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Powerful creative features provide new tools and workflow for visual effects
Autodesk Media & Entertainment (formerly Discreet ) has begun shipping Autodesk Combustion 4 software for Windows, the highly anticipated upgrade to its visual effects desktop software solution. Autodesk Combustion 4 software features a complete set of sophisticated tools for visual effects creation, including vector paint, particles, effects, animation and 3D compositing tools. Version 4 delivers the company's most exciting Combustion software feature upgrade to date, and provides motion graphics and compositing artists new creative capabilities, interface improvements, new paint tools and enhanced interoperability with third-party applications.

now shipping If you're ready to achieve amazing digital feats faster and at less cost, you're ready for combustion 4—the all-in-one professional compositing application from Discreet. Delivering a powerfully complete set of desktop visual effects tools, this highly anticipated release promises to ignite the extreme creativity of any serious desktop video artist. Whether your task is to produce professional video motion graphics, repurpose video content for the web, or create effects for feature films or HDTV, combustion 4 software delivers the first-rate power you need at an incredibly affordable price.

Combustion 4 offers an easy-to-use interface, non-destructive workflow, and extensive toolset designed to help you bring your imagination to life while getting your work done faster. Key features and capabilities include:

• Powerful creative tools—combustion 4 provides in-context access to motion graphics, industry-leading 3D compositing, color correction, image stabilization, vector paint and roto, text effects, short-form editing, expressions, Flash output, and much more.
• Artist-friendly interface—combustion 4 features Discreet’s unified and easy-to-use interface, including multiple-screen, in-context design work; easy navigation; and a schematic node based view—all designed to get you to your destination quicker and easier.
• Broad interoperability —combustion 4 delivers unmatched integration with industry-standard 3D animation, imaging, and illustration software, including Discreet’s leading 3ds max® animation software, cleaner® encoding software, and systems products including flint®, flame®, inferno®, fire® and smoke®.

New features

combustion 4 represents the next major step forward for Discreet’s legendary creative tools and desktop integration, providing artists with a unique competitive edge through unparalleled creativity at affordable prices.

These demo videos offer an exhaustive introduction to this all-in-one professional compositing application. For a complete list of combustion 4 features and functionality, download the combustion 4 tech spec. Here are some of the highlights:

• Discreet’s Diamond Keyer— the second generation of sophisticated keying algorithms derived from flame, Discreet’s Academy Award®-winning online visual effects system
• Time-Warp—a fully key-frameable, time-remapping operator for quickly creating slow-motion and speed-up effects
• B-spline vector shapes and new point-grouping—faster, more efficient rotoscoping
• New optimized ‘Fast Gaussian Blur’
• Custom capsules—create and save encapsulated single or grouped operator nodes and build yourself a library of effects to share and re-use
• Gbuffer builder—enables custom building of Discreet’s Rich Pixel Format (RPF) data structures from bitmap files for more extensive use of combustion RPF nodes
• Merge operator—new optimized operator to quickly merge 2 layers of the same size using any combustion transfer node
• Interface enhancements—edit-operator, navigation, filtering and compare tool improvements just to name a few
• New file import/export options—import of images into color mixer, import ASE (ASCII Scene Export) camera targets from 3ds max, import Windows Media, Open EXR compatible output
• Enhanced paint—new paint tools, grids & rulers, B-spline in paint and new customized brushes

Creative Cow's Ken LaRue explores the just announced Discreet combustion 4. Packed with many new features that Ken enthusiastically describes as "Hot!" and which include quite a number that many users have had on their own personal wish lists, C4 is drawing a lot of attention and discussion here in the Creative Cow forums. In this article, Ken helps us explore many of the reasons why... read more...

cleaner XL exceeds the stringent demands of media professionals for flexibility, quality, productivity and speed. Whether you're producing entertainment, corporate communications, e-learning, advertisements or proposals - you can rely on cleaner XL software to help your media look and sound its best.

Flexibility
To reach the widest audience, you need to be able to deliver your media in a variety of formats, sizes, and bit rates. No matter what your requirements, odds are cleaner XL software can meet your needs. With cleaner XL you're ready to create all the latest formats, including Windows Media 9, QuickTime 6, MPEG (1, 2 & 4), RealVideo ™, Kinoma for Palm ® OS based PDAs and many others. Because cleaner XL software can accept almost any source format, your existing media creation tools will become even more valuable and flexible when coupled with cleaner XL.

Quality
With cleaner XL, an easy to use automated workflow doesn't mean you have to sacrifice quality. Intelligent color space conversions, native YUV processing, a complete selection of editable filters and ready-to-use profiles let you optimize the quality for each output format. New in the cleaner XL software is a complete set of professional audio filters, including a 6-band parametric equalizer and compressor/limiter. Now your media can sound as good as it looks.

Productivity
Multiple output formats, sizes, and bit rates don't have to mean more work. cleaner XL software has a streamlined workflow so you can get more work done in less time. Each job can create multiple outputs and deliver each of those outputs to multiple destinations. Almost every part of a job, from output profiles to filter presets, can be re-used and easily shared. The new job queue lets cleaner XL process in the background while you're preparing other jobs.

Speed
cleaner XL is faster than any previous version of cleaner software thanks to optimization throughout the application. With multiple processors and Intel ® Hyper-Threading Technology you can go even faster.

Features
Support for the latest in-demand formats:

• New: Support for Microsoft Windows Media 9, including multi-channel audio
• New: Support for QuickTime 6, including MPEG-4 video and AAC audio
• New: Kinoma format for Palm OS based PDAs.
• New: Fast MPEG encoding speeds media preparation for DVD and Video CD creation
• Improved: Robust support of the industry's 60 most compelling media formats including: RealVideo ®, MPEG (1, 2 & 4), MP3, AVI, and WAV.

• New: Watch Folders for automated encoding. Associate a job template to a folder and simply drag and drop files to begin encoding. Export directly from your editor or digital media application into a Watch Folder.
• New: Includes over 180 customized and ready-to-use output profiles designed by encoding professionals.
• New: Optimizations for multiple processors and Intel ® Hyper-Threading Technology enables you to work faster than ever.
• New: High performance media filters optimized for stunning quality with complete creative control.
• New: Intelligent color space conversion preserves source fidelity and accelerates processing.
• New: Re-useable job templates and filter presets decrease repetitive set-up tasks.
• Improved: Stream Publishing makes it easy to automatically distribute your encoded media to multiple destinations such as a disk burning station, a web server or shared environments for review and approval.

Discreet cleaner® XL for Microsoft ® Windows ® minimum system requirements:

• Pentium® 3 or 4, 800Mhz or better
• Windows 2000/XP
• QuickTime 6 or later (included)
• Windows Media 9 (included)
• DirectX® 8.1 or greater (included)
• 256 MB RAM
• 200 MB available hard disk space
• 1024 x 768 16-bit display

In general, system performance parameters such as processor type, quantity, cache size, disk drive type and size and graphics card type and settings will affect overall system performance when using cleaner XL. Faster multiple CPU’s will increase encoding performance. Adequate RAM, disk performance and storage capacity should be considered for media type, size and workflow demands. In general, hardware that is faster with higher capacity is usually better.

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Cleaner 6.5 for Apple Macintosh