About combustion

With combustion, you create workspaces that contain composites, paint projects, and other effect projects. Each of these contains footage items (movie clips or images) that you process to achieve results that you want to render.

An operator is any process that is applied to an item in the workspace. For example, Composite, Paint, and Color Corrector are all operators.

When an operator is applied to the output of another operator, it creates a flow of image data. Each separate image flow (or stream) is called a branch.

The process tree is the collection of all the branches in the workspace. Therefore, there is only one process tree in each workspace file.

You can look at the process tree in two ways, and in three places.

Type of View:	Shown In:
Hierarchy tree	Workspace panel and Timeline
Flowchart-style	Schematic view in a viewport

Both types of view show the same process tree, but in different ways. The following Workspace panel shows the same tree as the Schematic view on the next page.

A composite is made up of layers—2D objects that you can move freely in 2D or 3D space. The Composite operator takes several inputs (the layers) and composes them into one composite. In the previous example, the Entrance composite has two layers named Hero and Background.

The input for a layer can be any flow of image data, so you can use the output of any operator in the workspace. The layer can use a Footage operator (an operator that interprets and processes footage stored on your system), an operator within another branch, or the output of a branch.

For instance, you can connect the Paint operator in the example to the Composite operator to create a third layer. You can do this in both the Schematic view and the Workspace panel.

Note: When you connect the output of a branch to an operator in another branch, the first branch joins the second; one less branch appears in the Workspace panel.