Managing Projects and Media > Managing Projects and Users > About Projects and Users >

# Projects

In Smoke, a project is a job-based working environment that provides:

- The EditDesk and the means of creating clip libraries for media management
- Proxy management settings to store low-resolution proxies for high-resolution clips
- A display environment for playing back clips
- A filesystem environment (home directory) for managing resources such as LUTs, EDLs, and setups

You can edit a project's settings through the course of your job. A project is associated with a default resolution that incorporates frame width and height, aspect ratio, scan mode, and bit depth. Although the default resolution in no way restricts you from working with other resolutions, it does define default settings such as:

- The default resolution for the processing of coloured frames (for example, black frames, colour bars, and colour noise)
- The default destination resolution for all resize settings
- The default resolution for entering Paint or Text with the None option
- The default resolution for the processed result of Action composites, independent of the resolution of clips you use as media and as the background

When you set a default resolution, you usually select a project configuration template file that corresponds to that resolution. For example, if you set your project's default resolution to NTSC, the ntsc.cfg project configuration template is usually used to create the configuration file for your project. The project configuration file sets environment display parameters such as monitor refresh rate and default timecode for clips.

This chapter describes how to select a default resolution and select a project configuration template. Remember, however, that all the parameters associated with a project's default resolution in no way restrict you from working with other resolutions. To learn about creating a project for use with clips of different resolutions, see Working with Multi-Format Input and Output.

Projects also provide a home directory on the system disk that contains sample setups and LUTs. These sample resources are situated in subdirectories for each module. Through the course of your project, you can save setups, EDLs, custom LUTs, and any other file-based resources in these directories. Because these directories are the default path for saving and loading resources such as effects setups, keeping files here accelerates your work.

Accessing Projects on Remote Framestores

You can access an Autodesk Visual Effects and Finishing project on a remote framestore from Smoke. This is useful if you want to prepare a project already created in an Visual Effects and Finishing application for finishing but do not want to tie up system resources.

You can only access a remote framestore on start-up. If you try to access a remote project that is already open in another application, you will not have access to the project's EditDesk, only to the project's clip library. This way you do not run the risk of overwriting someone's work or losing your own. Although the clip library will be read-only, you can navigate to other clip libraries belonging to the project and perform clip management operations.

NoteIt is important to understand that this functionality is not intended to allow collaborative and concurrent access to a central project from several remote workstations. A project remains tied to the workstation it is created on, and is meant for single-user access.

Sharing Projects between Autodesk Products

You can open projects created in Smoke in other Autodesk Visual Effects and Finishing applications installed on your workstation. Projects created in all products are stored in a single directory — /usr/discreet/project. The Project box in the start-up screen and the Project Management section of the Preferences menu list projects from both product sets. The default project that appears in the list is the last one opened in either product type.

You can load and use projects in all products transparently with the exception of the clips on the EditDesk and Desktop. When you use a project in both product sets, a separate Desktop and EditDesk is stored for each. Therefore, the clips that you leave on the Desktop in Inferno or Flame for example, will not be accessible on the EditDesk when you load the project in Smoke.