sutherla@qtp.ufl.edu (scott sutherland) (12/06/89)
******* WARNING! THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS VERY LONG. IF YOU DO ******* ******* NOT WANT TO READ IT, HIT N NOW. ******* There have been a number of articles posted to this news group which show how verbal and written press abuse the Amiga, from either not talking about it in articles where it belongs, to calling the Amiga a souped-up games machine, to outright lies. Well, I came across the following article in the December 1989 issue of CAMCORDER Magazine that I thought would please some of you out there. ***** THIS IS REPRODUCED WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE MAGAZINE ***** ^^^^^^^ TITLE: Mixing Business With Video: How You Can Use Your Camcorder To Make Executive Presentations. AUTHOR: Dean Friedman "... Now theres an altogether brand-new approach, guaranteed to delight the guy who signs your paycheck, make your co-workers green with envy, and maybe even land you that corner office you've had your eyes on ever since its previous occupant, Simpson, ran off to Aruba with the blonde from Accounting. This latest secret to corporate success-- Business Presentation Software. ... Today's business presentation software packages, which run on any of the four standard computer platforms (Amiga, Atari, Macintosh, IBM), are not necessarily less complicated than the venerable slide projector, but they are unquestionably more powerful, more flexible, and much more interacitve than the standard slide-projection style of presentation we're all familiar with. ... (More stuff on the uses of camcorders and computers...) WHICH COMPUTER: Just as is the case with desktop video (covered in previous issues of CAMCORDER), the computer of choice for these sorts of graphic intensive applications is the AMIGA. The AMIGA's strong suits are graphics, animation, sound, multitasking and price. But, that's not to say there aren't alternatives (albeit, significantly more expensive ones). The Apple Macintosh has been ahead of the pack, for a long time, in the area of desktop publishing, boasting a significant body of page design, and print- and slide-making utilities. Although the Mac's been doing it a lot longer, when it comes to creating good-looking single frames that combine text and graphics, the Mac and the AMIGA are pretty evenly matched. But, when it comes to animating these images, or incorporating a live video source into your presentations, or being able to trigger multiple live events easily, the Mac still can't match the AMIGA in terms of power, ease and price. The Atari ST is slowly making some headway in some, but not all, of these areas, but it too has a way to go--quite a long way, if you want to know the truth. As far as graphics and video go, it's just not in the same class as the AMIGA and the Mac. Finally, there's the good old IBM (you remember IBM--the largest profit-generating corporation on the planet Earth!). Yeah, well, if you spend $5000 or $6000 for peripherals like add-on video and graphics boards, you might be able to simulate some, but actually not all of the features you get out of the box on a $1000 AMIGA. But, don't fret. If you happen to be true blue, and already own an IBM or compatible, there is still a lot of viable presentation software out there you can use to good effect. You just won't have as much fun as you would if you owned an AMIGA or a Mac. KINDS OF IMAGES First let's talk about the kinds of images it's possible to create in this type of system and then we'll talk about how we can realize those images in a variety of different formats. Visual aids like bar graphs or pie charts, typical of any business presentation, are a piece of cake when employing the graphic design power of Amiga spreadsheet programs like MaxiPlan Plus (Oxxi), Analyze! (Micro- Systems), Haicalc (Haitex) and Math-Amation (Progressive Peripherals). These programs allow you to input streams of data in numeric form, and will then automatically display the compiled data in graphic form, as two or three-dimensional color bar graphs and pie charts. Using programs such as Deluxe Paint III ($129, Electronic Arts) or Zeotrope ($129, Antic), you can further enhance your graphic displays by manipulating colors and adding borders, logos, backgrounds or additional text. What's more, using the animation capabilities of these programs, these simple images can be made to move. Two- and three-D animation, multi-font titling and scrolling, complicated wipes, dissolves and fades--all of these sophisticated effects can be incorporated, easily, into a live presentation. Several Amiga packages such as MovieSetter ($99, Gold Disk), Lights!Camera!Action! ($69, Aegis), The Director ($59, The Right Answers Group), and Deluxe Video II ($89, Electronic Arts) also allow you to synchronize audio samples or music sequence to accompany the visuals. Yeah, but hold on just a minute there. This presentation stuff is all very nice, but what about my camcorder? I mean this is a camcorder magazine, not some computer rag, right? DIGITIZED VIDEO IMAGES Well, yeah, funny you should ask. Here's the story: there are a number of hardware/software packages available for the AMIGA which allow you to digitize any still or moving image, captured with an ordinary camcorder, and then display it from within your computer. Once your still or moving image has been captured within a computer environment, any number of effects or graphic overlays or color processing is possible. Real images can be stretched, twisted, flipped, sliced and diced and manipulated to your hearts content; and then played back at your command. Amiga products that create digitized images directly from any camcorder include Live! ($289, A-Squared), Frame Grabber ($539, Progressive Peripherals), and Digi-View Gold ($139, NewTek). (Details of a specific example are given) ... MOVING IMAGES Our lunar condo example (omitted above. Scott) employed the camcorder to generate a single still digitized image, but today's newest generation of desktop video tools is also capable of digitizing moving video images. There are some serious time constraints inherent in digitizing and playng back computer video sequences, which are a function of the computer's memory size limitations. A typical Amiga computer with two or three megs (megabytes) of RAM (Random Access Memory) might be able to store and play back no more than 60 seconds of continuous video. Even so, careful management of memory resources, the use of loops and the logical integration of still images along with live action or animated sequences can provide an unlimited time frame in which to deliver a live presentation. And of course, if your oral presentation makes allowances for the time it takes to load new disks, there's, again, no limit to how much video and animation you can play back. (Note: There are systems just coming out, which allow the AMIGA to read animations directly off of 80-megabyte (or more) hard drives, instead of RAM, yielding many minutes or hours of 'continuous' playback. But these are not yet fully compatible with existing animation and video products, most of which require that these ANIM files be read only from RAM, as opposed to disk, for continuous playback). IMAGE TRIGGERING Most of the presentation software mentioned above, such as The Director and Lights!Camera!Action!, allow you to preprogram a script which will then display your images to simulate a linear slide show-like presentation, flipping from sequence to sequence, either automatically, or with the click of a mouse. But, as was mentioned earlier, one of the main virtues of using a computer to display images, as opposed to using a slide projector or video player, is the computer's ability to provide instantaneous triggering of complex sequences or single events via its keyboard in real time. In other words, instead of being restricted to a fixed linear sequence of images, you are offered the option of jumping around from image to image, at will. One program that does this exceptionally well is called Elan Performer ($59, Elan Design). elan Performer allows you to designate keys on your computer keyboard to trigger an associated stall or moving video or animated image. A good analogy for this kind of instantaneous image control would be a person planing a piano keyboard or electronic music synthesizer. Instead of improvising music by triggering notes or sounds, Elan allows you to improvise a visual presentation by triggering images. It goes without saying, that these presentation tools are not the exclusive property of the business community; business presentation is my only immediate foucs for this article. These software packages are, obviously, powerful tools for all kinds of performance art. (A closing section on Mixed Media) " Whew, that's a lot of typing. I had originally planned to type in the entire article so that you could get a feel of how this material fits into the whole, but I decided just to quote excerpts. These sections were taken verbatim, and I take NO responsibility for grammatical mistakes made by the author. Spelling mistakes, however, are probably my fault. ENJOY. Scott Sutherland sutherla@qtp.ufl.edu