Combustion 2.1.1 Review

Well, I received my copy of combustion 2.1.1 via courier on a glorious midweek morning …instantly contemplating feeling ‘conveniently' sick to spend the day with my new binary friend, I was forced to wait for the weekend to sit down and play

Well, as time did its thing and the weekend drew closer I was very keen to start the tutorials and delve head on into combustion…you couldn't have held me back…

Finally, Friday night arrived, I put my social agenda on the backburner, (pardon the pun) opened my cute black box to be greeted by 2 manuals – big ones too! (A Users Guide of some 730 odd pages and a printed version of the fantastic tutorials that come with combustion.) The obligatory license shenanigans and the fairly important combustion CD. Now to install this puppy. After the request for my registration process was completed and combustion was installed after an easy ‘pop in the CD and your away' install all I had to do was double click the combustion icon for instant happiness…oh…and launch the tutorials PDF.

After many hours (and a many more coffees) had passed, I wasn't disappointed! For the beginner (as I am) the (13) tutorials are very well laid out, very informative and simple to follow. Each tutorial brings us through the basics areas of digital compositing and cover the following:

There is also a ‘Welcome to combustion' and a ‘combustion for AE users' PDF that helps those coming from AE to combustion see the light ;)

The most alluring thing for me to get into combustion is the very close workflow that it shares with the big 3 brothers it has inherited a great deal of its features from; Flint , Flame, & Inferno. The UI of combustion is very well laid out and once you get used to it, quite intuitive. I proceeded through all the tutorials in a sequential manner and had them all done over the course of 2 days. The tutorials and included footage/material do their best to aid in illustrating all the basic principles and areas of digital compositing. The tutorials also impart some useful ‘generic compositing' knowledge on the user.

It took a little getting used to the layer based schematics of combustion, as I had previously started to learn Digital Fusion – which is a node based compositor and relies entirely upon a schematic of interconnected nodes that you build to create a final ‘flow'. However, combustion does offer a schematic view that goes a long way toward offering a semi node based solution. The schematic view is my preference for visualizing a workspace and it does work quite well.

I found combustion to run very fast and stable on my machine. A few larger renders did take quite a while, but as I am not in a production environment, all was well.

Rather than go through an exhaustive (and quite boring) recollection of my time with combustion thus far, I will proceed to illustrate my thoughts (briefly) on the feature list of combustion2.1.1. Here is a run down of the cited features of combustion, and my experience with each:

• Artists UI – True, very nice and intuitive (almost inviting) UI. Excellent layout and easily remembered shortcut keys and the like

• Powerful Performance – apart from some slow local rendering times, I found combustion to be quite speedy.

• Compositing – Well, you'd want to hope so J …yes it composites elements in a layered 2d and 3d environment

• Paint – excellent vector based paint operators for all your ‘fun' wire removals etc

• Workspace & Timeline – ‘workspace' is the combustion name for your current ‘scene' or ‘flow'. Timeline is basically like every animation package out there; there is a timeline that you can use to edit timing and animation keys etc.

• Schematic View – Basically a node-like representation of your layers based composite or ‘workspace'. You can still operate quite well in the schematic view mode.

• High Color Resolution – support all the way to floating color space…with LUT support…very cool

• Film Tools – not entirely sure what this claim means ?? Perhaps it means it supports lots of film format types (NTSC, PAL etc) or maybe that it can visually show the safe regions for titles and the like ?

• Integrated 2D particle system – Yes, and a very good ones ..although the particles do slow things down a touch. The particles are abundant with the ability to fine tune all of them to your hearts content. You can even create your own little devils, lots of fun to be had here.

• Text Generation – good text tools for title animation and motion graphics work.

• Keying & Color correcting – excellent keyer's inherited from the FFI big brothers, like wise the Discreet CC tools. All in all, these are very good, and equally important assets of combustion.

• Motion Tracking – excellent and easy to use tracker. Has ability to track multiple points and also track Z depth. I found this tool to be very intuitive and only takes a few tries to get a handle on

• Effects Operators – and lots of them!! If you could imagine it, chance are that its there. These are all the operators that you have at your disposal from within a workspace, from a mask operator, to a particle generator, to a paint operator…its all there.

• Garbage Masks – used to mask out garbage (funny that) easily used mask operator.

• Audio – support for importing and playing audio. Also the ability to edit timing and the like via timeline control. Excellent feature.

• Interoperability & Plug-In support – Supports most After Effects plug-ins and has quite a lot of 3 rd party plug-ins available for purchase. Most workspace features are also supported by Flint , Flame & Inferno for upstream pipeline work, excellent for productivity.

• 3D integration – Has a very nice 3D composition environment where you can easily move animate everything in Z space. Also has support for Z depth compositing from file formats inherent to 3Dsmax

• Non-Linear editing Integration – have not tested this yet L

• Network rendering – nor this one, although I'm sure backburner is quite solid by now

• Cross Platform Support – Mac OS gets this beauty as well…when is the penguin going to be wearing a smile I wonder ??

So, after completing all the tutorials and most of the ones I could find on the net, I feel very happy and confident with combustion now. With the recent release of combustion 3, ill be looking forward to upgrading and getting my hands dirty with the new features it has to offer.

All in all, I have found combustion to be fun, intuitive, addictive and rewarding. It's a great application and I look forward to improving as time goes on. I would definitely recommend that anyone looking at getting into compositing get their hands on a demo version and work through the tutorials as I did…lots of fun to be had.