CMX all the way to 4K prorblems dont seem so big to my genberation as we're used to taking a screwdriver to a box or firing up VT100 emulators and poking around like I did way too much on the Henry. But in a software only world you can't fix something, you can't hack some tracks on an Encore and bypass the composite input to make a component DVE. You get what you get and in an age where Photoshop can paint things away by hitting the delete key the flame can only survive long term by finding some unique magic. For me its gestural editing and I think if we advance into a fully multithreaded GUI thats lets you tweak as you loop play, a multitouch interface allowing fingers to resize, reposition and add game controller like ability to navigate 3d space around a comp and take us into a minority report multiople simultaneous activity GUI then we start to get something exciting. Ill probably hate it and Ill bitch about how one pen is the only true way just as flame guys are moaning about the dual screen display now. But thats just comfort zone crap.

What we need is a system as optimised as flame used to be. Flame on an 8 core Onyx running 150MHz MIPS chips and RE2 raster managers was the equivalent of light speed compared to a mac of that time which ran at 30 MHz. The Xbow architecture of later SGIs delivered graphics performance no one else ever saw even with a wildcat and a DEC Alpha. We need that differentiation again. We need parallel computing. If I could buy a second Z820 and put a big cable between the two and have twice the performance I would. So instead Autodesk needs to start looking at render distribution. Burn isnt it, what Id like is background rendering on all available networked CPUs whenever theres idle cycles. If im playing a clip to a client theres still a second GPU doing nothing. Get rendering. If Im painting and a flame assist seat or another flame on my network has unrendered frames, get rendering. If Im discussing a super, importing clips, or just thinking, get rendering. Dont tell me, dont ask me just get rendering.

Then they need a new way of looking at batch. Not the mechanics - though yes the icon scale and comp navigation needs some Nuke like love - no I mean an Avid style smart render. If I have a 10 second shot and i change the last keyframe it should know what frames that affects and just flag those for rendering. The future of GUI design is less GUI. There should be no advantage to having a render button or even a dialog about it. Just render. Every flame, every flame assist and stand alone burn seats should just render all the time for everyone. Once you extend that thinking across the platform you realise we do a lot of repetitive interaction with our systems.

Saving setups? Why do I have to save a setup. If i go into the color grade area the second GUI should just show me a thumbnail of every shot in my timeline that ive applied a grade to. Including the ability to press on that grade icon and a film strip to expose all the versions Ive made. No need to save its all just there in timeline order. To promote a grade to a 'saved' version you just drag the icon to the grade library and name it. That can expand simply system wide saving the need to sort by name or time, as we become more story centric timeline order is increasingly the most helpful. Add to that smart filtering like show me just what changed today, in the last hour, or on a job with multiple users what changed since I last logged in and you start to get to a place where the database is a living breathing entity helping you do the work instead of just a library.

The info is all in there, its all in shotgun, the flame shotgun integration could be the greatest thing to ever happen to an online system. New 3d? It just imports it for you. New version of a shot? Its in the master already, and reverting to an older version should be as simple as clicking on the shot and seeing all the versions pop up.

I know I'll never see many of these things truly come to fruition but I can dream of interfaces that take away ALL the housekeeping, that makes versioning an automated process (super variations from a product matrix logged in shotgun with supers named and tagged to a country broadcaster database that KNOWS the legal sizes and durations and warns you of deviations... where you simply rename a copy of your master with the country variant and it updates all the super and logo content with whats in the database letting me just jump shot to shot and make small tweaks. With background rendering, by the time I've checked the last one the jobs done... OH and shotgun also knows who is on the approval list so as soon as I exit the project or hit the send for apporval button it wiretaps out approval versions and sends them to the producer to forward to clients. No more making quicktimes in the big room. Its all possible today, and Autodesk alone owns all the pieces of the jigsaw...

That's why I bought a Flame.