Combustion 3
Mar. 04, 2004 - Most of you know me from my After Effects writing I have done on these pages. I have been using the application for about 10 years now, and consider it one of my favorite and most often used programs. By being fully entrenched with this product for so long, you can imagine my hesitancy when I was asked to begin using discreet’s Combustion 3. While other reviewers have done a stand-alone review of the product, I thought it would be better to look at Combustion 3 from an After Effects perspective.
Before getting into the major differences, and benefits of Combustion 3, I should say that I really like the product. In the month that I have been using it (on both the PC and Mac), I have found it to be a solid and stable application, with only a couple of crashes on each platform. Until just recently combustion 3 was only available on the PC, but it now shipping for the Mac. [an error occurred while processing this directive]I also want to point out that I am not trying to start a flame war on which application is better than the other. Both After Effects 6 and combustion 3 have their own strengths and weaknesses – I am merely pointing out what I like best about combustion 3 from an AE user perspective and what features in combustion 3 would be a consideration for switching, or at the very least, adding to your toolset.
There are a great number of improvements in combustion 3, but right off the bat, I really like the fact that you can digitize video directly into the application. This is something I have been hoping After Effects would implement for a long time. Since you can digitize your footage, combustion 3 also allows you to do simple editing without needing a separate NLE system. Trimming and rolling clips in the Timeline are possible just like in After Effects, but because of the ability to digitize directly to the application, the point here goes to combustion.
Another new feature in combustion 3 is the expression browser. This feature allows you to visually see the shape of your expression that you create. If you want to see what shape your Sin Wave will take, the graph is there for you. If you make changes to the values that control the expression, you can see the results instantly. For those of us who are not math savvy, the included presets are a real help. I give combustion a point over After Effects for the unique way it allows the user to create and manipulate expressions.
The big drawback with expression in combustion 3 is that someone who has been using After Effects and expressions for a while, will need to speak a new language – or rather a new dialect. Both After Effects and Combustion base their expression language on JavaScript but with their own unique functions, code, etc. This means you won’t be able to do a simple copy/paste from an After Effects 6.0 expression and have it work perfectly in combustion 3. Fortunately, the combustion 3 documentation gives a pretty good overview of the major combustion JavaScript Objects (indicated by a cm), and even gives a conversion cheat sheet to help you convert any parametric equation to a combustion 3 expression. From mucking around with combustion 3 expressions, they seem a little lacking at times, so I would have to give a point to After Effects for more robustness.
In After Effects 6.0, the Paint Tool has been greatly improved to give the end user more options when creating animated masks, rotoscoping, etc., but the biggest drawback to the current version is the inability to use or create your own custom brushes a la Adobe Photoshop. Combustion 3 wins the painting category hands down as you can manipulate, change, import, and use your own brushes. To put the icing on the cake, all of the brushes are resolution independent, vector based, and can be keyframed.
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| In this image, some video noise/grain is present. |
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| While it can be pushed too far, like the above example, combustion 3's remove grain operator is great for cleaning up noise. |
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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