Autodesk Combustion 2008

[panthon]

3 years waiting. Is combustion dead? No, you think, 2008 is announced. Until u read that the only new thing it got is:

Colour Warper™ (NEW)

* Performs primary and selective color correction allowing for precise fine-tuning with multiple levels of adjustment in a single pass
* Interactive adjustment of gamma, gain, offset, hue, saturation, and contrast; apply animatable settings to all channels or independently to R, G, and B
* Intuitive hue shift and tint color wheel for fast, accurate color balancing; visual color sampling palette for precise color matching
* Interactive Histogram and Curves editing modes for subtle, precision tweaking of color components
* Independent controls for color correcting shadow, midtone, and highlight regions—features user-definable luminance ranges
* “Match” feature for fast scene-to-scene color correction
* “Selective” feature for sampling up to three different color regions for isolated correction
* User interface features a high-quality RGB vector scope, and a 3D histogram for precise color monitoring


What were u saying about toxik 2008? Fusion anyone?

[timmatron]

Yeah that's pretty LAME!

[Da_elf]

ooooo. im quivering with delight. quivering i say. oh yes. ooooooo
sheesh

[percydaman]

fusion is excellent, and I highly recommend it, but its a tad on the expensive side.

[Resolution01]

That is an update no a new relese!

It is time to move to Fusion or Toxik!

[mokiloke]

What a joke! The developers must have a had a few minutes to improve a few existing tools, in between counting their money.

[joconnell]

Learning nuke here at the moment - not too bad price wise and seems rather powerful...

[t3dm]

one thing we have encountered with combustion is that i crashes with quicktime h264's try importing a quicktime file with a h264 codec and it crashes straight to windows, happens in the 2008 trial too supposedly . I dont have the requirement usually to import footage that is compressed, but we are working remotely with some guys in the states in HD. Sharing WIP live footage via the h264 codec is great as the file sizes are small and can be shared over our FTP site very quickly to show clients animatics etc, but this bug with combusition is just annoying!!!

fusion time???

[tct70]

Learning nuke here at the moment - not too bad price wise and seems rather powerful...

I'd be interested to have your thoughts as you get to grip with Nuke. Also interesting that so far you are the only one to offer it as an alternative.

Anyone else have any opinions on Nuke?

Thanks.

[joconnell]

It's very good if you're working in an effects environment - using the multi matte id element and render elements it gives you access to nearly any aspect of your render after the fact - great for control freaks.

on the h264 option a lot of delivery codecs use temporal compression where it records a full frame or keyframe every so often and then only records the changed parts of the frame until the next full frame keyframe. The bad point to this is if you scrub backwards it has to jump to the keyframe and rebuild from there - not very responsive. You'd possibly be better off decoding the quicktimes to tga sequences to work with instead.

[t3dm]

thanks for the tip!! we are only treading water at the moment with compositing!!

[kimgar]

i'm also trying to figure out what software to go for, so far i've been using combustion and it's been working quite well so far.
but with the rather disappointing new release and it's inability to handle large resolutions - the urge to look elsewhere has been triggered...

the thing is, that all the comping software i've looked at is mainly targeted at film production, i'm looking for something that can handle high resolution posters as well.

photoshop does the job quite ok i guess, until that psd file grows beyond a gig or two...

at the moment i'm leaning a little towards fusion64, hoping that my 8 gigs of ram could be put to use, but i can't help hearing 'overkill' in the back of my head

do you all use photoshop for poster work, or is there an alternative that can handle both stills and video?

[Da_elf]

would a render farm with each node having 8 gigs of ram in them be an over kill?

[kimgar]

umm, i don't follow you elf, i think you misunderstood?

i was thinking that using fusion64 for poster comping would be overkill - software wise...

as for a renderfarm with 8bg nodes, i don't think that is overkill at all - in fact our first 8gb nodes is just around the corner!

[panthon]

I was taking a look at fusion64 as well, but information related to this app is quite well hidden. I dont know if it would be AE plugins compatible or if all 3rd party plugins need to be recompiled for 64 bit.

I've tried nuke, fusion, shake, After effects, a little bit of flame/inferno and combustion in the past and my choice is clearly fusion. Although it's a little cumbersome when it comes to dealing with EXRs with multiple channels, it´s indeed fast, it's able to use a cheap blackmagic card to monitor HD, and it accepts all the plugins im used to in combustion. The updates pace seems to be allright too.

Nuke was fine too, but not as artist friendly IMO, shake is almost dead, combustion is dead, flame/inferno are too damn expensive...and after effects...not ready for heavy 32 bit jobs. Plus, AE's netrender is really crappy.

Although Ive been a combustion user for years, i havent bothered to install the 2008 version. I was so disappointed with the latest release that i was determined to get rid of it. Getting the hang of a nodebased compositing app may be challenging at first, but after a while it's like a puzzle. Lots of fun..Unless u are on a deadline

Oh, and I think fusion is much better compositing EXRs than photoshop. I get nervous when I cannot do some things in photoshop because I'm on 32 bit mode...The only limitation seems to be RAM...that's the reason why Fusion64 would be a GREAT addition.