Diferences Between Flame and Flint

[buttachunk]

Deke,

i think i figured out why most people believe Combustion is slow-- the settings are hard to get used to. I just spent a few minutes configuring Combustion 4 on a Sun dual Opteron 250 workstation with 4 gigs of ram and a Quadro FX3000. It is pretty fast at 1280 x 910 (custom setting) 12 bit 24fps, but was slow and sluggish until i got my settings right.

Here are my settings;

Preferences-- mostly default, but make sure that software Open GL is unchecked, and uncheck “use texture ram”. Then, in the composite settings, make sure rendering is set to software. Then enable Open GL in the window tab. It’s pretty insanely fast on this system-- at preview resolution on a 1280x910 comp with a Diamond key, color correction, grain removal, and 2 Sapphire camera shake nodes, rendering at about 9fps-- playing back 14fps. Added Sapphire glow to the nested comp, it was down to about 6fps rendering, then 14fps playback. The addition of most other Sapphire plugins (blurs, etc) are rendering at around 9fps in preview rez on the whole nested comp.

I added a particle stream to the comp-- a fireball travelling across the screen, and it rendered in preview rez at approx 9 fps. In Medium rez, it rendered the above comp including the particles plus blur at 17fps then played back at 24fps (the comp speed).

When I do a render to ram, it plays back any rez at 24fps. It took 45 seconds to render 35 frames at best settings.

[beaker]

Deke,

i think i figured out why most people believe Combustion is slow-- the settings are hard to get used to. I just spent a few minutes configuring Combustion 4 on a Sun dual Opteron 250 workstation with 4 gigs of ram and a Quadro FX3000. It is pretty fast at 1280 x 910 (custom setting) 12 bit 24fps, but was slow and sluggish until i got my settings right.

I work at film rez(S35, 2048x1556) most of the time, so thats where my point of view for it being slow is coming from. It may be fine for you at SD rez, but for compositing film rez it sucks. Roto is fine, paint sucks at float, only good at 8/16 bit, EXR support sucks. Half the stuff I really need is broken. Everywhere I work we always have 2 gig of ram and a nice quadro card. 4 gig is worthless with combustion, doesn’t really make a difference since it can only use 2-2.5 gig until it is made into a 64 bit app.

Preferences-- mostly default, but make sure that software Open GL is unchecked, and uncheck “use texture ram”. Then, in the composite settings, make sure rendering is set to software. Then enable Open GL in the window tab. It’s pretty insanely fast on this system–

–snip

When I do a render to ram, it plays back any rez at 24fps. It took 45 seconds to render 35 frames at best settings.

Yes, I know about all those settings(been using C* since v1). Also when you render to ram or playback and let everything cache on the timeline, it is always going to play back at 24fps or whatever you set it to because its playing from ram.

[buttachunk]

doesn’t really make a difference since it can only use 2-2.5 gig until it is made into a 64 bit app.

Yep, guess Shake 4 will be 64 bit… OS X already is, as are several linux distros. Shake can use up to more 2 gigs of RAM when making a flipbook, according to the Shake manual, since it is another process. I have Fedora Core 3 64 bit installed, and the Nvidia driver has been crashing Shake recently when I try to open any file windows. The built-in driver works but is not hardware accelerated, so i’m thinking about getting Suse.

Also, agreed-- Shake is more streamlined for high end feature compositing work that you’re doing. Combustion has kindof a broader tool palette for motion graphics and particles and such, and is designed for prepping elements for FFI-- which are 8 or 12 bit.

Also, have you tried Combustion 4 yet ? Something feels faster with the caching… I may be tripping though

[MarkH]

I’m not going to take sides on this, I hate taking side.

Beaker - What apps do you use for compositing at film rez? Are you using combustion on mac or pc? It seems like combuistion’s faults are effecting you more than the average person, so in your case I suppose combustion doesn’t fit the workflow. Combustion fits well in my pipeline and I’m happy with it, but the support for 3ds Max is also a huge plus for me. I’m really curious to try out Toxik. It wouldn’t do much for my pipeline today, but it’s something I’d like to look into. It’s more represenative of flame than combustion too. :twisted:

[beaker]

Beaker - What apps do you use for compositing at film rez? Are you using combustion on mac or pc? It seems like combuistion’s faults are effecting you more than the average person, so in your case I suppose combustion doesn’t fit the workflow.:

I have used AE, Shake, DF, Combustion, for film compositing, just depends the job I am working and what tools that company uses.

I never said I didn’t like combustion(I use it in production for many things). I was just disagreeing with many of buttachunck’s statements about it. I have equally as many bad things to say about DF, Shake and AE. Just because I say bad things doesn’t mean I don’t like it. It’s just a very slow app. (no I am not using it on osx).

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