jkellow@bach.helios.nd.edu (John Kellow) (06/11/91)
I just read the press release on Apple's new system software called QuickTime for including multimedia in applications. It includes support for animating images, playing digitized sounds, compressing images, controlling video equipment, and playing digitized video from a hard disk. It sounded very promising so I was wondering, Whats the current state of the art in animating images on PCs and Workstations? I'm not talking about special multimedia hardware, just ordinary PC's, Macs, Sparcstations, Amigas, etc. I've used NCSA Image on the Mac and Sun Sparcstation to animate some of my experimental data and these programs work well when all of the images are loaded into memory, but I work with small images (105x68, about the size of a postage stamp on a Sun color monitor, usually I zoom them up to 2x or 3x). I've also played around with xgrasp, but these images are also small, about 320x200. All of these programs animate 8 bit color mapped images with the same colormap. Is there something prohibitive about changing the colormap every frame? So where are the bottlenecks for doing TV quality animation on a PC or Workstation (what is TV quality anyway 640x480x24bit? 16bit?). Is the limitation in disk->host memory, host memory->framebuffer memory, host processor speed ? It seems that things are moving in the direction of desktop computers being able handle digital video like they handle digital sound now, but I can't really see it on the current generation of machines. John Kellow kellow@ndcvx.cc.nd.edu
jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J Eric Townsend) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.185556.10123@news.nd.edu> jkellow@bach.helios.nd.edu (John Kellow) writes: >Whats >the current state of the art in animating images on PCs and Workstations? >I'm not talking about special multimedia hardware, just ordinary >PC's, Macs, Sparcstations, Amigas, etc. On the Amiga, there are at least a dozen packages for doing 2D and 3D animation. Everything from "give me a list of images and I'll make a delta-compressed anim" to "give me a set of objects and movement instructions and I'll generate an anim". There are also a half-dozen or so 3D modeling programs that can generate single images for building into anims with a 2D packages. The IBM language REXX is available for the Amiga (comes with release 2.0 of AmigaOS). This is a powerful language when used for writing macros to drive packages which support it (1/2 of all professional packages? Something like that.). >of my experimental data and these programs work well when all of the >images are loaded into memory, but I work with small images (105x68, I've generated 320x200x4096 color frames on a Sparcstation and animated them on a 68000 based amiga with no problem. Playback in realtime for images under 100 frames on a 4Mb system. There are also Sony Control-L and Control-M video tape controllers for the Amiga to drive VCRs. (I've got a Sony SLV-R5UC (<$1000) that I just bought for this purpose.) >So where are the bottlenecks for doing TV quality animation on a PC >or Workstation (what is TV quality anyway 640x480x24bit? 16bit?). I've played with 740x400 anims on a 68000 Amiga, but big anims stall. I've just bought a 68030 Amiga, however. :-). At a recent Amiga shows, several 3rd party people were showing off real-time playback of digitized videos (3 minutes from "The Terminator" (I think) was one such video). The rule is: get at least a 68030 @ 25Mhz and a fast hard drive. NTSC is something on the order of 740*400+ (many tvs and vcrs only deal with about 250 lines anyway) pixels, with 24bit color being overkill. 4096 colors isn't enough, but it's close. I'm in the market for 24bit color on the Amiga... Some costs: Amiga A3000: 25Mhz 68030, 68882, 2Mb RAM, 50Mb hard drive, multisync monitor, around $3000-4500 depending on who you are/work-for. Check out comp.sys.amiga.[multimedia,graphics] and see what others tell you. I'm a hack, not a professional. -- J. Eric Townsend - jet@uh.edu - bitnet: jet@UHOU - vox: (713) 749-2126 Skate UNIX! (curb fault: skater dumped) -- If you're hacking PowerGloves and Amigas, drop me a line. --
mann@intacc.uucp (Jeff Mann) (06/12/91)
In article <1991Jun10.185556.10123@news.nd.edu> jkellow@bach.helios.nd.edu (John Kellow) writes: > > >I just read the press release on Apple's new system software called >QuickTime for including multimedia in applications. It includes >support for animating images, playing digitized sounds, compressing >images, controlling video equipment, and playing digitized video >from a hard disk. It sounded very promising so I was wondering, Whats >the current state of the art in animating images on PCs and Workstations? >I'm not talking about special multimedia hardware, just ordinary >PC's, Macs, Sparcstations, Amigas, etc. QuickTime will be able to play low-resolution video clips in small windows on the Mac. It uses software compression/decompression. It won't be useful for video production, but will certainly add some interesting possibilities for any software application, not just multi-media. Imagine pulling down the help function, and instead of a list of instructions, you get a nice little video clip showing you exactly what to do. And you thought voice mail was fun :-) >So where are the bottlenecks for doing TV quality animation on a PC >or Workstation (what is TV quality anyway 640x480x24bit? 16bit?). That's about right - 16bit will give a reasonable TV-like quality, while 24 bits are really needed to provide the full bandwidth of TV. TV has a fixed 525 rows (interlaced), but they are usually not all visible, so 480 is pretty much ok. The horizontal resolution is an analog function. For example, S-VHS and Hi-8 have around 400 lines (columns), while higher end systems can exceed 500. I think broadcast TV is around 300-400 lines. Of course, the higher the original resolution of the graphics, the better the picture will be after the transfer. Most broadcast-quality video cameras these days have around 700 lines of horizontal resolution. >Is the limitation in disk->host memory, host memory->framebuffer memory, Certainly the disk is the major bottleneck not only in terms of speed but of storage space. With 640x480x24bit, that's nearly a megabyte per frame. At 30 frames per second (standard video rate), you're going to need nearly *two gigabytes per minute* ! So your standard 600meg optical disk is going to get you a whopping 20 seconds of video -- IF it could handle the transfer speed, which it can't. Neither can any standard PC memory bus. The solution to all this is video compression, using a scheme like the JPEG or MPEG (which is still under development I believe). Several companies, including NeXT, announced systems which used the much-hyped C-Cube JPEG compression chip which promised incredible results but failed to deliver. So the products never appeared. I don't know what the state of the C-Cube chip is right now. Currently, the only commercially available PC system I know of that can play reasonable quality video from a hard disk is an Amiga, using a fast disk/controller, and a "black box" called DCTV. I believe that DCTV uses a proprietary compression scheme. Frames are stored in a standard lower-resolution Amiga format, except that the first few scan lines contain control information that allow DCTV to expand it to 24-bit (so they claim) quality. I've seen the system, and the quality was quite good in the demo. I haven't had a chance to try it out myself. One problem is that there is no facility to record full-motion video, only to play it back -- digitising takes several seconds per frame with DCTV. Several systems for the Macintosh are due out by the end of this year. Super Mac Technology has announced a product -- I saw a demo of it last year. It was pretty glitchy back then, but it was just a prototype. The final product should be able to record as well as play back, and should come in around $5000.US. The recent MacUser magazine has a very good article about this whole subject. >host processor speed ? It seems that things are moving in the direction >of desktop computers being able handle digital video like they handle >digital sound now, but I can't really see it on the current generation >of machines. I think the possibilities are quite incredible. Certainly there are systems available which can do this (the Quantel Harry for instance) but they are in the six-figure range right now. I guess I first started to realize the kind of things you could do almost ten years ago, and I've been waiting for a product ever since :-) I'm hoping to be able to bust my piggy bank and get one as soon as there's something available. Nope, it doesn't seem to be here quite yet, but give it another year. Unless (hoping) someone knows something I don't... >John Kellow >kellow@ndcvx.cc.nd.edu P.S. -- another really interesting aspect of video compression is that it should be working well when ISDN becomes widely available. With a system capable of both selectively sending and receiving video over phone lines, I think we're going to see some pretty amazing changes in what we now think of as TV -- talk about 'yer multimedia :-) All this could be happening in the next two years. I wonder what it's going to be called? I don't think TV quite covers it... =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | Jeff Mann Inter/Access Artists' Computer Centre, Toronto [416] 535-8601 | | ...uunet!mnetor!intacc!mann intacc!mann@nexus.yorku.ca mann@intacc.uucp | | The Matrix Artists' Computer Network BBS: [416] 535-7598 2400 8N1 | =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
emartine@digi.lonestar.org (Edgar Martinez Martinez) (06/19/91)
In article <1991Jun12.073358.12295@intacc.uucp> mann@intacc.uucp (Jeff Mann) writes: > >I think the possibilities are quite incredible. Certainly there are >systems available which can do this (the Quantel Harry for instance) but >they are in the six-figure range right now. I guess I first started to >realize the kind of things you could do almost ten years ago, and I've >been waiting for a product ever since :-) I'm hoping to be able to bust >my piggy bank and get one as soon as there's something available. Nope, >it doesn't seem to be here quite yet, but give it another year. Unless >(hoping) someone knows something I don't... > >>John Kellow >kellow@ndcvx.cc.nd.edu > In the June issue of PC Sources, there is a small article (page 57) that talks about a new board that compresses and lets you play video at 30 frames per second, and all in a 386 PC with a 1 Meg video card. It compresses images by almost 98 percent! The board and software cost 10,000 dollars. Edgar Martinez UTArlington Co-op program (Great!) emartine@digi.lonestar.org DSC Communications Corp. Plano, TX b645zju@utarlg.utarl.edu University of Texas at Arlington "Energy is energy, and you either channel it one way or the other." Cher
jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J Eric Townsend) (06/20/91)
In article <1991Jun18.214123.16407@digi.lonestar.org> emartine@digi.lonestar.org (Edgar Martinez Martinez) writes: >In the June issue of PC Sources, there is a small article (page 57) that talks >about a new board that compresses and lets you play video at 30 frames per >second, and all in a 386 PC with a 1 Meg video card. It compresses images >by almost 98 percent! The board and software cost 10,000 dollars. Ha. My crappy little 68000 based Amiga A2000 could play back compressed animations at around 15 fps. I haven't really pushed my 25Mhz '030/882 based Amiga A3000 yet to find out its rate. Of course, there're the demos at Amiga shows where people play back 3 minutes of digitized video from a film... I think the current favorite is from "Predator". Ask in comp.sys.amiga.graphics. -- J. Eric Townsend - jet@uh.edu - bitnet: jet@UHOU - vox: (713) 749-2126 Skate UNIX! (curb fault: skater dumped) PowerGlove mailing list: glove-list-request@karazm.math.uh.edu