Keeping Combustion running on a Mac
by Keith Sonstegard
on
Sep 8, 2009 at 8:58:16 pm
I use Combustion on every edit I work on. The crashes are killing me. I've looked/worked with AE and Motion and they just can't compare to C*. Nuke is good but doesn't have audio support. Is a dual-boot Mac with Tiger (for C*) and leopard (for Avid and everything else I have) my only option?
Has anyone tried Eyeon Fusion in bootcamp mode on the Mac? If I have to reboot anyway, maybe it time to jump ship.
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Aaron Neitz on Sep 9, 2009 at 5:11:58 pm
What version of C? I'm running v4 on OX 10.5.8 and it's fairly stable - especially with image sequences. Sure it crashes EVERYTIME you render, but just save before you do that.
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Keith Sonstegard on Sep 9, 2009 at 5:53:00 pm
Thanks Aaron -
I'm running C* 2008 on 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Mac w/ 8 GB or ram. OS 10.5.7
C* will crash 9 out of 10 times when I go to footage controls and select or change the proper field order for a clip. I've kind-of found a workaround that seems to work 50% of the time...First I select the composite controls and then the footage controls (not changing the tab). Then I change the field order. Another workaround has been using Automatic Duck and selecting the field order before importing the video files.
C* also crashes most of the times when I change the playback behavior of a clip. i.e. make a clip loop instead stopping at its end.
I've been lucky on the rendering side...it has crashed only once during a render. When I close C* I get the common "The application Combustion has quite unexpectedly" error... I can live with that. I also have Sapphire plug-ins that I can't live without but, 50% of the time they'll bring down C* also.
My hope was to see if anyone else has a dual-boot system but, i've got a feeling it really doesn't make much sense. I also found out that I can't do it on my Mac which is a 3,1. Tiger isn't supported, only Leopard and up are supported on that platform.
I have a great tech-support guy who mentioned that I get an older Mac that supports the Tiger OS and just trick it out and only run C* on it. Connect it via Ethernet, add a KVM switch box and get-to-work. This may be my only option outside of jumping ship.
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Jeff Brown on Sep 10, 2009 at 2:35:15 pm
[Keith Sonstegard]"older Mac that supports the Tiger OS and just trick it out and only run C* on it."
If you're going that route, consider an inexpensive Windows i7 machine with XP-Pro (32-bit), and a KVM. You could even toss the Combustion shortcut into the "startup" folder, and it would look the same once it booted...
Sapphire rarely crashes for me on XP. Combustion doesn't even crash all that often.
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Joe Gill on Sep 20, 2009 at 2:33:43 pm
Maybe we can get cheap upgrades to Flare - that's *kind* of what happened with paint/effects, that way jumping platform will be not so bad. Anybody hear any thing from our reps about this?
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Keith Sonstegard on Sep 21, 2009 at 1:00:44 am
Last I heard, you had to buy Flame before you could get Flare...it's meant for the assistant in a Flame room. Flare would be great to have. I also took a look at Flint. But that's about $150k.
Re: Keeping Combustion running on a Mac by Dean DeCarlo on Sep 23, 2009 at 5:31:52 pm
Seriously doubt they will be doing Combustion users any favors in terms of Flare. It would be nice if Flare was affordable and sold as a regular product. Autodesk might just take over the desktop high end compositing market with it but as usual their interest is to protect their "systems" products. Same as it ever was.
