Between the monitors and the timeline is an effects panel (the FX Ribbon), presented as a left to right flowchart – your raw clip is on the left, the final output is on the right and effects are in between.

The Timeline tab presents an interface familiar to any editor – two ‘monitors’ (source and sequence) with a timeline below and media on the left. You can import an edit using XML (FCP 7 and X), AAF or EDL and motion effects, dissolves, basic wipes and so on are reproduced in the imported sequence. Whilst Smoke remains a very complex compositing tool, many tasks can be completed from an edit-friendly timeline – including, of course, editing. Smoke for Mac aims to make compositing and finishing easier for editors. A few months ago they released Smoke for Mac 2015 with a yearly subscription price of £1280 (ex VAT) or monthly at £160 (again, ex VAT) – handy for those people who have a quick compositing job but don’t need it every day. In some ways, Autodesk started the ball rolling with Smoke for Mac 2013, dropping Smoke’s price from over £10,000 to £3,300 and simplifying the user interface – while maintaining the flexibility for hard-core users. For sure, the price would be coming down and, as Blackmagic supports the Mac with almost every product, we could expect a port to that platform.įusion 7 – slightly restricted and still in its Windows incarnation – is now free to download from the Blackmagic website, and free, at least to its competitors, is pretty scary. When Blackmagic Design bought compositing system developer eyeon Software, pretty much everyone expected them to do something scary with its main product, Fusion. They’ll play with it, learn it, like it and use it.”ĪDAM GARSTONE reviews the latest versions of VFX software for Smoke, Nuke and Fusion especially in the light of the mighty Blackmagic Design’s recent buy-out and pricing policy. I suspect that in the long term it may, but in the short term, a new group of users – previously unaccustomed to the power of node based compositing – will download the free version.

“Whether Fusion will start to erode the customer base of Smoke and Nuke is debatable.

Fusion blackmagic design