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In the previous video you created a new project and new user.
Let’s start off by importing the various different media
that you can bring in Autodesk Smoke via the MediaHUB.
You can follow along by downloading the media via the link in the YouTube description
or typing the link displayed below in the internet browser.
You can access the MediaHUB, through the file menu by selecting import,
right-clicking in the media library or by clicking the MediaHub tab at the bottom of the screen.
The MediaHub is essentially divided up into two sections.
On the left is the Media panel containing the Media Library.
This is the Smoke database containing all your source media and sequences.
On the right is the file browser where you can access all the locations available to your system.
This could include local storage, network connections or shared networks.
If you wish to go to your Mac user folders,
click and hold the bookmarks button down and choose “User Home”.
This will instantly take you to your common user folders like desktop, documents and downloads.
Clicking the HOME icon will always take you back to all the devices visible to your system.
To locate media, simply double-click on a device to start navigating through the folders.
The file path is displayed at the top of the file browser.
If you want to manually enter the location of your media, just double click on the current path field
and it will open a keyboard where you can type in the file path.
Just press cancel and you can continue to navigate the folders in an intuitive way.
Once you have arrived at your desired folder location,
you can click the “Bookmarks” pull down menu and choose to add a new bookmark.
This lets you quickly jump back to a favourite location
if you are browsing elsewhere on your system.
The MediaHub will show your media as clips even before you have imported them into the media library.
Supported streaming media formats as well as images sequences are displayed as singular clips by default.
To view the frames in the clip, you can click and drag on the grey bar
beneath the thumbnail of the clip to scrub the frames.
You can also double-click on any clip to bring up the preview window.
The preview window offers you a bit more extra functionality
than the standard thumbnail clips in the file browser.
For example, you can use the in and out buttons to set an import range for a specific clip.
Let’s say you film an hour of footage and you only want to import a few seconds.
You set the In frame and Out frame and when you import the media, Smoke will only bring in what you want.
There is also extra information available in the Clip Info and Metadata tabs
The Clip Info tab tells you about the generic details of a source
such as its resolution, format and time-code.
The Metadata tab gives you more specific information relative to the format.
For example, you would be able to see all the metadata from footage shot with a RED or ARRI camera.
If you need to adjust the metadata setting for any format,
you would choose the “FORMAT SPECIFIC OPTIONS” tab
and you could adjust the various metadata settings for the selected clip.
A final word on the metadata, set your settings prior to importing.
Now before you import any media, you have to decide if you will let Smoke manage your media.
You can opt to import the file in its native file format and keep it where it is,
or have Smoke transcode the footage into the intermediate format
that you selected when you set up your project.
This transcoded footage is copied into the Smoke Managed Media folder
that is selected when you installed Smoke.
Switch to the General Tab, and under CLIP OPTIONS you will see that CACHE SOURCE MEDIA is turned off.
When this function is disabled, you can import the footage into the Smoke
and work directly with the native source.
If CACHE SOURCE MEDIA is enabled when you import media,
Smoke will background transcode the footage into the intermediate format.
You are able to monitor the transcode progress by looking at the message console.
You can click on the arrows at the bottom left of your screen to bring up the window.
This console is always available and just click anywhere on the interface to hide it.
In this case, this project is set to use PRORES as the intermediate format.
You should be able to start working straight away with the native sources,
and Smoke will automatically swap in the intermediates as they are processed in the background.
I’ll turn off CACHE SOURCE MEDIA so that I will be working with the native sources.
To import any media into Media Library, you can select the clips
and press the IMPORT button or simply drag the clips from the browser to the Media Library window.
Dragging the clips to a library will add them into the Smoke database.
If you already have folders inside the library for organisation,
you can also drag the media to existing folders to keep better organized.
You can also import an entire folder, including subfolders and the media they contain.
This operation will recreate the same folder structure inside the library
to match what is actually on your hard drives.
One final tip,
you can also import files by dragging and dropping from the Mac Finder into a Library.
Next up… Dealing with media that contains alpha channels
as well as how to deal with Photoshop files in the MediaHub.