just wondering how a dual opteron 2.4 ghz system w/ 4 gb ram and a Quadro FX3000 videocard would fare with Combustion* at SD with medium density comps (4-7 layers, with multiple plug-ins) ? Flame-like or better ?
i just tried it on a 3200+ Athlon 64 bit, and my hands are still shaking.:bounce:
Well, on the 3 GHz Pentium 4’s with 1GB of RAM - at my school - combustion* is still incredibly slow, even with a lot of memory assigned for caching…
Maybe you should contact discreet about this? Ask them what kind of system is the best to buy, or maybe check out the discreet site for specified hardware.
i just did some tests with my new athlon 3200+ 64bit, and combustion is approx 4-5 times faster than After Effects on a similar composition with the same plug-ins. that is both interactive and render-out speed.
Combustion was still noticably faster at ‘preview’ resolution than After Effects was in quarter resolution…
I am in the process of building me a couple Dual Opteron Workstations. The will be used for rendering, animation, & compositing.
Dual 2.0GHz AMD Opteron 246
256MB PNY Nvidia Quadro FX 4000(only one will have this in it, the other will have 9800 Pro or Quadro FX 1100)
2.0GB Corsair XMS ECC Registered PC3200
Tyan Tiger K8W
If Combustion 4.0 can’t work well on this then that would CRAZY
I let you know when I am done and run Combustion on the system. 
Made a big change to what systems I was going to build. I was going to stick with AMD Opteron 246s but that was before I saw the ASUS NCCH-DL 875P Xeon Platform. I could not believe they have a dual xeon atx motherboard that supports AGP 8x Pro, 2 64-Bit PCI slots( now I can install that Adaptec SCSI Raid card I always wanted) and supports up to 3.6GHz EM64T “Nocona” processors". I am sold on this motherboard. Another big plus is that it uses the Intel i875P chipset which means my Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro video editing card will work on it. O happy days.
buttachunk & mlmiller1983: combustion* might be a lot faster than After Effects, but it’s still incredibly slow compared to, say, NUKE and Shake. Also, combustion* is still layer based, rather than node (don’t let the schematics fool you).
Still, combustion* is not all that bad, afterall it even features several tools and functionality as seen in flame*. And yes, with that system (of yours, mlmiller1983) it seems like nothing much could go wrong
I plan to utilize both Combustion 4.0 and After Effects 6.5 Pro as I believe they are both good with each having their own strengths and weaknesses. Shake is only avaible for Macs but if I ever do buy a Power Mac I will be sure to pick it up unless Macintosh is working on a PC version. As far as NUKE goes I never heard of it but I’ll check into it.
Shake is still available for Linux and NUKE, I’m surprised you never heard of it, was formerly an in-house compositor of Digital Domain (hence D2 NUKE :)). Take a look here for more information on NUKE: http://www.d2software.com. It’s currently, together with Shake and Houdini Halo, my favorite compositor.
Thankyou free money from uncle sam. I going to pay for it with saving the $800 I get each month from the Air Force Reserve( i have to be attending school full time though). I took me about 6 months of saving up but its going to be well worth it.
uhhh… incredibly slow compared to Shake ??? have you used similar plugins on both for your tests ??? maybe your preferences in Combustion are wrong…
i did a comp. in Shake and one in Combustion on the same machine using the same footage files with similar plugins/effects (keying, blurring), and found both to be around the same speed (Comb in preview and Shake in 1/2 rez and 1/2 rez proxie). Combustion’s playback looked better and played back the frames faster than Shake (with cache set to Aggressive).
Not to start a war here or anyhting. but after a couple of years compositing on various projects I have to say that combustions main failing is its speed and stability. I have absolutely no loyalty to any package. I will happily use whatever works. I really want to use combustion as it has great features, awesome tracker and paint, 3d cameras and a huge promise, discreet master keyer and colour warper, it just has bit me in the ass so many times.
I have used it on a number of projects and on the mac platform its performance is dire. PC is much better and with a spec’ed out machine like you are talking about you should be fine for SD work.
I have found shake to be must faster and more stable on every platform i have used it on. I also have found after effects to be superior in its use of the same plugins. I would also urge you to have a look at digital fusion, I have only had some small experience with it but since you are basing yourself on PC and having seen version 5 (due out soon) I am very impressed with it !
I probably just stick with what I got now but I will look into digital fusion. I got AE 6.5 Pro for only $200 on ebay I kid you not and it was the legit version too and was able to register it with Adobe and Everything. Also got Premiere Pro 1.5 and Photoshop CS for only $175 each too. All commerical versions too.
So you say based on your experience that After Effects is pretty good. Well I’ll probably just stick with that for now. The system I am building now is a Dual 3GHz Intel Xeon “Nocona” PC.
Damn Me thats a good price for those bits of software… well done. I would definately stick with that for the moment. I have done a lot of TVC work with After Effects and I love it You may want to look at commotion or Silhoette for roto !
Good luck
The two main 3D software I will be using at the moment are Maya Unlimited 6.5 and Lightwave 3D 8.0. The Maya is an educational license while the Lightwave is a commerical license( Newtek was having a special offer and I got for $550 because I had a Maya license, not bad I would say).
About Commotion is this the software you are talking about in the link.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=323016&affiliate=shopping
Thanks!!
Yes that is the product but you should know that it is a dead product. It is no longer in development and is no longer listed as a product by pinnacle. You should be cautious in getting it as you will get little or no support from the developer and there won’t be any updates.
-Eric
I have never used it, but the product website is: http://www.silhouettefx.com/roto/
-Eric