matt@ace4.sps.mot.com (matthew noell) (04/10/91)
Dear Netters, I am looking for a way to animate large bitmaps and record this to video tape. What I would like to know is what are the possible solutions? Any information that anyone can provide would be great. So far I have been looking at the NeXTdimension because it has the necessary VCR connector and a data compression/decompression chip along with the Intel i860 chip on the graphics board. NeXT says they can display 30 frames/sec. I have seen the NeXT display live video from a camcorder but not anything using bitmaps stored on disk and displayed in rapid succession. However, the problem with the NeXT is that I am not sure about where NeXT will be in the future. I would like to be able to get the same capabilities I am looking for in something other than a NeXT with maybe a third party add-in board. Thanks in advance, Matt Noell Matthew Noell Motorola, Inc. Technology Simulation APRDL, MS K10 Advanced Products Research & Development Laboratory 3501 Ed Bluestein Blvd. Semiconductor Technology Group Austin, Texas 78721
olsen@hpfcdq.HP.COM (John Olsen) (04/16/91)
matt@ace4.sps.mot.com (matthew noell) writes: >I am looking for a way to animate large bitmaps and record this to video tape. >What I would like to know is what are the possible solutions? >Any information that anyone can provide would be great. Take a look at the Amiga. You can pick up an A500 with a big hard disk and lots of RAM for considerably less than a NeXT box. You'll want to consider a few things first to see if it meets your needs. How many colors do you want on the screen? This, along with the size of the frame-to-frame deltas will determine how fast it can play back. I've done simple monochrome rendering stuff at 60 FPS, but doing Hold and Modify (HAM) animations of full-screen bitmaps may drag you down to 10 frames or so. The amiga has about 20 or so screen formats and/or resolutions to choose from, anywhere from 320x200 monochrome to 640x400 16 color to 320x400 4096 color, and lots of other odd combinations. It can also do overscan so you don't have a background-colored border around everything, and the images go to the phisical edge of the screen. Are you going to be rendering these pictures, or hand drawing them? There are good packages available for both. There are also a few packages available for doing the animation. Dpaint III and Disney Animation Studio come to mind. If you want 24 bits/pixel there are a few add-on cards with varying degrees of animation-friendliness. I don't own a 24 bit board, so I can't really comment on how well they work. John M. Olsen, Graphics Technology Division (303)229-6746 olsen@hpfcjo.HP.COM, olsen@hpfcdq.HP.COM Hewlett-Packard, Mail Stop 74, 3404 E. Harmony Road, Ft Collins, CO 80525