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"Composite Command Prompt" shows up as a menu item in Windows 8, but there doesn't seem to be any documentation about what it is. When I run it, I get an instance of cmd.exe. So, what is it?

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    Never heard of it myself, and don't have Windows 8 handy right now to check, my guess is it's from a 3rd party program. If you right-click and check the properties of the shortcut, what is it pointing at? Dec 17, 2013 at 16:35
  • can you turn its background transparent? if so, its cmd with 3D compositing in its UI rendering. with standard command prompts you cannot enable any kind of transparency. just a guess. Dec 17, 2013 at 16:36

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If you'd told people in your question what folder in the Start menu you'd found this in, there wouldn't be such perplexity. My educated guess is that you found it in the Programs > Autodesk > Autodesk Composite folder of your Start menu.

It's not unusual for development software packages to add Start menu items that simply invoke the command interpreter with a lot of extra environment variables and whatnot already set up, so that one can run various command-line tools from the package more easily. Visual Studio 2010 has a Visual Studio Command Prompt item on the Start menu, for example. (It's still there in VS2012.)

This is just more of the same, except that it sets up the environment and whatnot for running python scripts for Autodesk Composite, previously known as Autodesk Toxik, and runs a command interpreter from which one can invoke said scripts. Hence "Composite".

Of course, the clue to what it is is right there in the Start menu, staring one in the face as the name of the folder containing the shortcut. Don't forget to tell people this important where-you-found-it information next time. We're not clairvoyant you know. ☺

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