Just about at the crossroads...
by Mark Suszko
on
Sep 16, 2009 at 2:15:38 pm
I am all for being an iconoclast, but I see a crossroads coming up as we start planning our upgrade of mac hardware and OS and FCP software to the latest versions. I am hard-put to justify to my bosses continuing with Combustion in the face of all the success and support for AfterEffects. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel on Combustion because I lack faith in it being supported much longer, as well as fears that it will be crippled or buggy when we go to Snow Leopard OS. Will it be com-busted?
We haven't used Combustion a whole lot, but when we do, it is for roto, keying, and motion tracking. We have Apple Motion, which is a fine shortcut fo the simpler jobs now, and AE is not awesome at roto-paint, but is fine at the other two functions, so again, I'm pressed to come up with strong arguments for sticking with Combustion. Should I?
And if we surrender to the masses and switch to AE, what should I get to bolster AE in areas where Combustion may be superior?
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Dean DeCarlo on Sep 16, 2009 at 3:56:19 pm
I'm spending time getting skills in AE but keep going back to Combustion for comfort and capabilities. Combustion still serves most of my needs just fine so I'm not going to bail it any time soon. I was planning on spending time getting acquainted with Toxic (or whatever it's called) but since Autodesk has shown once again that they cannot be trusted I'm going to put any non-Combustion composite time in to AE. Fusion and Nuke are dark horses for me right now. They look promising but have too small a market share (in the video world anyway) to be compelling.
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Eric Craft on Sep 16, 2009 at 9:11:48 pm
At this time the future of Combustion is unknown, so I wouldn't make plans on having any new versions until they make an official announcement. Adobe has added a lot of 3rd party tools that may address your needs in the past few years. With CS4 they added in Mocha from Imagineer Systems, to enhance its tracking capabilities, as well as adding in Keylight for keying in prior releases. The best way to find out if it will do what you need is to download the demo and give it a try.
If you are doing a lot of that stuff some of the higher end packages like Nuke, Toxik (now Maya Composite and free with Maya 2010), or Fusion may give you better tools as they are designed to address the needs in the feature film market.
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Mark Suszko on Sep 16, 2009 at 9:55:42 pm
We're not doing feature films, we do TV public service spots, so my main needs would be applying various fx plug-ins for looks, some motion-tracking/stabilizing (maybe once a year), very occasional roto-paint, and keying, as well as straight-up compositing of mutliplane 2-d shots and stills into a 3-d comp in SD and later, HD. Upgrades to the latest FCStudio are in the works. I fear the jump to new hardware and Snow leopard will not be smooth for Combustion. And I should add I never forgave Autodiscreet for killing Edit*.
Could be worse, I suppose: could have been using Shake:-)
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Dean DeCarlo on Sep 17, 2009 at 2:54:03 pm
Sounds like Nuke, Fusion etc. might not be a perfect fit for you. Pretty much anyone doing your type of work is gonna be on AE. However, if the tools for Roto, Keying etc. are better in Combustion (and I think they are) then keep using them. That's what I'm doing. I still hold out hope that they will make a Combustion 2010 (or 2011) but given their track record even if they do it will just have some other pieces bolted on rather some core fixes like 64 bit, stability etc. There are still a lot of places using Shake out there. I think there are still people using Commotion for roto!
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Aaron Neitz on Sep 17, 2009 at 6:46:18 pm
Based on this comment, I'd go pretty much AE the whole way. For stuff like that it blows Combustion out of the water for speed: Adobe has really great caching. It's also super stable and can render with all your cores.
AE makes a poor compositing system because it's roto and painting tools are weak (and it's layer based, but doesn't sound like you need the power of nodal).
If you already have a copy of Combustion, you can always use that to do roto and then send the mattes over to AE for compositing.
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Alan Okey on Sep 17, 2009 at 7:47:37 pm
[Mark Suszko]"I am seriously considering throwing in the towel on Combustion because I lack faith in it being supported much longer, as well as fears that it will be crippled or buggy when we go to Snow Leopard OS. "
C* is already crippled/busted/buggy on Leopard, let alone Snow Leopard. To be fair, Autodesk never announced support for Combustion on anything newer than Mac OS X Tiger, so it's pretty much a use-at-your-own-risk scenario if you try running C* on Leopard.
I just recently bit the bullet and installed Tiger on a separate partition just to keep working with C* without it crashing whenever I try to tweak anything in the footage tab or after every render, which is what happens when you run it on Leopard. In my case, it's a problem because my video card (ATI Radeon HD 4970) is too new to have a Tiger driver, so I can't run dual monitors in Tiger.
I think it's pretty safe at this point to consider C* a dead product as far as future development. That doesn't mean it can't continue to be useful to you if you can make the necessary sacrifices/adjustments to use it, which means running it on OS X Tiger. If that doesn't jive with the rest of your workflow (FCS 3, etc.), then you'll need to boot to a separate, dedicated Tiger partition or run C* on a dedicated Mac with Tiger.
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Mark Suszko on Sep 17, 2009 at 9:33:52 pm
I think you pretty much crystallized it for me, Alan. When you have to start going thru too many technological hoops and planning around backwards compatibility just to keep a single favorite app alive, it is nature trying to tell you something.
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Matthew Beall on Sep 18, 2009 at 2:07:10 pm
I made the switch to AE CS4, and agree completely with the above posts.. It is great for motion graphics, effects (plugins, particles, etc), and general layering, but completely sux for real compositing (rotoscoping, paint, etc).. I still go to c*/toxik for that..
Re: Just about at the crossroads... by Phil Radelat on Oct 4, 2009 at 7:41:25 am
While it would require learning yet another program, there's a surprisingly robust node-based compositor in the free open source modeler blender. One of the many advantages of it is the fact that the program runs on all platforms.
One of the cool things about it is that you can composite 2d and 3d objects, along with blender 2.5- and 3d projects files. You can also use 3d alphas, which is pretty interesting.
There's great lengthy tutorial on it over at http://www.cmivfx.com/ that covers it pretty well and the project used has incorporates 3d alphas. You need to register to use their cmiPlayer, but once in you can find it under FREE TUTORIALS/BLENDER COMPOSITING TECHNIQUES
This program is often overlooked, but it can be a handy resource, especially if you're freelancing somewhere your normal work tools aren't available. The program can run off a USB stick.
