Discreet Combustion 2

What the heck is this? We wouldn’t be surprised one bit if you said the same after seeing Combustion 2 for the first time. But as your eyes get used to the new look software you will find the interface useful and easy to use. At first view, it may look like a crowd of icons and buttons with some text thrown in some places. It is a very smartly designed interface that has been divided into two parts horizontally. The above part is the viewport area and the lower potion contains everything else including a toolbar and timeline.

Combustion is the desktop version of high-end composting cousins, Flame and Inferno. It has loads of features that will make a special effects guy jump with joy. But the learning curve is quite steep. Options like vector paint, advanced keyer, tracking, gradient masks, fabulous particle systems etc take it way past competitors. Not many PC-based software provide so many features.

Combustion comes with various viewport options so as to show various stages of the project. The viewport also comes with Schematic view, which shows the project in node like format. The connections can be made or broken by the nodes, simply by dragging and dropping.

We practically fell in love with the particle generation feature of Combustion. They are actually a simulation of physics-based effects. It has demo simulations of fire, smoke, water, trees etc. The effects can be used as is or they can be tracked on a moving object. All pre-loaded effects are customizable, and users can also make their own effects. It’s a great feature that is fun to work with too. Moving further we come to masks. These are useful when you want to use parts of different footages and merging them to make one video. Masks can also be used to hide out portions that were left while keying. These masks can also be animated and given soft edges/gradients over time to match the movie clip.

Combustion also ships with Discreet’s network rendering software, Backburner that allows you to render your work on the network while working on the base machine. Combustion can also combine with other SGI-based software by Discreet like Flame, Flint and Inferno. This makes it a good tool for big players with high end compositing systems. Small workloads can be shifted on PC-based combustion systems.

The Bottom Line This software is apt for post-production and design houses that don’t want to lose valuable time working on small takes on their heavyweight machines. The package is attractively priced.

Geetaj Channana