Autodesk Smoke Essentials: Autodesk Official Press (2014)
Appendix. Answers to Additional Exercises
Chapter 1
· Autodesk trainer Grant Kay created the Autodesk® Smoke® Learning Channel on YouTube. It is a free collection of training videos covering all aspects of Smoke functionality. It’s a fantastic searchable resource for learning more about specific features, and it does a good job of highlighting keyboard shortcuts and hidden features of Smoke.
· The General Discussion section of the Smoke AREA Discussion Forums provides a discussion list for questions, tips, and techniques that are shared by the Smoke user community.
· The online Smoke User Guide is a searchable collection of hierarchical help articles covering the entirety of Smoke functionality. Click the Search button at the top of the table of contents to access a search interface to find what you’re seeking, or click the small plus button to the left of the topic in which you’re interested to reveal more information.
Chapter 2
· To create a new project file on the same volume as the currently selected project, you need to choose File 
Project and User Settings. Then click the New button, and the Create New Project window appears. Here you can enter a name, config template, and bit depth for the new projects. Enter any name you like, choose the config template named 1920×1080@23976psf.cfg, set the bit depth to 10-bit, and click Create. Please note that if you want to create a new project on a different volume, you need to quit Smoke and restart it to choose from the volume’s pop-up menu.
· When importing the Lab Scene and Opening Scene EDLs in order to practice the conform process, you need only follow steps 1 through 12 to obtain a successful result. However, once you’ve imported the first EDL, the conform list will be full, preventing you from following the instructions in step 3. Instead, you’ll need to open the Conform Gear pop-up menu to choose Load New EDL.
Chapter 3
· Given the way that this chapter walked you through the process of organizing your media, the Default Library becomes empty and is no longer needed. There’s nothing special about the Default Library, and it can be harmlessly deleted if you don’t need it. However, if you ever add anything to the Media Library without selecting an existing library first, a Default Library will be created to contain the new item.
· It’s common practice for editors to review available footage in order to get better acquainted with all of the performances accessible to them. As you play your clips, you can press the M key to add markers to the timebar underneath the viewer, noting significant moments in the media. Once you’ve added several markers to a source clip, you can use -up-arrow and -down-arrow keys to jump the timebar’s positioner from one marker to the next.
· In Details mode, you can see more of the columns of information that reveal details about each clip. Clicking in the header of the Bit Depth column will sort all of the clips in the Media Library by their bit depth, making it easier to spot which clips happen to be 12-bit rather than 10-bit. Incidentally, you can right-click any column header to open a context menu that lets you show and hide different combinations of Media Library columns, and you can drag columns to the left and right to rearrange them.
Chapter 4
· When rippling the outgoing and/or incoming sides of the edit between clips 3 and 4, it helps to turn Snapping off and zoom into the timeline. Also, if you turn off Focus On Trim in the Options pop-up menu, you can play through the clip and stop when the positioner reaches a frame to which you want to ripple part of an edit in order to use the positioner’s location as a sort of temporary marker. You’ll want to turn it back on when you start rolling edits in order to experiment with different trim positions.
· To create more intercutting in order to add a bit more energy to the scene, you can cut away to the wide shot toward the door from the frame where the woman picks up the black case on the desk to where she sits down about to open it (20:57:40+12 to 20:57:45+12), and then you can cut away to this shot again from when she plucks the capacitor out of the electrical panel to when she turns from grabbing a new capacitor out of the case on the desk (20:58:00+13 to 20:58:03+11). As you make these edits, be sure to match the woman’s action in one shot with the same continuous action in the next. Furthermore, see if you can pick up the pace by moving forward a few frames at these edits.
Chapter 5
· Of the three times “sit down” is said at the beginning of this scene, the last one is the easiest to eliminate, since the second character’s mouth is just about turned away from the camera, and it’s a wide shot, making it even less obvious that her mouth is moving. Turn off the Link button, put the positioner right before the third instance of “sit down,” move the focus to track A1, and then press Control+V to add an edit to the audio clip. (Remember that you can press the Page Up and Page Down keys to move the focus up and down.) Do the same to the audio clip on track A2. Then turn off Ripple, and resize both audio clips to create a hole where the “sit down” dialog was. This opens an audible gap in the room tone, so move the positioner just past the sound of the door closing (source timecode of 11:40:09+14) and add edits to audio tracks A1 and A2; then move the positioner just forward to the end of that small section of silence (to 11:40:10+03) and insert another set of edits. Copy this small section of “room tone,” create two additional mono audio tracks (A3 and A4), and paste the room tone twice into these new tracks by changing the focus of the positioner to track A3.
· For the second and third additional exercises, you can refer to the final edit of this scene in the full movie of “The Place Where You Live” (available online) to see how the author cut this scene. However, feel free to deviate from this edit if you find a way you like better.
Chapter 6
· The process of shortening each clip in this already-edited sequence is a perfect excuse to use the Trim tool with Ripple turned on, but make sure that you turn on the Link button so that the audio and video don’t go out of sync while you’re working. Additionally, don’t forget that you can double-click any edit point to open the Trim view, within which you can ripple the outgoing and incoming portions of that edit or roll the edit point itself.
· When you choose Strobe from the Timewarp Type pop-up menu, the default value of 2 makes playback look like it’s subtly stuttering. Increasing the Repeat value (in frames) makes the stuttering slower and more apparent.
Another fun effect is to set the Timewarp Type to Constant and the Timewarp Rendering Option to Trail; setting a number of Pre frames creates a ghostly motion trail in advance of real-time motion in the frame, while setting a number of Post frames creates a ghostly motion trail frame that follows real-time motion in the frame. Combining this with slow-motion or fast-motion percentages can create a number of eerie and interesting effects.
· Don’t forget that the way to change a dissolve to a dip-to-color dissolve is to click the To/From Colour button among the dissolve’s controls in the FX Ribbon. Also, when experimenting with different color settings, keep in mind you that can use the Pick button in the color picker to choose any color from either the image or the Smoke interface itself.
Chapter 7
· A quick shortcut to take when starting this is to zoom up the vertical height of the tracks until you can see the Axis effects box (labeled AX) on the first video screen clip and drag it to the second video screen clip to copy the Axis effect, using it as a starting point. Then double-click the AX box to open the Axis editor. If you scrub the positioner in the timebar, you’ll notice that you’ve also copied the tracked Position X and Position Y data, so you’ll need to eliminate the tracking without losing the starting position that you have now. Right-click each of the Position X and Position Y parameters, and choose Reset Channel (Current Value) from the context menu to eliminate the tracked keyframes while keeping the current position of the window. Then you can simply customize the Position X, Position Y, Rotation Y, and Scale parameters until the man’s image is reversed and appears correctly positioned relative to the reverse shot of the woman. If you want to use the Stabilizer to match the slight motion in the shot, you can track the desk surface, but don’t forget to use the Offset parameters to return the Position X and Y of the floating window to where it’s supposed to be located.
· While a simple dissolve may seem like the easy choice to introduce and dismiss the video screen, you should try different wipes instead for a more designed appearance.
· To put a copy of the woman’s hand in front of the floating window, create a third video track, and then turn off the Link button and copy the clip in track V1.1. Next, move the positioner to snap to the beginning of the clip you copied, move the focus of the positioner to track V1.3, and paste the video clip so that it lines up with the matching clip on track V1.1. Select the new clip on top, add an Axis effect to it, and open the Axis editor. Click the Keyer button, and follow the instructions you used previously to make a primary sample of the wall in the background. Choose Matte from the pop-up at the lower-left corner, and then use the Sampling Patch 1 through 3 options to sample parts of the woman’s hand, setting each patch button’s corresponding Patch Box pop-up menu to White so that those samples add to the white held-out area rather than to the transparent black region. Next, choose Matte from the Sampling pop-up menu, and click different parts of the matte to make her hand and forearm as white as possible and the background wall as dark as possible. (With a solid white arm, you won’t escape some gray fringing in the wall.) Once you’re satisfied that you have the best tradeoff of white hand to slightly grayish wall, turn on the Shrink button, and the default Width of 1.00 will make the gray disappear. Next, turn on Blur, and set the Width and Height to 2.00. Finally, set the image back to Result using the lower-left pop-up menu, and you’ll notice that her hand looks strangely gray. This is because the Auto CC option is on, which is attempting to de-spill the color of the wall, which is awfully close to her hand. Turn Auto CC off, and you should now see that her hand appears in front of the video image. Return to the timeline, and save yourself some rendering by trimming the beginning and end of the clip on track V1.3 to match the appearance and disappearance of the woman’s hand.
Chapter 8
· As you try to create a matching contact-lens effect in the other eye, here are some tips to help you work more quickly. Don’t import another EyeInterface layer; instead, pull another link out of the yellow output tab of the EyeInterface node and connect it to another MUX node. Using multiple MUX nodes connected to one clip rather than multiple clips saves you processing time (read: rendering time), and it is a more efficient way to work for projects using the same media multiple times. Also, see which nodes you can duplicate by copying and pasting from what you’ve already done in order to save yourself some effort. Finally, connect the second animated contact-lens branch of the node tree to the as-yet unused Front2 and Matte2 input tabs of the Blend & Comp node.
Chapter 9
· Since the Colour Correct node is adjusting the values of a branch of the image that’s being used as a matte, if you reduce the RGB Gain parameter in the Master controls, you’ll dim the image that defines transparency and make the doorway more opaque. To see what you’re doing while making this adjustment, you can right-click the Action node and choose Set As Context. Then select the viewer in the viewport that you’re using to look at the image, and choose Context 1 from the View pop-up menu. Now when you click the Colour Correct node to view its controls, you’re still viewing the result of the Action node where you can see the exact effect your adjustment is having. When you want to see the current node in the viewport again, select the appropriate viewer and press F4.
· The Optics node creates a glow effect, with inner and outer levels of glow represented by two color controls. The simplest way of using the Optics node is to connect the Front, Back, and Matte input tabs to the mirror clip’s yellow output tab. The Matte input will take the mirror clip’s luma channel, which will be used as a luma matte to dictate where to put the most glow (the highlights) and where to put the least glow (the shadows). If you like, you can modify the Matte input by inserting a Colour Correct node between the mirror clip and the Matte input tab and then lowering the Master Gamma parameter to restrict the glow only to the highlights of the image. The default settings of the Optics node are far too intense, so you’ll want to lower Size to about 4% and Intensity to about 2%. Then, experiment with choosing different intensities of a purplish color for the Interior and Exterior glow colors. When choosing a color using the RGB sliders of the Colour Picker dialog, keep in mind that the sliders themselves are showing you a preview of what color you’ll be choosing if you move the slider in that direction.
· While the Deform node has a lot of parameters, you don’t need to adjust that many to get what you need. The Crumple option in the Deform Type pop-up menu gives the best effect for this shot, resulting in an irregular series of interacting waves. Setting the Amplitude to 2.00 yields a nice level of deformation that’s noticeable, yet it doesn’t deform the image too unflatteringly. To animate the deformation, move the positioner to the very first frame of the timebar and turn on Auto Key. Then drag the Time Offset parameter slider to set a keyframe. Next, move the positioner to the very last frame of the timebar, and increase the Time Offset parameter. The higher a number you choose for the second keyframe, the faster the image will undulate. When you’re finished, be sure to turn off the Auto Key button.
Chapter 10
· The foley sound effects (clips FOL 01 through 10) are also good opportunities to use the Aligned Edit command to line up a good cue point in the cloth source audio with an action in the video, using the source positioner to find a good audio sync spot and the record positioner to find a good video sync frame.
· Once you’ve created a good cloth EQ setting (lowering the M4 and H controls just a bit are a good start), you can copy it to the other clips in the timeline by expanding the height of the track until you can see the audio effects box. Then you can drag the EQ box to other cloth audio clips to copy that setting.
· Typically, the sound of cloth rustling is very quiet. You’ll notice if the cloth sound isn’t there, but it shouldn’t be in the forefront of your mix. Lowering the mix to somewhere around −8 dB should work. Once you’ve set the clip gain for one of these cloth effects, you can copy the gain setting to others by dragging the GN effects box to other FABRIC FOL clips.
Chapter 11
· When creating a new gap effect, keep in mind that when you click anywhere within an empty track, you automatically select a gap equal in duration to the entire sequence, to which you can easily apply any effect from the FX Ribbon. When desaturating the image, another good tip is to remember that you can selectively desaturate the shadows, midtones, and highlights of an image by selecting one of these tonal ranges in the Colour Corrector editor and then adjusting the Saturation parameter.
· When doing a secondary correction on just one subject within the image, you need to switch to the Colour Warper and use one of the selectives. You choose a selective to adjust from the Work On pop-up menu, and you define a selective’s matte using the selective controls to the right of the histogram in the middle of the Colour Warper editor. To define a custom color as a selective, click the Pick Custom button and drag on the feature you want to isolate. When adjusting the resulting selective, you can choose Matte or Sel from the View pop-up menu to the left of the color wheel’s controls in order to see how your selective is isolated against the background. Matte shows a high-contrast image of just the matte, whereas Sel shows the selected area in color and the unselected area in grayscale. While in Matte or Sel viewing mode, you can adjust the color cube controls to refine the selection, zooming in to see the controls better by Control+Option-dragging and panning around by Control+Command-dragging. Choose Result from the View pop-up menu when you want to see the adjustment you made to the resulting selective.
· After adding both color correction and wipe effects to a gap effect above the second clip. First, edit the color correction and lower the Master RGB Gamma parameter to darken the image by about the amount you want to darken the floor. By doing this first, you can see the masks effect in the second step. Next, open the Wipe editor, and start by clicking the Reset Mask button all the way at the right edge of the mask controls so that you’re starting with a blank slate. Click the Add button, and then click to draw a four-point shape that isolates the floor. Then either use the Offset control to feather the shape inward so that the light-to-shadow falloff appears natural or choose Advanced Gradient and adjust the outer and inner shape control points individually to create the kind of shadow falloff you want, ideally more feathered at the top than at the bottom.
Chapter 12
· The easiest way to create different styles of existing titles is to duplicate what you’ve already made and edit the Paragraph and Font styling parameters. Remember that you need to set the Text Mode pop-up menu to Edit in order to edit the text or set it to Move to drag the text-editing box around within the frame.
· To animate text most simply, use the Axis controls with Layer enabled. To zoom into a piece of text, use the Scale parameters with Prop (proportional) turned on. Move the positioner to the beginning of the timebar; then right-click both of the Scale parameters and choose Set Keyframe from the context menu. Then move the positioner to the end of the timebar, add keyframes to both Scale parameters in the same way, and this time adjust either of the Scale parameters to increase the size of the titles to the end state. If you want to finesse this movement, you can enter the Animation editor by clicking the Animation button at the left edge of the Text editor. To see the keyframes you’ve created automatically, click the Filter tab at the right of the Keyframe editor, turn on the Animated button, set the Animated Expansion pop-up menu to Exp & Col, and set the Auto Frame pop-up menu to All. Now you can see the keyframes you’ve created along with their Bezier handles with which you can adjust the ease of their motion.
Chapter 13
· Right-clicking a sequence in the Media Library and choosing Export from the context menu accomplishes all exports. Remember that you have to select a destination from the Local Devices browser before the export options become enabled. You choose the type of export from the Export pop-up, in this case Sequence Publish, and then you can choose from the available presets from the Format Preset pop-up, in this case one of two AAF for Avid Pro Tools presets.
· To set up export of only a section of a sequence, you must first copy and paste that section into a separate sequence. Export always exports the entire sequence that is selected.
· To access the Advanced Options, you need to turn on the Show Advanced Options button. To export an EDL without also exporting accompanying media, you can choose Export Sequence Publish and Format Preset EDL Publish (8-bit DPX and WAVE); then turn on Show Advanced Options and turn off both the Export Video Media and Export Audio Media buttons. Do not mistakenly turn off the Include Video and Include Audio buttons that are to the right of the Format pop-up menu, because that will disable video and audio events from being written to the EDL, producing nothing.