Finishing touches for Autodesk Smoke

Autodesk has announced extensions for the Autodesk Smoke 2009 finishing effects system.

Available to customers on subscription, these extensions provide many new features, including: real-time deliverables for mastering to multiple formats without rendering; enhanced floating point toolset; more than 80 new particle system presets for Inferno, Flame and Flint; improved Smoke editorial workflow; additional compressed format support; and greater interoperability with the Autodesk Lustre digital colour grading system.

“We’re meeting the demands of post-production houses that want to expand and differentiate their businesses by offering highly creative, effects-centric finishing,” said Stig Gruman, Digital Entertainment Group vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “With powerful new creative capabilities, complete clip compatibility between Flame and Smoke, native playback of streaming media formats, and expanded codec support, our customers are poised to benefit from the most open, collaborative and affordable Autodesk systems to date.”

“We are delighted that Autodesk's visual effects and finishing systems will support AVC-Intra natively," said Tadao Shimozuru, director of Professional AV Systems B.U., Panasonic AVC Networks Company. "With the new P2 Varicam, AJ-HPX2700/3700, launching in the same time frame, customers will be able to enjoy an ideal file-based workflow with full raster, 10-bit video quality."

Extension 1 for Smoke 2009 include: Side-by-Side Source and Record Views - Enables Smoke operators to build a narrative structure from the ground up. Includes side-by-side Source and Record players, instant access to basic editing functions, the means to easily create sub-clips, and the ability to work with a source and record a clip simultaneously. Audio Gain Rubberbanding: Allows the user to quickly and easily set audio levels in the timeline.

Real-Time Deliverables: When multiple resolutions from a high-quality master need to be output, this new mastering-to-VTR tool improves efficiency by providing real-time up and down conversions without having to render. Outputs source files of up to 2K 12-bit images to most video formats.

Support for Additional Compressed Media Formats: Supports Apple QuickTime animation with alpha and QuickTime motion-JPEG, XDCAM, XDCAM HD codecs, and Panasonic P2 AVC-Intra media at 50 and 100 modes.

Improved Support of QuickTime Metadata: To further increase interoperability with Apple Final Cut Pro, Smoke now uses time-code and reel-name information contained in Apple QuickTime files when importing or soft-importing QuickTime metadata.

Advanced Import Image Browser: Artists can work more efficiently with industry standard digital acquisition formats. It is faster and easier to browse and recursively scan clips in P2 and XDCAM directory structures.

Support for External Proxies: When working with high-resolution images such as film scans, existing proxies can be imported rather than re-generated.

Full-image Resolution output to the Broadcast Monitor: Ability to send a selected clip to the SDI output of the NVIDIA graphics card to offer clients a full-screen view on the broadcast monitor.

Floating-Point Processing in the Colour Corrector and Colour Warper: Support for 16-bit floating-point processing has been extended to the Colour Warper and Colour Corrector, providing greater control over the entire original colour range of 16-bit file formats.

Remote Rendering of 16-bit Floating-Point Action Setups: With the addition of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700, artists can use the latest GPU-accelerated version of Autodesk Burn software to remote render Action setups based on 16-bit OpenEXR files.

New HDR Viewer: Provides a more accurate and flexible view of logarithmic, linear and video images in modules supporting multiple viewers, and the Player exposes even more image detail.

For a complete list of features and benefits please visit www.autodesk.com/smoke.