I disagree! They care. Honestly they do.

We have no way of knowing what we were going to get or not but there’s been lots we asked for…
- full screen app as an option
- desktop paint
- snap to positioner
- audio scrub (50%)
- jkl keys now multi press
- euphonix now works with CFX
- fx tab can now collapse
- quick off in CFX (and I expect everywhere in next build)
There’s more but it’s 7am and I can’t think straight before coffee

There is sadly a mass of things going back even to my pre2 suggestions
http://area.autodesk.com/for...-pre2---initial-thoughts/
that haven’t happened but I don’t expect all my suggestions to suddenly land in the next build (2 builds is a perfectly acceptable delay).

As for mike 1 AD 0, I’d like to think we’re all on the same side. A ‘win’ I hope is a win for all of us. More smokes means more online work for me. More demand for smoke artists means we all have more options for work. Is not a binary situation where only one side gains.

This forum is working pretty well, it’s lost some vocal people back to their 2012 and smoke advance/ flame jobs until AD finishes as for really busy people its too time intensive to keep writing these long messages. It takes me time too but in this case my loss of time in Bangkok traffic is ADs win in my pearls of wisdom. I’m not an online forum guy generally, I left the avid-l over a decade ago,it’s forums (fora?) turn quickly into personality clashes and self aggrandization and I have little time for either. I most appreciate here the point counterpoint with Brian, between our two equally motivated positions lies a compromise that will satisfy near everyone.

While I fully appreciate 2013 is a new direction I do feel AD IS obligated to its existing end users to take their concerns into account - not least because they have funded the development of the new version, but also because their usage experience has to be more valuable than some focus group they ran, unless of course that focus group has lasted 16 hours a day x 1000 users for 20 years.

My only wish is that the flame and smoke guys who email me directly would share their thoughts here. I’m not some leader of the resistance, I just express my own thoughts. I understand some of the high profile users have to be here under pseudonym so as not to cause commercial damage to their brand as enthusiastic end users but even under a secret identity - say it here, not to me!

On that topic if you are emailing me directly can you put Area in the subject line so I can filter it away from work email - it’s getting a bit messy.

Best regards

Mike

All's well that ends. That's why its called finishing.

I agree :)))

SPOILER: in the end everyone dies.

I’m just a small voice of common sense while everyone is getting over excited about CFX. Yes it’s awesome, yes it changes everything (for the people who didn’t already have batch) and at the new price point it’s the steal of the century… But… It’s not the edit system people will walk away from avid and FCP for… Yet. But it could be…

You just can’t have the hype you’ve had with road shows and creative cow rah rah then launch with no audio scrub which was where it was heading when I started complaining. AD always get it right in the end, that’s why I have barely commented in crashing issues or bugs - you know that will just get fixed. But the reality is 28 years of editing gives you a perspective in edit system requirement s that you don’t learn in user interface design school. Down and dirty wins the day when the chips are down. In tv you can get away with horrible horrible shortcuts when the alternative is missing your air slot. Taking away some of the dirty workflows may look elegant and cool in demos but sometimes you just got to air whatever you can get done in the next 15 minutes. A system that doesn’t allow dirty quick workarounds will fail.

We can’t let that happen.

Best regards

Mike

All's well that ends. That's why its called finishing.

Let me get client approval on some shots from old tvcs and ill upload them.
Tell you what I did and how long it took i won’t lie - ill send the action save files time stamped if needed :)

In fact pondering these things as I do I was saying to the clients yesterday that while there are more powerful ways of doing most things we do in a smoke/flame the fact that you can smear your errors all over the screen so easily means you get a damn good result in a fraction of the time you would in another system. As a vfx super it still amuses me when we quote 2 days or more for a shot in nuke for what I do naybe 10 shots if in a single day in flame. End result of my 10 shots would be 99% of the several days in nuke generally too.

But then I’m still amused by how much slower everything became when we went digital. On a gvg or an ultimatte you’d dial I a key in 5 seconds - clip gain softness hue screen correction twiddle those knobs and record in real time. We had that in digital too for the briefest period with the a64, kadenza a84, alpha 500… But then vfx became more everyday events.  Blue screen extended beyond specialist shooters and we started to get chroma keys you had to really work up. Same with colour grading. Once upon a time people did their art direction on set rather than in post, all we had to do was put the Macbeth chips in the boxes, which was lucky as secondaries sucked back then. But as the power of the boxes grew people grew to depend on the flexibility it provided so rather than just tweaking a red shirt to coke red we now tweak adark blue shirt to yellow because of a late end client request to avoid the logo colour of their competition. Everything is acievable now, but little is in the original brief or quoted for - which is why the down and dirty fixes are so vital - a last minute action pass tweaking something can be the difference between asking the deadline and not losing money on job to coming back the next day, creating scheduling conflicts and a world if pain - AND working a day for free.

It’s not aBout workflow niceties, it’s about dragging an 18 frame shot out of the master timeline, diving into action pulling a ropey key in the old keyer for speed,rotoing a dirty gmask hold back matte, tweaking a grade, rendering the 18 frames and dropping it back into the master before anyone has time to come up with any more suggestions.

That why I want my desktop tools back.

All's well that ends. That's why its called finishing.