Mac users: just curious...

While I hope to take advantage of the recently announced Smoke 2013 lower price goodness in the near future, I do still use Combustion on occasion mostly due to my familiarity with it. Every time I open Combustion, it's like opening my front door to greeet an old, close friend.

I have not yet upgraded to OS X Lion - still using Snow Leopard. What are your experiences with running Combustion 2008 on Snow Leopard? I've had some weirdness, such as the Gaussian Blur or Motion Blur filter crashing the app, as well as any attempt to manipulate parameters in the footage controls doing the same. I have a few saved workspaces that I can no longer open, most likely because they contain one of the aforementioned blur operators. Any attempt to open them results in an immediate crash. Also, quitting the app always results in a crash... it's been that way since upgrading from OS X v10.4 (Tiger).

My system is a 1,1 Mac Pro with an ATI Radeon 4870 and 8GB of RAM.

I know this forum is virtually dead, just curious if there are any other current users of C2008 on the Mac out there.

[Mark Suszko] "Now looking to master Motion 4 and 5 for mac, and maybe dip a toe into AE finally."

I never warmed up to Motion, but I've been using Motion 4 instead of Combustion for things like lower thirds and flying logo animations. For any real compositing, roto or keying, I still head back to Combustion or use Conduit.

Motion 5 has a great keyer, but I hate the new UI and its lack of customizability. The lack of proper broadcast monitoring is an absolute dealbreaker for me.

I have access to AE, but every time I try to use it I start cursing and throwing things because I hate its UI so much. It's just so unbelievably clunky, and I can't stand the steps it takes to do simple things that I can do in my sleep in Combustion. The lack of an interactive schematic view (a la Combustion) is also a dealbreaker for me. I'm not a mograph specialist, so no none really cares what tools I use for my work - as a result, I can get away with using alternatives to AE.

I'm not too worried about getting burned by Smoke because even if Autodesk killed it next year, I'd still get a lot of great work out of it and it would make me money.