Runaway Training:Combustion Underground Training DVDs

Jim Harvey JHV Digital New York, USA ©Copyright 2004 Jim Harvey and Creativecow.net. All Rights Reserved

For any of you who have struggled with learning any graphics/video package you will appreciate the review that I'm here to deliver.

Discreet’s Combustion is an incredibly powerful tool that can create all manner of motion graphics, composites, wire removal and has a host of other abilities that can make people really sit up and take notice of your projects. The problem is, as is the case with everything in our field, is learning how to use it. Sure, you can take a course at a tech school, an industry seminar, or buy hundreds (or thousands) of dollars worth of tutorial books or training CD’s and spend weeks pouring over them trying to get a handle on how to get combustion to do what you want it to. That's always been the way it worked until now.

Runaway Training is a couple of guys who work in the industry and have the bona fides in a number of disciplines. One of these characters (both of whom don't like to be called “experts”) is Lee “Rod” Roderick. Lee is a Certified Discreet Training Specialist for Combustion and also was the author of Discreet Combustion 2 Courseware. If you read CMP’s Photoshop for Non-Linear Editors, then you've already been exposed to Lee's savvy (he wrote the chapter on Combustion in that book). The idea is simple and brilliant. Make a training disk that deals with one particular aspect or problem, throw in 3 free tips or tricks, and put a short interview with an industry specialist who will talk about what's going on NOW in the industry and how to get your game up to speed. Do everything in Full Motion and Full Resolution so that when people play the DVD it's actually a pleasure to watch. Now only charge the folks $20.00 or so per disk. This way you can pick and choose what you want to know or learn without having to spend all your candy money on training.

Oh yeah, I DID say only $20.00 per disk.

I got my hands on the latest two releases from Runaway Training and popped them into my DVD player and worked through the tutorials. Let me preface this by saying that I am possibly the world’s WORST Combustion user. Perhaps I should call myself the world’s BEST non-user. I've never given myself the time to sit and learn the program properly, and the few times that I've fired it up, I've gotten lost so quickly that I've spent more time trying to find my way back to square one than actually creating anything of any value. All that has changed with these disks! The tutorials are clear and the video is the best I've ever seen on a training disk. Roderick’s style is relaxed and he has a pleasant voice that doesn't jangle you while your trying to follow his instructions (Trust me when I tell you that is an important aspect of ANY training set!). I watched the DVD through once and then went to work applying the exercise as it unfolded. The ability to stop and “rewind” a section has always been a strong point of training DVD/CD sets. It's no different here. Inside of a very short time, I had completed the lesson, learned some valuable things about the Combustion interface and lost my fear and loathing of the program altogether. If you are stumbling along and trying to understand why you shelled out the money for a program that has so much going on that you don't know where to start, these DVDs are for you. If you are comfortable with Combustion, having the ability to choose what you want to learn at a ridiculously low cost is a real bonus. The free tips are a nice touch and something that you'll want to add to your notebook for future reference. I wasn't really thrilled with the interview portion at first, but I watched it again and realized that there was a lot of very solid information in the interview that newcomers and even some “old timers” could learn from.

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©Copyright 2005 Jim Harvey | Creative Cow
All Rights Reserved