Re: Why does AD bother with desktop Compositors?

Alex makes a good point about the economic hard times.

IMHO: Big companies are all shoring up right now. It's a huge possibility that Toxik and Combustion get scrubbed. Or at least development gets scrubbed. AD is going to keep focus on their premium systems - that's what sets them apart. That's their bread and butter in the EFX division.

Toxik has already lost to Nuke and Fusion. It's current feature set, while OK, can't compete against those more mature products. Heck, a $500 copy of EOL'ed Shake is more production friendly that Toxik. Unless AD REALLY REALLY wants to get a foothold in the desktop compositing game, it really doesn't make much business sense to chase the competition.

They'd be better off making a version of Flame that ran on Windows and wasn't married to specific hardware - like a flame seat that didn't need I/O or audio, just a compositing seat that could share stones, backburner, and setups with a front-room Inferno. Price it to compete against Nuke. Now that's a product that would sell like crazy hotcakes.