peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce) (10/05/89)
[from a friend who isn't on usenet right now...] I'm looking for information about getting animations off a Mac IIcx to videotape. I don't know much about video but I've got a customer who wants video and I've got to learn quick. The quality has to be pretty good. The animations have been built with VideoWorks II and MacroMind Director. I've tried using the MassMicro ColorSpace II board. The image it produced wasn't that good. The flicker caused by the interlace was pretty annoying and the images had the tendency to swim. I'm wondering if the newer boards, like the NuVista, do a better job at getting RGB input into NTSC, or is trying get good video out of a Mac a waste of time? I'm not that interested in frame grabbing, or a board with lots of special effects. Genlocking would be nice, beyond that all I want is a good solid image. Thanks in advance Frank Galdes --------- Replies back to me and I'll pass them on to Frank. Thanks... Claris Corp. | Michael R. Peirce -------------+-------------------------------------- | 5201 Patrick Henry Drive MS-C4 | Box 58168 | Santa Clara, CA 95051-8168 | (408) 987-7319 | AppleLink: peirce1 | Internet: peirce@claris.com | uucp: {ames,decwrl,apple,sun}!claris!peirce
kent@sunfs3.camex.uucp (Kent Borg) (10/11/89)
In article <10598@claris.com> peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce) writes: >[from a friend who isn't on usenet right now...] >I'm looking for information about getting animations off a Mac IIcx to >videotape. I don't know much about video but I've got a customer who >wants video and I've got to learn quick. The quality has to be pretty good. > >The animations have been built with VideoWorks II and MacroMind Director. >I've tried using the MassMicro ColorSpace II board. The image it produced >wasn't that good. The flicker caused by the interlace was pretty annoying The NTSC you get from a Macintosh is never going to look very good because NTSC does not look very good. Because of the interlace and low bandwidth of NTSC, single pixel features will either disappear or flicker. To get reasonable results you will need to adjust what you try to display: = Do any antialiasing you can. This will help a lot. = Avoid 1-pixel wide or tall features. = Keep things rather big. = Keep things away from the edges of the screen. = Avoid black-blacks, gray them a little. = Run like hell from white-whites, dirty them some. = Avoid 100% saturated colors, calm them a bit. In general, don't try to do things which are not possible and then blame the Macintosh for failing. To see what is possible, look at what is on TV. To see that this is not what you are use to looking at on your Mac screen, find a good TV and put it near your Macintosh color monitor, tune the TV to a network program doing the weather (or something else with graphics) and compare. The TV set will look *terrible* by comparison, but that's as good as it gets. You will not be able to do any better than that. That's NTSC for you. -- Kent Borg "Then again I could be foolish kent@lloyd.uucp not to quit while I'm ahead..." or -from Evita (sung by Juan Peron) ...!husc6!lloyd!kent