Autodesk on Monday indicated it’s shipping new versions of its compositing and media mastering software applications for Mac OS X, Combustion 4 and Cleaner 6.5.
Autodesk’s long-awaited upgrade to its Combustion visual effects and compositing software is finally shipping for the Macintosh, as well. The software was first announced in February, and was initially expected for Mac release in May.
Combustion combines vector paint, particles, effects, animation and 3D compositing, animation and 3D compositing. It’s popular with digital artists working in motion pictures, television and commercial work.
New features in Combustion 4 include Diamond Keyer, a second-generation keying technology derived from Autodesk’s Discreet Flame technology. Also new is Time Warp — fully keyframeable, time-remapping operations for creating slow motion and speed-up effects. B-spline vector shapes and new point-grouping have been added for better rotoscoping. New optimized “Fast Gaussian Blur” has been added, new operators merge two layers of the same size, and new paint tools have been added.
Autodesk Combustion 4 costs $995; upgrades from Combustion 3 cost $249.
Cleaner 6.5
Cleaner 6.5, first announced in November, adds encoding support for QuickTime 7, the latest major release of Apple’s multimedia software which was released earlier this year. Cleaner 6 is used for mastering and encoding digital video for everything from the Web to DVDs and handheld mobile devices.
Also new to this release is the DivX Pro 6.0 encoder — the new version of DivX just released independently earlier this month and updated support for Kinoma Producer 3 an application that enables users to export MPEG-4 video optimized for playback on Palm handhelds and Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) device.
Cleaner 6.5 also adds the Flix exporter, which allows users to publish video in .FLV and .SWF formats. With QuickTime 7 support, encoding using H.265 (Advanced Video Codec, or AVC) is now supported. Autodesk has also added support for Real 10.
Autodesk Cleaner 6.5 costs $599; upgrades from version 6 cost $125, and versions prior to that can be upgraded for $179.