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(As part of an ongoing "Mobile Studio Series," this review copy of combustion was tested on a top-of-the-line 500 MHz G3 Apple PowerBook with 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM as well as on the traditional desktop.)
Video & The MacVideo Gear
Some post artists may be familiar with combustion's previous incarnations as the programs Paint and Effect, which were segregated paint box and composite tools originally offered by the Denim Software company several years ago. Since that time, the product has gone through several revisions culminating with the purchase of Denim Software by Discreet, which was itself merged into the well-known graphics firm Autodesk Inc. In its early days, the product drew attention from the post world for its innovations and desktop advances. With this 1.0 release, the combustion package incorporates the best from its legacy past with retrofitted features from its much costlier new siblings in the Discreet line-namely the Discreet flame and inferno solutions.
The Combustion Interface
At first sight what most graphics pros will notice about combustion is its unconventional look and feel, which is a radical departure from traditional desktop Mac or PC compositors. In fact, it will likely only be familiar to artists acquainted with Discreet flame or inferno. In other words, most desktop graphics designers will have a fair learning curve ahead of them with this package, but one that is, in my opinion, well worth the effort. In a world where interfaces of graphics programs tend to be anywhere from ugly to dysfunctional, the appearance of combustion's interface is refreshingly balanced. Best of all, its clean, gray beauty is anything but skin deep. In this case combustion's form actually does follow its function. The folks at Discreet have produced a user interface (UI) that's a pleasure to behold and logical in use and implementation.
The full vector painting and compositing environments available within combustion are easily reached. Most functions in the package are triggered through "contextual" or "in-context tool" tabs that change the look of the interface in context to whatever task is at hand. Each context tab loads convenient palette options for creating elements as well as for general editing and animation operations. This contextual approach is another feature borrowed directly from the flame and inferno...