Well, well, who'd guessed Autodesk would've gone so far as to announce that they intend to release a non-crippled version of Smoke for the OS X platform? It comes as a follow up to their releasing of Flare a crippled "junior artist" seat of Flame but what makes this release interesting is that there is no owning a system product preconditions this time, anyone with the right amount of money and has a Mac Pro with Quadro GPU and Kona 3 + fast storage can own Smoke. This is not a crippled version either this is the bottom end version which does not feature Batch and for the time being it lacks Sparks support although that will arrive in a later version according to Autodesk. Apparently they simply could not get Sparks support built in time for this release which was the case when they moved from SGI to Linux.
This is big news for many especially all those production companies built on Final Cut Studio. FCS is an excellent studio package but the disparate nature of the individual applications can make an efficient finishing workflow quite challenging. I like to think of Smoke as the entire FCS package plus Shake rolled into one in with an extremely efficient GUI. It really is a joy to watch an experience Smoke artist rip around the interface and galling at the same time for those of us working with FCS and having to "Send To" all the time.
So why now are Autodesk joining the "race to the bottom" with a software only product? The world has obviously changed a lot in a short space of time and there continue to be extremely challenging market conditions in many areas of media production. Smoke on OS X obviously addresses some of those concerns with a really quite affordable price of $15,000 + yearly maintenance. To have such an integrated toolset for finishing has never been so affordable.
It should be interesting to see how (or if?) Avid respond with their DS offering. Reading a thread on the Avid community forums found its member in typical cynical mood as to the wisdom of Autodesk's move. I don't share their outlook I think this is a watershed moment in the pricing of mission critical software. It also makes one wonder if other system products will find their way to OS X as a software only version? What of Lustre? It is obviously a non-trivial task writing for another platform but neither is it knowing what to give and what not to give as Autodesk could easily cannibalise its system products market quite easily. I get a bit of de ja vous from the 3D application pricing of old to where it is now. Apps like Maya and Softimage were at one time so incredibly expensive I never thought I'd be able to afford them when I was experimenting with Imagine 3d and Lightwave all those years ago, now look at the pricing. I expect Autodesk's system products to follow a similar path never to compete on pricing with the likes of Apple and Adobe but to be that, er, reassuringly expensive level but not totally out of the question. The UK price of Smoke is estimated to be about £9000 while that is beyond my budget it aint all that far away! Maybe in a couple more years, eh?
John Montgomery from fxphd.com has hinted quite strongly that they will be running Smoke courses beginning in January. I highly recommend fxphd.com to anyone interested in Smoke training and for that matter any courses they offer tend to be of the highest order.
