1. Potent Particles — Need realistic fire? Smoke trails? How about some magic Pixie Dust, a slick Transporter effect for your sci-fi epic, or the kind of shimmer that just can’t be made with the limited particle plug-ins in most animation software? Here’s the coolest, most realistic-looking particle system anywhere, and with the extensive customization options for tailoring the look and behavior of the particles, you’ll be making magic in moments. Tinker Bell never had it this good.

2. Integrated Morphing & Warping — Your client tells you they want to turn water into wine, or make a banana out of a motorcycle. Instead of spending a pile of cash on a separate morphing program, you simply use the newly integrated, industrial—strength Morph and Warp capabilities of the amazing bundled RE:Vision Effects™ RE:Flex™ plug-ins, which deliver smooth, convincing morphing and image distortions with a few clicks of your mouse. Using the excellent spline editing tools in combustion to control the exact look and dynamics of the process, anything from full cinematic morphing to highly controlled image distortions allow you to fix problematic elements and fully control the shape of any object in a scene. Try doing that in the real world!

3. Integrated Editing Functionality — Even though everyone has a dedicated NLE for full-on video editing tasks, how many times have you needed to tweak your edited video to match the special effects you’re creating, without switching programs and re-importing edited footage? Once you try the new Edit operator, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Basic cut edits with professional-quality transitions are easily accessed from within the combustion timeline, making it a cinch to synchronize your footage with your titles, effects and overlays. Good luck doing this in any other compositing software. On Earth, at least.

4. Visual Expressions Browser — Making things move around in odd ways is fun, but you would probably never use the words “fun” and “math” together in the same sentence. Using the unique Visual Expressions Browser in combustion, turn the dry numbers of moving pictures into highly interactive, instantly intelligible visual displays of complex motion and interpolation effects. Grab a parameter and slide it around while watching the visuals dynamically update. Once you learn by example, try your own hand at creating custom effects using the industry-standard JavaScript language that’s under the Expressions hood. Learning how math relates to animation has never been easier. Easy and math in one sentence. Cool.

5. Vector-based Painting and Roto — Getting stains out of a wedding dress is a major hassle, and it’s even worse if the wedding cake is a Triple-Tier Chocolate extravaganza. Not to mention what it’ll do to the lovely bride’s complexion. It’s up to you to take those smears and zits and make them vanish. Use the potent Vector Brush with Cloning and Motion Tracker to quickly and effortlessly remove the undesirable goobers, without having to touch up each and every frame by hand. Deploy the new wild, multi-colored, awesome custom brushes to add zest and personality to her step. Watch your video clip play in realtime as you paint away in a separate editing view. And if our blushing bride enjoys too much cake, the Warp tools will help trim those pesky pounds away.

6. Advanced Feathering Controls — Are the feathering controls in your current compositing software giving you trouble? Ever wanted separate controls over the softness of both the inside and outside edges of a feathered selection? Ever need to fine tune the blending of one side of a foreground object without affecting the other side? Your search is over. combustion delivers this unique ability, with full spline-based editing tools and realtime visual feedback. It’s the 21st century, time for 21st century feathering tools. Leave crude feather “rock” hammers in the stone age.

7. Advanced Tracker — Discreet has set the standard for motion tracking and footage stabilization tools, and combustion’s amazing Tracker is the leader of the desktop pack. Not only is it wonderfully precise and fast, it’s also highly integrated into the combustion toolset. Vector brushes can track anything in your footage, and even resize and reshape to follow the action. Particle emitters can follow everything, for instant space ship exhaust and plane contrails, Clone tools play “Follow the Imperfection” and clean up after themselves. Save shaky handheld footage from the garbage bin, and make fresh bread from nothing but pixels and water. OK, scratch that last one, but once you’ve used our combustion Tracker, you’ll lose track of other, er, trackers. You get the idea.

8. Integrated Font Browser — You have 927 fonts. There’s no way you’re going to remember what each and every one looks like, and with the combustion Font Browser, you don’t have to. In one quick and easy step, preview the look of each typeface, and type your own text into the Preview window. How many ways can the word “Sandwich” look? How many things can you put between two pieces of bread? Do the math.

9. Grain Management — Make your DV video take on the granular richness of film. Add the emulsion look of a live background plate to a computer-generated character to give your productions the slick, professional sheen that makes the monster look like it’s actually in the scene with the damsel (or dude) in distress. The Grain Management tools in combustion analyzes and reproduces the grain characteristics of imported footage, and adds it to anything else placed into a scene. Remove the nasty noise artifacts from cheaply-shot video. Hey, PixelVision is always gonna look funky, but for everything else, there’s Grain Management.

10. Functional Schematic — What good is an overview schematic of a complex project if you can’t actually do anything with it? The impressive Schematic view delivers full editing and playback abilities within an uncluttered, visual flowchart representation. Play back footage as picons (picture icons) in thumbnail nodes. Rewire effects in an intuitive, graphic fashion. Make it easier to explain the mechanics of a complex effects shot to the rest of your team – or your Mom. And do all of this without sacrificing the power of the traditional timeline method of editing. Compositing is a visual task, so here’s a graphical method both fast and straightforward. 

11. And then there’s superior color correction tools, support for just about every bit depth you can come up with (8, 10, 12, 16 bit and floating point), the ability to not only continually rasterize but edit imported PostScript® graphics, a multitude of layer transfer modes, project compatibility with Discreet’s online effects solutions… OK, this list goes to 11. And beyond. Try combustion, and make your own list. Ours goes to 11.