Re: Why does AD bother with desktop Compositors?

[Don Nash] "I just remember a while back, in a similar discussion, Bones talking about Toxic being Combustion's replacement. I went to AD's website and checked out it's features and watched some of the demo videos to get an idea of it's workflow. While I thought the UI was very elegant and more modern than Combustion's, it was obvious that its focus was STRICTLY on the film side of things.
If I saw the same features that Combustion had, combined with the newness of Toxic and all its added capabilities, I would have been very excited to consider Toxic as such."

I totally agree that at this time Toxik isn't a replacement for Combustion and motion graphics. However, for compositing it has much better tools.

[Don Nash] "Alas, it is not...and it doesn't even pretend to be. That's why I am confounded when folks more informed than myself say that Combustion won't be developed because of Toxic."

It's because people want it to become Toxik, in which case the sales people will just tell you to buy Toxik if you want 3D, 64bit, true floating point, etc. Rather than focus on areas where Toxik lacks, ie motion graphics (not 3d, not 64bit, etc) and AE users. If you want to see Combustion improved it will need to be where Toxik lacks, IMHO.

[Don Nash] "Fusion also uses some AE plugins via an adaptor, as well as Saphire plugins(AE SDK?)...so, if AD wanted to develop Combustion, to include 64/32bit I don't see why 3rd party dev's wouldn't work with AD...even if it meant going to a new standard (OpenFX). If they receive licensing fees for every Combustion seat, why would Trapcode's dev. not want to re-write his plugins to the OpenFX standard, and to where it's available to the whole market? During a re-write, I don't think AD would need to resort to using ReFlex anyway...they have morphing tools in Toxic, so I'd imagine they'd want to use those tools instead (the same way many of CB's best tools are handed down from FFI)."

You keep refering to Toxik features, use Toxik for those features. Why would they want to invest money to make a product that does what one of the other products already does. You want Combustion to become Toxik with motion graphics tools. So would you rather have Toxik with motion graphic tools and Combustion die, or Toxik as it is and Combustion focus on enhancing the 2D motion graphics tools. I seriously don't see where you get the idea that they are going to put money into a rewrite to make a lower priced clone of what they already have. I say enhance the version of Combustion with some better tools (not waste the time and money on a rewrite) or kill it after making Toxik a true replacement. The only program that I know of that offers true 3d particles is Fusion, and I'm not sure anyone even uses that in production. Particular (as well as all the other Trapcode plugins) are heavily tied into the AE 3D system. As Bones has mentioned the developer will only do this if there is enough interest.

[Don Nash] "Imagine Toxic and Combustion with Particular, and perhaps 3D Stroke and Shine built-in.
After such a re-write, why not put CB right in the sweet spot between AE and Nuke/Toxic...something like $1995. It would be well worth it."

After effects tried that and dropped the price with the next major release 18 months later and 6 months after Combustion 2.1 entered the market at $995. So it seems that neither Adobe or Autodesk want to compete with each other in that price range. This also proves my point that Combustions competition is AE and not the higher end film compositors. The only product that falls between the low end and high end is Eyeon Vision, which appears to be a motion graphics tool that is a subset of the Fusion tool set, but they offer very little information on it.

-Eric