FILLMORE@EMRCAN.bitnet (07/19/90)
I would like to take an informal poll of various animation techniques being used the Sun community. We have an application running in Patran on our Sun 3/60 color workstation. It will generate several hundred Sun rasterfiles, and our goal is to transfer these images to S-VHS videotape. Basically I think we need a Sun-compatible genlock to convert RGB to NTSC, including the extra S-VHS output. We should be able to get a high-end S-VHS VCR with single-frame capability. We could generate this animation manually by hitting a key on the Sun keyboard to display the next image, then hitting a button on the VCR, over and over. It would be nice to have a little more sophistication by using the Sun serial port to control the VCR. Alternatively, is there a way to display a sequence of Sun rasterfiles quickly enough to go directly to video tape without stopping the VCR? (On our Sun using the screenload command in a loop is not quite fast enough) Is anyone doing anything like this on the cheap? Does anyone have recommendations for Sun-compatible genlocks? Any other comments? Please include model numbers, prices and phone numbers if possible. I will summarize the responses for the list. Bob Fillmore, Systems Software & Communications BITNET: FILLMORE@EMRCAN Computer Services Centre. BIX: bfillmore
FILLMORE%EMRCAN.bitnet@ugw.utcs.utoronto.ca (08/15/90)
A while aso I asked for suggestions on how to do an animation on the Sun and record it on videotape - cheaply. Thanks very much to everyone who replied, especially Ole H. Nielsen the author of Movietool. A lot of people suggested that I get a copy of Movietool to do the animation. As for the hardware to get the images to videotape, it appears that you have to spend at least $15,000 for a reasonable genlock which is currently a little out of our league. I also got a few suggestions to transfer the images to an Amiga or a PC which would allow lower-cost genlocks to be used. In this case the user did not want to get involved in using two machines with associated file transfers, etc. We finally decided to get a copy of Movietool from titan.rice.edu and we are now experimenting with it. One of the applications is modelling the heat created in a bar of steel as it is compressed. Patran creates a sequence of Sun color rasterfiles with color used to show the temperature. We have found that if we keep the image to about 1/8 of the raster size then Movietool will create a very smooth animation on our system (Sun 3/60 with 8 meg). We have tried videotaping directly from the screen with a camcorder with some success (there is a little flicker). We are going to get a video professional to try this with better equipment. Thanks again for all the suggestions! Bob Fillmore, Systems Software & Communications BITNET: FILLMORE@EMRCAN Computer Services Centre, BIX: bfillmore Energy, Mines, & Resources Canada Voice: (613) 992-2832 588 Booth St., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0E4 FAX: (613) 996-2953