Sticking to its long-term penchant for incendiary product names, Discreet - famed creators of Flint, Flame, Inferno, Fire and Smoke - previewed combustion*, a complete desktop visual effects system for Windows NT and Macintosh, at NAB in April, with the system is slated for release at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans. After years of talk throughout the industry about "full integration," "convergence of capabilities," and "bringing it all together," the product looks to represent a meaningful step in this ballyhooed direction. As it stands, combustion* may claim the right to temporarily appropriate the Southern city's nickname, "The Big Easy."

Combining the best of the company's unified paint, animation and 3D capabilities with an extremely fast caching architecture, combustion* is a combination punch. The intuitive Discreet interface is still there, as are all the capabilities that brought the company to the forefront of the industry back in 1995. Perhaps most importantly, the new Discreet system is more affordable, sporting a price tag of US$3495.

Sheena Duggal, visual effects supervisor and creative director of high-speed compositing at Sony Pictures Imageworks and a veteran of such varied films as Super Mario Brothers, Contact and Starship Troopers, to name a few, points to the varied functionality of the system, including the integrated keyer, color corrector and tracker, the inimitable Discreet interface, and the speed. With combustion*, Discreet now has professional paint and compositing tools for artists working on affordable NT systems, she says.

By all accounts, combustion* works well both independently and with Discreet's more pricey products, as well as providing support for EPS vector objects, Photoshop layers, and After Effects plug-ins. What's more, combustion* offers brand new 3D compositing capabilities such as true perspective, with moving camera, lights, raytracing and increasingly realistic shadows and reflections.

Accessible, artistic and action-oriented, combustion* may well make Discreet the front runner in what is certain to be a popular market. It certainly gives the company a head start.