Moving to Combustion 2 from After Effects, Part 4

We had sort of an abrupt ending to the last installment, for which I apologize, but there was a good reason. After all, I could have just kept writing and writing and writing about where things are in Combustion, resulting in an article that very well could have rivaled War and Peace in the length department (and, as some might argue, boringness department as well). So I decided to pull a Miramax/Kill Bill thing and split this particular aspect of our series into a couple of separate installments. As "they" say, onward and upward.

Effects

It would be strange for a program named After Effects not to have, well, effects. So it's not particularly surprising that AE offers you a wide variety of effects through the menu bar, a dedicated palette, or a contextual menu (fig. 1). Combustion isn't so limited by its name when it comes to what they call effects, opting instead for the Operators moniker, but they're ostensibly the 'zact same thing as AE's filters, albeit with a slight twist (more on that in a minute).

Figure 1: AE's Effects, accessed through the menu (left), palette (center), and contextual menu (right).

Where are they?

Combustion's operators are accessed pretty much the same way as After Effects' are: via the menu bar, palette, or contextual menu (fig. 2). So far, so good, huh?

Figure 2: C2's Operators, accessed through the menu (left), palette (center), and contextual menu (right).

Main differences

Now for the slight twist I mentioned. When you get right down to brass tacks (and really, who doesn't enjoy getting down to brass tacks?), pretty much everything in Combustion is an Operator. Huh? I don't really understand the reasoning behind this myself, but even things like composites and text objects are classified as Operators, in addition to the things you might immediately think are Operators, like basic filters, chromakeying and motion tracking. So it wasn't really useful, at least to me, to think of comps and text as Operators, because it doesn't really seem like you're operating on anything at all in that context. It may be of some help to you (as it was me) to make the mental separation between what I took to calling objects (comps, text, paint, particles) and the "true" Operators that fall into the effects category. Enough lecturing here—hopefully you've got the gist by now.

It's worth mentioning here that for some, the suite of included effects may well hold the deciding vote on which package to go with. As of this second, Combustion arguably holds the edge with the amount of "stuff" it can do out of the box, things like an integrated paint engine, particle systems, motion tracking, and chromakeying, as well as features like the Discreet color correction engine borrowed from C2's big siblings (Flint, Flame, etc.). That's in addition to the full set of base filters you'd come to expect from a package such as this. Not to shortchange After Effects (the production bundle, anyway): it's got most of the advanced effects Combustion has as well, though it's been my experience that the AE version of tools like chromakeying and vector painting leave a lot to be desired when put up against the same features in Combustion. BUT (capitalized because it's a big but) After Effects 6 was announced while I was writing this story, and if the advance looks are any indication, AE6 will have come a long way towards narrowing, if not eliminating, this feature disparity when it ships. Stay tuned on this development, as I hope to do a follow-up in this series once AE6 has been released.

Audio

I've come to the realization by now that if you're looking for decent audio capabilities out of your effects package, Combustion is decidedly not for you. After Effects isn't exactly an audio powerhouse, but at least you can do some semblance of audio mixing and filtering in AE (not to mention work with more than one sound track if you wish). Combustion is pretty much built with the most basic of audio capabilities: the ability to import a single, finished audio track for you to time your comps to, and that's about it.

Where is it?

In After Effects, audio clips show up in the Project window and can be dragged to any comp's timeline (fig. 3). AE also lets you set fades in the timeline, adjust gain through the audio palette, and even access a dedicated set of audio effects (fig. 4), giving you quite a bit of audio options for a program that doesn't purport to be an audio editor. Combustion has exactly one way to deal with audio: through the Audio palette (fig. 5) located in the Operator Controls area. Not hard to find, but also not much to do once you get there.

Figure 3: Audio is just another file type to work with in AE, a fact which makes it surprisingly adept with sound clips.

Figure 4: AE even includes its own set of filters just for audio.

Figure 5: Combustion's audio "feature" pretty much only lets you work with a single sound clip as a reference track.

Main differences

I think it's pretty clear by now what the main differences are between After Effects and Combustion in terms of audio: After Effects lets you do stuff to your audio, and Combustion, well, doesn't. Having glanced over what you can do with AE's audio tools in the previous paragraph, I suppose Combustion deserves the same courtesy. The audio palette allows you load a sound clip (or audio tracks from QuickTime movies), set a playback range, and then assign (or link, as it's known in C2) it to a composite. That's pretty much it. Very basic, but it's not really claiming otherwise. After Effects definitely has the upper hand here.

Playback controls

Playback of your artistic masterpieces is a vital part of either program, but let's face it: a palette of VCR-style controls isn't exactly the sexiest feature in the world. But hey, I'm not stuck just talking about glitz and glamour alone. I give you the basic meat-n-potatoes stuff as well.

Where are they?

I tend to group a few things into the category of playback, and from the looks of things, Discreet and Adobe do as well. So I'm hardly original there. What the royal "we" would lump together are as follows: resolution modifiers, RAM playback, and, of course, basic playback controls. Both AE and C2 spread their various playback controls over different parts of the interface, but they're all pretty much there in plain sight. In After Effects, you're given a Time Controls palette that combines basic playback with RAM preview functions (fig. 6). The resolution modifiers can either be invoked for RAM playback from this palette, or can be controlled on a comp-by-comp basis through the tool palette at the bottom of any comp window (fig. 7). Combustion keeps things pretty well together, placing the basic controls smack dab in the middle of the interface, with resolution modifiers right next door (fig. 8).

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Main differences

Ah, but where's the RAM playback in C2? How Combustion handles RAM playback is somewhat different than how After Effects does it, so I figured that the "Main Differences" section for this feature would be a good place to go over it. It's nice when I decide to stick to my own arbitrary and generally poorly-conceived conventions. Anyhoo, by default, playing back any timeline in Combustion results in RAM playback—it's integrated into the basic playback controls. Of course, each frame has to get loaded into RAM first (you probably already know the drill there), but once a frame is loaded it'll play back from RAM. At first glance, this has a big benefit as well as a big drawback over the way AE does things. The big benefit is that RAM playback is automatic. The big drawback is that you seemingly don't have the finer controls, such as frame skip and frame rate controls, that AE's dedicated palette gives you. But a little digging helps here, as C2 offers a Render to RAM option from the File menu (fig, 9). This palette is very similar to what you might get in a full-blown render settings interface, so suffice it to say that it gives you a lot of options for RAM playback. Of course, both programs let you save what's in the RAM playback buffer as an animation file, which is a big plus regardless of the program you're using.

Figure 9

Info Palette

It's always a good thing, in whatever program you happen to be in, when you can just glance over to a fixed place in your workspace and see contextual feedback about what you're working on. Many programs offer some sort of info palette or window that serves up just this type of information (hence the name, now that I think about it), and our two protagonists are no exception. As is a running theme by now, however, their respective implementations of the info palette concept are somewhat different.

Where is it?

As After Effects is wont to do, there's a dedicated palette for basic info (fig. 10), which is cleverly called the Info palette. Combustion gives you the same information across the bottom of its interface (fig. 11)—no similarly clever name, though.

Figure 10

Figure 11: Combustion's info palette includes a handy-dandy RAM usage tool (right).

Main differences

At their respective cores, each program's Info palettes are pretty much constrained to the X and Y coordinates of where you've got the mouse parked at any given moment, as well as the color value your mouse is hovering over. After Effects also uses this space to give you feedback on the loading state of projects that are large enough to not load instantly, at which point the Info window in AE has pretty much reached the end of its usefulness.

On the other hand, Combustion offers a couple of other tidbits in the instant feedback area that I've found increasingly useful over time. For one, in addition to XY coordinates and color feedback, Combustion displays a constant counter of RAM usage, which can be seen back in figure 11. This feature, as you might imagine, is incredibly helpful with overall project memory management, not to mention providing a sick reminder of how much more RAM you really should have on your machine. But that's another conversation entirely. The other nice feedback feature in C2 is always-on composite info overview that's superimposed over however many panels you have your Viewport split into (fig. 12), which tells you stuff like what workspace branch you're currently looking at, the name of the object, and various view settings. For me, the more real-time information that's always referenced and displayed, the better, and C2 doesn't disappoint here.

Figure 12: Combustion offers comp info from within the viewport.

Again, break time

Time again to stop and take a bit of a breather for now, as we're just about two-thirds of the way through our little sub-jaunt into C2's interface specifics. Now, for those of you that have been keeping score and are actually holding me accountable for what I say in these silly little articles I write, you may be steaming at the moment. That's because I promised you a good hard look at C2's Operator Controls panel for this time, a promise that I most decidedly did not deliver on. All I can do is ask your forgiveness and offer my assurances that we're going to spend the better part of our next installment on that very topic, so hold on just a little longer. Until next time, boys and girls.

Filed under: Tutorial on July 18th, 2003

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