denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste) (11/03/88)
I finally picked up a SunRize color separator, and with that, a DigiView (2.0) and my laser-disk player I've been happily converting sequences of computer animations and other things from various videodisks I own. I've been trying to put them together into playable animations, and I've had experiences with three packages so far: [Don't worry, this all culminates in a question.] First was... dilbm/pilbm/movie - developed for the original "juggler" demo (you remember it, don't you?) and in the public domain (but not the sources, damn it). GOOD SIDES: Extremely fast playback, very compact animation file, and the price was right BAD SIDES: Terrible documentation, horribly confusing user interface, EXTREMELY slow compile time (hours!) for an animation. So I decided I needed to actually spend some money, and I made a query on the net, and a guy in Vancouver WA mailed me to say "Hey, we make just what you need!". So... Animation:flipper - part of a set of animation programs from Hash Enterprises. GOOD SIDES: Extremely easy user interface, fast compile time for animations BAD SIDES: Animation files are larger than 'movie' (not their fault - they're playing to a standard, and 'movie' uses a different one), much slower playback speed. The worst thing is that it needs a small, STUPID, iconizable, freely-distributable playback program so I can build "click-and-go" demo disks with my animations. The only playback program they provide has a complex windowed setup interface before the playback begins. For a while I used Animation:flipper to preview my animations, then set up dilbm/pilbm/movie to make final distributable forms. But, I decided there must be a better way, and on advice from my local dealer I bought... PageFlipperPlusF/X - Folks, this is a hell of a package. They made a conscious decision NOT to be "IFF ANIM" compatable, and instead designed their own. This means they were able to put in some really nifty things: Controlled subloops with loop counts; ability to change playback speed on the fly; Ability to call subroutines (in essence - they call them "intermezzo's"); Ability to layer up to four input files per frame with transparency (so I don't have to do it with "DigiPaint" ahead of time!); and a lot of other stuff. It has an even nicer user interface than Animation:Flipper, because you set up your program using not just a frame-list but an actual synthetic language (which is how you control all those nifty features) - this should be terrifying, but they've provided a truly nice language-oriented editor for it, and have "incremental compiles" which is pretty nice too and a great time saver. The ONLY problem I've had so far, and regretfully it may be enough to make me stop using it (to my sorrow) is that the package is designed to support overscan. My stuff is not overscan (nor will I be changing, for reasons too complicated to go into here). When I build an animation and display it, it shoves all of it over to the very left margin (off screen, where an overscan image would start). [Since you describe the size of your animation in the "Global Constants" section, I don't understand why they don't CENTER the damn thing instead of putting it on the left margin.] Since I often do quarter-screen animations (to get more frames in and faster playback) this means I usually lose the left fifth or so of the image behind the bezel of the monitor. I've searched the manual and can find no mention of this problem nor of a way to deal with it. Is there anything I can do about this? I haven't registered yet (I've only had it a week) so I haven't gotten onto their bulletin board yet. Any other users of this package out there? Please get in touch with me. There's GOT to be a way to make this work! Steven C. Den Beste, BBN Communications Corp., Cambridge MA denbeste@bbn.com(ARPA/CSNET/UUCP) harvard!bbn.com!denbeste(UUCP)