Thinking about buying Combustion

[Backenbotten]

Hi wolf_cub_one!

I'm a CS3 user, but I haven't used After Effects hardly at all. Agreed it'd be interesting to hear some AE users on this!

I'll try to give my view on CS3's NLE-stuff anyway...
The "edit" operator in CS3 does allow for single track editing, like splitting, changing in/out points, adding simple dissolves. If you want several tracks at once (with alphas and various transparency) though, you have to go with a composite operator and use layers. While this is certainly very powerful it is IMHO overkill when you only need to do simpler things you can do in an NLE app. Combustion always caches everything uncompressed to RAM (which makes image quality very accurate but most often not real-time), so you won't get the same responsiveness like in many NLE apps. I also find it more tedious to animate transparency for layers than using a dedicated NLE app.

The things of NLE-type I have done succesfully in CS3, is:
1) Short and simple single track editing with straightforward cuts and dissolves. (I'd rather not do this for longer stuff though because of the need for RAM preview).
2. To make rough edits to feed the right footage into the comp, where I have say a 5-minute DV-coded avi and only need smalll parts of it.

If you go with combustion, I think you'll spare a lot of worries by getting a dedicated NLE app as well. I do almost no editing, but I find it hard to imagine that I would have been happy with only combustion for the projects i've been involved in.

That's only my opinion, i'm sure other CS3 have others...

[wolf-cub-one]

Thanks for taking the time to answer. It was wishful thinking to hope that I could use Combustion also as an NLE. I just downloaded the demo and will play with it this week.


Thanks again

[Alex Mateo]

i have a free license :D , was a gift in SIMO spain :D

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