What is Combustion 2.1?

Our first reaction: “What the heck is this thing?” Our final reaction: “Wow, this is seriously dope!” That's good, by the way.

Combustion is a paint, animation, and 3D-compositing application for film and video, similar to (yet vastly different from) Adobe After Effects and Pinnacle Systems Commotion. This package serves primarily to create special effects in major motion pictures — remember when Kevin Bacon turned invisible in Hollow Man? That was Combustion. The program is beyond the average consumer’s pocketbook, but for video freelancers and professionals, it’s a deal.

Combustion is an entry-level, professional application that has a common user interface (UI) and file compatibility across different platforms; it’s also compatible with Discreet’s higher-end compositing packages, Flint and Inferno. When you look at Combustion, your initial reaction may be similar to ours — fear and loathing of the Mac-alien UI, and the frightening thought that you’ll have to relearn everything. This may be particularly true for those comfortable with After Effect and Commotion. After we spent a few hours going through tutorials and playing around, Combustion’s UI made sense more than those of the aforementioned Mac programs, actually.

The interface is broken into two sections. The top section is your Viewport area, which you can set up to display video clips. Operators (processes applied to video and other items), and a Schematic View of your project (more on this later). The lower section contains everything else, including a Toolbar, Workspace (a hierarchical view of your project), Timeline, Operator Controls, Audio, and... well, everything else. Although it sounds like a jumble of confusion, this half is actually very clean and smart, which distinguishes Combustion’s interface from those of programs like After Effects, where the interface is based on windows and floating palettes. Whenever you select an item from the Workspace — a Text Operator, for example — you only see the controls relevant to that operator, such as font size, type, and so forth.

The Viewport area supports several configurations, including single, two-up, and quad view, so you can view several items at a time. For instance, in the two-up mode, you can have one Viewport show you an unprocessed piece of footage, while the other one shows the effects of, say, the Discreet Color Corrector Operator. In another application, you might have one Viewport display your work layers in a 3D space while another Viewport displays the final composite.

A second monitor makes working in Combustion much more productive (that way you can have many different Viewports open at once). If you have a two-monitor setup. Combustion’s interface expands to fill both of them as soon as you launch it.

You can also set up a Viewport for Schematic View, which displays your project (or Workspace, as Discreet calls it) in diagram form, presenting each element (video clips, layers, operators, and so forth) as an independent, interconnectable node in the scheme of your project. In Schematic View, you can rearrange and reroute the connections between the nodes by simply clicking and dragging. Users of Alias|Wavefront Maya will be familiar with this easy-to-use, node-based workflow, and it clearly sets Combustion apart from After Effects and Commotion.

Speaking of those would-be competitors, Combustion offers a combination of their feature sets — and more. For instance. After Effects doesn’t have Commotion’s painting, rotosplining, and motion-tracking capabilities, and Commotion doesn’t have true 3D compositing and composite nesting as After Effects does. Ultimately, you have to get both programs to cover the demands of professional work. Combustion has all of the above-mentioned features built in, along with a host of other professional-level features.

One of these features is the grainmanagement tool. Grain is a natural element of film. When you composite computergenerated material, such as 3D animation, with film footage, the two look noticeably different because computer-generated images do not have grain. With Combustion’s grain tools, you can add grain to the computer-generated element by selecting a grain profile from a list of Kodak film stock, or by sampling an area of the film element and applying that profile to the computer element. Likewise, the grainmanagement tools can remove grain.

Another professional feature is support for color look-up tables (LUTs). To put a dry subject in easy-to-swallow terms, film contains more color information than the 8 bits per channel supported by computer monitors. When film is scanned into digital form (lo-bit Cineon), the extra color information is saved, but does not display correctly on a monitor. With Combustion’s View LUT, you can view Cineon files on your Mac and see them as they’d appear projected on a movie screen. This is essential for people who work in motion pictures and need to retain the full color bandwidth of the original film.

Combustion’s feature set is very rich — so rich, in fact, that it’s impossible to cover even a fraction of it in the two pages we have. Some highlights: The Discreet Keyer, an awesome tool for cutting clean mattes from bluescreen orgreenscreen footage, really blew us away. The program offers extensive and intuitive controls for features like spill suppression (eliminating the key color’s fringe around the subject) and matte choking. You can adjust all the parameters for keying through time, so you have complete control.

The Discreet Color Corrector is much more intuitive than After Effects’, and looks similar to the Color Corrector in Final Cut Pro 3. The feedback is a little shakier than that of Final Cut’s real-time 3-Way Color Corrector, but it’s good to have.

The Particles Operator rocks. Particle systems simulate physics-based effects such as smoke, fire, and rain. They can also generate organic effects such as grass, trees, and leaves. What makes Combustion’s particle system so downright cool is its interactive feedback. Let’s say you load the built-in Smoke library in the Particle Controls panel. You get a preset list of different smoke effects (Basic, Wispy, Heavy, and so forth) and a preview window, just click and drag in the preview window to move the virtual smoke emitter around. This is not only a great way to see the effects of the particles, but a lot of fun. You just won’t find this level of interactivity in other effects programs.

How fast is Combustion? We rendered one of the included tutorials on an iBook 500MHz G3 and a Dual 500MHz G4. Since Combustion is optimized for multiple processors and is AltiVec aware, we expected — and found — a pretty big difference between the two machines. On the iBook, the render time was 9 minutes, 22 seconds. On the Dual G4, it was 3 minutes, 55 seconds.

So the program is great and all, and easily deserves a Freakin' Awesome, but what about the price? At $4,999, it’s pretty much out of the hands of consumers. Will professionals get their money’s worth? Combustion is the baby in Discreet’s family of industry-leading special effects and compositing tools, consisting of Flint, Flame, Inferno, Fire, and Smoke, or what Discreet calls FFI/FS. It’s a tight clan, with a high level of interoperability. Its members use the same format across the board for many operations, such as keying and color correcting, meaning you can start a Workspace in Combustion and transfer it to FFI/FS. Ultimately, Combustion thrusts a Mac foot inside the door of the industry, where we can expect to see more Macs involved — which in itself is freakin’ awesome.

Tokuda, Andrew. (June 2002). Combustion 2. MacAddict. (pgs. 46-47).

Download Combustion 2.1 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver