AutoDesk Smoke :: Can't Read Or Transcode Files

I worked for two days with Smoke 2013. Much easier to get around than previous versions. but for now I will only mention the problem I have, not the qualities I found in this new version.

First day of work was fine, everything felt as expected. Second day the problems start:

> same User, same Project, same Original files and hard drives.

- at startup error message briefly displayed: "failed to create tar files"
- upon Importing ProRes 422 files: I set smoke to Create Intermediate files and Proxies (in order for Smoke to use its own files and not the originals): does not do anything. At the bottom left of the timeline I get the message: "can't connect to backburner manager". I tried restarting Backburner. It seems to work, but on reimporting I get this message again.
- if I then drag the files from the Finder to Smoke, they appear in yhe library but cannot play (Render Pending message). On first day I worked with the same set of files and Smoke seemed happy. I felt things were going nicely.