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?
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!!!
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.
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?
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.
extremely nice of you panthon, i hope you know how much information like this is worth, especially on a forum where most info can be trusted - it’s very very appreciated. imagine having to wade through and learn all of this software from scratch, it would take forever.
i am down to two apps now, fusion and nuke. and i’ll have to see what toxik is all about…
this helps alot, thank you for sharing your hard earned experience!
Glad to help.
Im curious bout toxik too, but mostly about 2008 version, cos I heard 2007 was overcomplicated with the addition of the database. Toxik would sound like the right choice for an autodesk-oriented evironment, namely max and maya users, but for some reason, it’s consistenly ignored by the big studios and by everyone in general. I like to think that’s because toxik is just starting, but some people just don’t trust Autodesk Compositing Department, apart from the Super High End apps (mostly Flame, now). It´s like Autodesk can’t revamp combustion cos it would hurt toxik, but they cannot do toxik too powerful or it would make no sense for the user to invest on a hardware-based comp app like Inferno (in the past, an inferno seat used to cost 600.000 euros). Some users dont like to know that some companies improve their applications based on marketing strategies instead of technology possibilities.
i hear you panthon, it’s frustrating that combustion won’t evolve, probably because of marketing policies. but i guess i can understand autodesk to some extent as well. with three products eating at eachother, whatever you do, someone will end up frustrated…
i’ve barely seen the splash screen of fusion and nuke, and man do i love them already! just the fact that they are a small cute 30 mb download does it for me
toxik looks like a bloated beast in comparison, will definately wait for a simpler 2008 version…
Have a look at fxphd.com if you want to learn some comping stuff - it’s quite cheap at $370 a year and they cover toxic, nuke, combustion, fusion and after effects - you either get a temp license of the program or there’s a trial version out there so if you want to see which program suits you you can get trained in all of them rather than just fiddling around.
the demo is up for combustion 2008 on the ADesk site.
Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have changed the splash screen at all!
And while throwing in that CC (which, in the wake of all the flame/inferno tools is a COMPOSITE tool, made up of more than one section, but i can see nthing that wasn’t already doable with a few more operators), they haven’t fixed the alpha premultiplication issue with HDR imagery: premultiplying clamps to 1, which is annoying to no end (And something Fusion doesn’t do, for instance).
'tis a bit of a bummer, tbh.
Edit: applying a color warper operator (the new CC) to an rpf in FP format crashes combustion. Repetitively XD
