By arthur argote (Archiea) (68.164.68.90) on Monday, January 06, 2003 - 09:47 pm:

hey guys...

Combustion 2.1 debuts with a new price, $995. For previous 2.0 users its s free upgrade...

http://www.discreet.com/support/combustion/download/download.php3?color=2

I believe this version no longer requires a dongle.

I think this is a valid compositing solution, especially for Mac LW users where comparable features are only available in Apple's $5000 shake.

with this new pricing structure, perhaps NT should offer a LW/Combustion deal for 2K.

Then again, people wish for peace in the middle east for decades now....

By Psyhke (Jbeck) (24.163.209.122) on Monday, January 06, 2003 - 11:27 pm:

LW from Safe Harbor + Combustion = $2,250. Pretty close!

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 05:27 am:

This must be cheaper than Adobe After Effects production bundle. I'm a bit wary of Discreet, though.

By kenneth woodruff (Kenneth) (64.129.197.193) on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 - 11:17 am:

I downloaded the demo to try it, and it's _really_ chunky! I was surprised at how sluggish it feels. We all knows that AE often feels muddy, but coming from someone with a lot of AE experience, I immediately noticed how slow combustion is on my dual gig quicksilver.

By kenneth woodruff (Kenneth) (64.129.197.193) on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 - 11:24 am:

I downloaded the demo to try it, and it's _really_ chunky! I was surprised at how sluggish it feels. We all knows that AE often feels muddy, but coming from someone with a lot of AE experience, I immediately noticed how slow combustion is on my dual gig quicksilver.

By Dennis Wilkins (Dennisw) (66.87.85.5) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:46 am:

Kenneth, I just wanted to let you know that the Demo is currently 2.0, the 2.1 upgrade is supposed to address this to some extent. I just saw a demo of Combustion, (and then a personalized one later), and came away very impressed. One thing that was mentioned by this guy was that when you bring in your source clips, let each one play through so that they are written to the ram buffer, then everything else is added on top (buy all the Ram you can). I've used After Effects for 6 years, And I like that when you play a clip in combustion with a blur applied for example, then add color correction, it only renders the color correction - a big time saver when modifiers start adding up. Floating point, non-destructive, bezier adjustable, transform selectable, dodge and or burn, paint strokes - Wow. I think I'll be buying it, then I'll never have to touch Commotion again for roto or paint. Also for pre-comping, they have a pretty cool commit to disk function, where it renders the pre-comp, automatically inserts it as another node, where you can use it or, click on the original pre-comp and use that. I think that it requires a different way of working to get the most out of it, but I think the power is there. Tracking, Color Correction, mask selection and adjustment (you can add trackers to individual points of a mask), you can apply an effect or a brush stroke operation to a tracker, these are way advanced over AE. Free network rendering...

I don't work for Discreet...And I love AE...but I may have to get Combustion as the new hot Mistress though...It's about the price of some plug-ins now too...

Dennis

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 01:39 am:

I think there'll have to be some response from Adobe about the Combustion price drop. I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe has to drop AE's price as well. Now if only Shake would come down in price!

A.E has the advantage of the vast number of filters available for it, plus a massive user base. A.E has the disadvantage that it is not properly compliant wth OS X. It can't operate with more than 1.5gigs of RAM in OS X, in fact it becomes completely dysfunctional.

So... Combustion seems like a good deal at the moment.

By Dennis Wilkins (Dennisw) (66.87.85.5) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 08:47 pm:

Combustion can use most After Effects (and some Photoshop) Plug-Ins, And it supports Illustrator files better than AE (Modify Vector shapes and points independently regardless of layer, etc).

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 09:15 pm:

That's interesting. After Effects has such a dominant position with plug-ins you'd think Discreet and others would just reverse engineer the ability to use Adobe plug-ins, like Final Cut Pro has.