Electronista has the announcement on Smoke 2013 for Mac. Sounds pretty cool, but I think the $3495 price tag will hurt them when they could have gone cheaper or done a crossgrade and really cleaned up, though the drop from $15,000 is really appreciated. I think a serious crossgrade offer like Adobe or AVID offered for Final cut Pro would hugely widen their installed user base.

You can also check it out at Autodesks web site with a whole slew of videos.

PVC also has a good article on the new smoke, as does Larry Jordan.

It seems they are really stressing that Smoke does more than edit, with color correction, true 3D compositing, fast garbage masking, motion tracking, fast renders and node based compositing, which is really exciting for anyone who dabled with the ill fated shake in the past. And it is supposed to have been retooled to work on MacBook Pro’s not just high end MacPro’s. And it can take FC 7 and FCPX XML directly, though it needs to take AVID and Premiere as well.

It will come out later this fall, but will have a fee beta version starting in June.

I am really damn excited about this! I love node based editing since I learned Shake, but have stopped using it since Shake went away. Would love to have an editor with real Node based FX and full editing capabilities. I just wish there was sidegrade pricing!

Tags: Smoke