Combustion 3

For a long time, Discreet has been at the top of the tree when it comes to high-end compositing and effects work. Compositors like flame and flint are used by the best post-production houses to create effects for Hollywood movies, adverts and anyone else who can pay the massive hourly costs of hiring them.

With combustion, the company brings the same look and feel, the same workflow, and many of the same high-quality tools to the desktop, at a price which competes (well, almost) with Adobe After Effects.

Admittedly, v3 is more update than full rewrite. Improved cacheing enables you to save different tool set-ups for different users, and useful extra information markers are positioned on the timeline. This release also consolidates tools, adds neat functions and brings in a Warping tool previously only available as an add-on.

The toolset
combustion’s strengths are mainly features borrowed from its high-end stablemates. The superb interface keeps all the tools to the bottom-third of the screen in well-organised tabs, freeing up the rest of the screen for the video frame itself. This helps you focus on the job in hand, rather than the tools you’re using to achieve it, and compares well with rival products that often boast a confusion of windows, toolbars and palettes.

The tool area is divided into two sections. To the left, you’ll find a set of general navigation tools for moving around your composite. These enable you to configure the monitor section of the screen any way you like. A flowchart view, for those who like this way of working, provides an overview of your work. There are also navigation tools for the stack, where footage and any modifying effects you’ve added are kept in a hierarchical order.

To the right of the tool area is a selection of context-sensitive panels which provide access to combustion’s various effects, be they keyers, trackers, text tools, colour correctors or morphing functions. Above the tools are controls which you can use to scrub the timeline. It’s a system that works well, and keeps the desktop tidy.

combustion 3 takes tools from Discreet’s other top-flight packages, and includes an excellent colour corrector, keying tools, and a robust set of tracking and masking functions. It also provides a particle system that’s flexible, versatile and a joy to use. Right from the start, you can drop in a range of realistic smoke, flame and explosions, add some twinkling fairy dust, or open up a warp gate with a few simple clicks of the mouse. The technology is identical to Wondertouch’s Particle Illusion plug-in, but when combined with combustion’s other masking and tracking tools, it becomes a lot more powerful than your typical standalone package.

Editing functions
Whatever you do in combustion, you can watch the results pretty much as they’re created. This means that even when you’re working on a very complex effect, you can expect a responsive and interactive experience.

Sometimes you don’t just want to create an effect on one shot in isolation; sometimes, an effect spans a number of shots, and the exact cut point is determined by the way your effect manifests itself. For these reasons, compositors have now begun to include basic editing functions. You wouldn’t want to use combustion as an editor, but if you’re cutting a few shots together with an effect as part of them, or if the editing of a sequence contains effects as an integral part of the cut, you can work very finely with your sequence within the package.

With v3, you can now slip a layer, moving it in time, and choose whether its effect keyframes move with it or not. You can also split a layer – the equivalent of the razor tool in an editing package. This creates two separate layers – one containing each section of the cut clip. You can then add effects to one or both of the cut sections.

Like most compositors, but unlike editors, combustion treats each cut as a separate layer – so if, for example, you have an explosion, shot from two different angles, and you cut back and forth during the effect from one angle to the other, you’ll end up with lots of layers. Each layer will contain substantially the same shot, so it can get tricky to keep a track of things.

New additions
combustion 3 offers Flash output, so you can also use the program to create Web graphics. With combustion’s great compositing tools, a whole different world opens up to Flash designers. However, it’s worth noting that the package isn’t designed for making Flash movies. It’s very easy to end up introducing effects that are needlessly uneconomical with bandwidth.

Expressions are another new addition. Using a JavaScript-based language, you can automate your animations. Expressions can be written, saved, and then used over and over in different projects.

A range of pre-written Expressions are supplied with the package, easily accessed via the Expressions Browser. You don’t need to know how they work to create sine motion, random vibrations, or various circular and curving motions. You simply add them to any animated function to create vastly different effects. For example, adding a sine wave to the vertical position of an object makes it bounce up and down, while adding the same Expression to its scale makes an object grow and shrink.

Video Painting is one of combustion’s specialities. Different brush strokes can be made using a variety of brushes, as well as manipulated over time and tracked to follow objects on-screen. In addition, you can use a range of extra custom brushes or create brushes from video layers, particles or geometric shapes.

Cloning and tracking combine easily with the brush strokes for added flexibility, enabling you to perform vital touch-up work, wire removal or rotoscoping effects relatively quickly – even on moving shots.

So what’s our final take on combustion 3? Although not a major leap for the program, it’s certainly evolved in the right direction. New users will find the app intuitive to use, and the tools are superb; combustion 2 users upgrading for £159 will be impressed by the new additions, particularly morphing and the enhancements to Video Painting.