CGTalk - AE or Combustion,which route

Hugh

01-07-2004, 10:59 AM

Well, asking this in a Combustion forum, you can pretty much guarentee the answer you will get...

I'll try and be objective as I can - as someone who has used both in the past, but doesn't use either any more.

After Effects' strong point is when it comes to motion graphics - a lot of design companies use it for just this, and this is where it excels. However, for compositing work it's not ideal - it can feel very klunky when you're trying to do larger composites...
Personal opinion: I found AE very intuitive at first - it was easy to find what I was looking for, but as I got better, I found this slowed me down - there didn't seem to be a faster way of doing things...

Disclaimer: I've never used Combustion 3, so my comments are based on version 2...
Combustion is a great combination between the motion graphics and the compositing. It has some great compositing tools (partly taken, I believe, from the FFI family) and it also has a good graphics toolkit. If you're going to be doing a little bit of each, then definately go this route. A major downside of Combustion when it comes to compositing is the lack of a proper node system. It has the schematic view, but this is purely a node-based view of the layers that Combustion uses. When I used to use Combustion, I would occasionally try to actually work with the schematic view, but this gets very painful (there's a reason why it's called a schematic view and not a schematic workspace)

Personally, I mainly do compositing, and for that, I don't think you can really beat Shake... (although Digital Fusion, and it's younger brother DFX+ come close)

I hope this has been useful - for the kind of thing you are after, I would go with Combustion of DFX+ (DFX+ is the 8-bit version of Digital Fusion with a cut-down tool-set which can be expanded by buying seperate modules)

Quick blurb on Digital Fusion/DFX+ (both of which I will just call DF...)

DF is a proper node-based compositor set to rival Shake. I don't find it quite as flexible as Shake, but with Shake being discontinued on Windows, Digital Fusion does seem to be being introduced to a lot of film VFX houses. DFX+ is the more TV-oriented version (only supporting 8-bit images), and comes with a smaller tool-set. More tools can be added by buying addon 'modules' - so DFX+ with all the modules is, I believe, just an 8-bit version of Digital Fusion.

Try out the various demos - there's a Digital Fusion demo available from Eyeon's website (http://www.eyeonline.com) and there's a Combustion one from Discreet (http://www.discreet.com). I'm not sure about an After Effects demo, but check out the Adobe website (http://www.adobe.com) if you want...