Discreet Combustion 3;

The latest update to Discreet's Combustion - version 3.0 for those following along - offers some tasty new features that handily justify its reasonable $200 upgrade price. But I wasn't blown away - any version of Combustion is a tough act to follow.

This desktop compositing program is certainly tops when it comes to razzle-dazzle. Sure, there are the timeline functions and you can spin around text, images, and video and output to various video formats, but the program's superior rotoscoping paint tools and drop-dead gorgeous particle effects provide the sizzle for its dedicated legion of fans. Combustion also has one of the most sensible, if not exactly sexy, interfaces around.

Almost everything that does anything in Combustion is called an operator. Filters are operators; 3D effects, masking, keying, and so on - all operators. And all of these can be stacked onto your timeline to make things happen to your footage and stills. You can adjust the stacking, too, so a filter can affect only a certain object in your composite. Or slide the operator over to affect the entire composite itself - not unlike Photoshop's Adjustment Layers.

The new Edit operator is one of the most notable features of the new version. Now you can actually edit your video footage inside the program. It's an important component that a lot of desktop compositing programs leave out. Developers assume you are going to edit in another application and then move the final movie into a program (such as this one) to work some more mojo. And they are right; that is generally what you do. However, it sure would be nice to do some basic cuts and dissolves from within a compositing program, and now you can. Granted, it's not meant to replace your NLE but if you...