My goodness!!!!!!  My very first blog!

I followed most people and did the facebook thing first.  I never thought I’d ever do blogging until some of the nice people within Autodesk asked me if I would give it a go and I thought why not!

So here I am. 

I am used to doing public speaking and presentations but not blogging so you’ll have to give me a few chances to pick up the pace.

What I would like to get out of this blog is as much user information about Smoke and Flame to you as possible.  So I have a few ideas in my head of what I would like to show but I’ll need your feedback as much as possible as to what you would like to see.  Also I am always scavenging for material so if there is anything I could use to show a point then I would be more then delighted to do so.

Let’s get started.

Beginners guide to the fundamental workflow of working in Smoke and Flame

A few questions I always get asked when someone starts using Smoke or Flame for the first time are:

“Where is the BIG save button?”
“What is the fundamental workflow for managing my media?”
“Where can I save my work where it won’t be accidentally deleted?”

Well I have my own view of how to see the different levels of the application and I have simplified it into a four step workflow.

This applies to both Smoke and Flame. 

The applications have 3 distinct levels. 

• The bottom level is your physical storage which you should not try manually edit as it is managed by the application. 

• The middle level is the clip library.  This is the database level where your media is stored and managed.  This includes your sources, intermediate work and finals. 

• The top most level is the application level where the actually creative processing takes place.

Hopefully you’ll spend most of your time in the application level but the database level is equally important.

COMMON NEWBIE MISTAKE: Often users keep all of their work in creative area and think its all safe.

REALITY: It is probably the most unsafe place to store your work because you can easily delete things without a warning and if you work with other users, it is possible to assume you saved your work in the database and the other users could erase your work!!!

Always save your work into the clip library!!!

Now you can organise multiple libraries with multiple reels, folders and desktops.  How you organise your work is down to you but always save your work there.

So bearing everything we covered, there are 4 simple workflow steps I swear by to keep you in blissful happy workflow.

1.       Always load media into the clip library first

2.       Load your media to the application level and get creating!

3.       Save all your work back into the clip library

4.       Use the clip library for all your outputting & archiving.

This works with the all releases of Smoke & Flame.

This may be very basic to most users but the number of times I have seen it go terribly wrong definitely warrants a loud blogging shout!

I will start video blogging as well so keep checking back!!!!!

If there anything you don't know about and would like me to cover, please drop me a message.

I look forward to hearing from you and doing the next blog.

Signing off!!!

Grant