mahler@alpine.UUCP (Aaron Mahler) (06/14/90)
I'd personally like to condemn Personal Computing for their recent
article on Multimedia. It mentioned the Amiga in a whopping two
paragraphs and the entire tone made the machine sound completely
inferior.
"His first multimedia presentation required 30 hours of work for a
5 minute segment, but for subsequent projects Miller's been able to cut
his development time in half" (15 hours for 5 minutes??)
"For the future, he's looking at three-dimensional rendering (shading
and lighting of CAD drawings) to create more realistic animations. He
concedes that's unlikely to appear in his presentations anytime soon, in
part because rendering requires more speed than the Amiga can handle
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but mostly because he can't justify a $20,000 investment in hardware
and software and a dedicated graphics person to run the equipment."
I pretty much think that is a pile of crap. Yes, rendering is lengthy,
but with the proper equipment (A3000 or 50MHz GVP, etc - WELL under
$20,000) one could do some NICE stuff in a pretty reasonable amount of time.
Considering you can preview in rough modes and automate the final image
process it's not like you have to be there all the time.
The article goes on discuss in detail all of the extremely expensive
MS-DOS and Mac programs (from $395 to over $8000 for software). They
even give you the outline for "Building A Multimedia System" - the
prices were quoted at: $14,700-$24,950 and $11,450-$20,200. They are,
of course, 386 based machines. What else? Uuuugghhhh. I'd rather chew
tinfoil.
With Commodore staking out the Multimedia (I hate the term itself -
Amiga started doing this LONG before IBM/Mac, yet WE never got all
excited about it - it was considered natural for this machine. Ho-hum)
market - articles like this are a disgrace. The magazine (unlike many
of the others) doesn't even announce the A3000, not even a blurb.
Oh well - I'm done screaming. Amiga will make it's dent here real soon
and you don't know how happy I'm going to be when it happens.
Any comments?
Aaron Mahler
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Aaron Mahler - Amiga Enthusiast/Comp. Science Major/C Programmer
UUCP: ..uunet!tronsbox!alpine!mahler (Amiga 2500 - UUCP v1.03D)
UUCP: ..sun!portal!cup.portal.com!dalamar (Use if alpine bounces)
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Ever get the feeling MSDOS users are TRAINED to annoy Amiga users?