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[Click for full size image] Time Warp lets you use a Bezier curve to control the speed of clips.

Creating today's hippest effects is a breeze in Smoke, too. Case in point: a time warp, where everything moves at normal speed, then instantly accelerates to other-worldly speed, then quickly decelerates to slow motion. Piece of cake for Smoke: Click on the shot you want to modify, then select TW, for Time Warp. This opens up a new set of buttons (I like the way you only see the buttons when you need them), offering you a choice of speeds. If you click the E button, the time warp editor opens. Here's where a Bezier curve helps you visualize the speed adjustment of your clip. Hey, I really like this effect!

Here you can also add trails or mix for nightmarish effects. Here's the easiest way to use this powerful effect: On the timeline, first splice the places where you'd like the speed change to occur by parking the cursor at those places, and hitting the Cut button on the keyboard. Then select the segment you want to speed up, and apply a time-warp soft effect by clicking TW, click on Ripple, and then simply edge-drag the shot wider if you want it slower. Then in the next segment you cut, select it, hit TW and drag it so it's shorter on the timeline. You'll see a preview of this if you play it back, but you'll need to render if you want it to be smoothly interpolated. Select Full Interpolation, and it only takes a second or two to render this spectacular effect.

Smoke also contains a remarkably powerful paint module, where you animate brush strokes, and also track something like a mic in the shot and then, like a moving Photoshop, remove that mic from the shot. Wish I had this system a few years ago when I had the misfortune of trying to save money, hiring a clumsy audio assistant who couldn't keep his mic out of my shot.

Spending too much time with color correction? It's a common problem. With Smoke, you can do the color correction right from the timeline. Select the shot, then click on the CC button on the left, then adjust contrast, offset, gain and so forth, (if you need more tools, click on the E button and you can control more than you ever imagined). Then, if there are similar shots in your segment, drag the values for the first one you corrected and drop it onto the others that are similar. Voila! They're fixed too. You won't find color correction like this anywhere but the high end.

A significant development with Smoke is its growing family of plug-ins, called Sparks. Various developers have created thousands of Sparks, and if you add enough of them, your Smoke can act like a Discreet Flame, certainly one of the most powerful effects and compositing systems in existence. You can get Sparks that are particle-based, and many are 3D effects. 5D is also making great Sparks plug-ins, as well as Photron with its Primatte keyer. These versatile applets can make it so you're able to import 3D models into the DVE module and create effects that you've never seen before. If this isn't convenient enough for you, there's even a 3D modeler, a Spark made by Birds and Dragons, Inc. that you can operate directly from the timeline. I've only scratched the surface of the variety of Sparks plug-ins, a collection that has to be seen to be believed.

[Click for full size image] Here's a view of the edit desk with a monitor window above. Compositing with Smoke is a breeze, where you can add as many layers as you like.

What about layering? Go ahead -- add as many video layers as you like, and Smoke will be able to handle them all in short order. For audio, you can add all the tracks you want there, too, but you'll have to mix them down to match the number of tracks you have in your hardware for output. But won't all this take forever to render? How fast is Smoke, especially with all that HDTV data to pass through? In our testing, some one-second-long effects were rendered in four seconds, and a one-second dissolve took five seconds to render. Now that, friends is moving a lot of data. When we saw this speed in action, it became apparent that Smoke is aptly named.

I am nuts about this system. It's so close to perfection that it seems ludicrous to even review it, and I'm wondering what the heck Discreet will be able to do to actually top this. Well, I must admit, Discreet gurus showed me secret improvements coming up in version 5.0 that knocked my socks off, but I agreed not to mention those in this review. Those updates will be announced at this year's IBC convention in Amsterdam this September. We'll keep you posted, but until then, suffice to say that if you want to do some serious editing and high-end finishing with control over virtually everything on screen, it doesn't get much better than this.

Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy award winning producer, video editor and shot-calling PBS TV director. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.

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