Re: Questions about Combustion feature parity in AE

Aaron,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a fantastic response. That's exactly the kind of information I was looking for.

Too bad about AE's roto/paint suck factor.

I have Shake, and I love using it when I can, mostly for straight compositing. Unfortunately its roto, paint and tracking abilities pale compared to Combustion, at least in my experience.

I've really been enjoying getting into Conduit lately - it's like having a mini Shake right inside Final Cut Pro. Nodal compositing is definitely where it's at.

I've actually been going back into C* lately to try to use it like a nodal compositor, with some limited success. I find that it's a little more cryptic than Shake or Conduit when trying to use math operations. The operators are more complex than the simple nodes in Shake or Conduit. I was trying to build a color difference key the other night and I found it kind of difficult to separate the input source into individual channels. It's probably easy to do, it's just that the RGB arithmetic and Compound RGB Arithmetic operators are a little trickier for me to figure out.

What's your opinion of Combustion's capabilities when trying to use it like a nodal app?