ofer@gandalf.Berkeley.EDU (Ofer Licht) (04/04/89)
Does anyone out there have the specifications to Eric Graham's movie anim file format? Is his "J-compression" algorithm available for perusal? -------- I am now able to make the movie package (dilbm, pilbm, movie) function consistently (read: no gurus) and find the resulting anims to be significantly faster than those created by makeanim,grabanim,etc. The movie anims, however, take longer to create and require more storage space. The storage and speed factors suggest that "J-compression" is not quite as good as Jim Kent's "vertical encoding" compression used in ANIMs of type 5. Then why do the movie anims take so much longer to compute? -------- I am willing to sacrifice the storage requirements of movie anims but would like to speed the process up a bit. Currently, I produce animation frames in ilbm format on a network of suns (using DBW render ported back to UNIX and a custom local network job distributer). I download the frames and process them into an anim on the amiga. I would like to be able to process the frames into an anim with a "J-compression" algorithm running on a sun4. If you have any suggestions for other compression algorithms, email me. Note: anyone interested in my ray-tracing setup on the suns is welcome to a copy of all sources (including the network job distributer and the modified DBW render package). Ofer Licht ofer@gandalf.berkeley.edu
baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer) (04/05/89)
In article <22556@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> ofer@gandalf.Berkeley.EDU (Ofer Licht) writes: >Does anyone out there have the specifications to Eric Graham's movie >anim file format? Is his "J-compression" algorithm available for >perusal? >-------- >I am now able to make the movie package (dilbm, pilbm, movie) function >consistently (read: no gurus) and find the resulting anims to be >significantly faster than those created by makeanim,grabanim,etc. >The movie anims, however, take longer to create and require more storage >space. The storage and speed factors suggest that "J-compression" is >not quite as good as Jim Kent's "vertical encoding" compression used in >ANIMs of type 5. Then why do the movie anims take so much longer to compute? Nobody has the code for the Movie format except Eric Graham himself. I tried to get the code for almost a year from Byte-by-Byte for use with my Animation:Editor program. They did promise me several times to send it, however I still don't have it. We ended up writing a daemon program that captures the frames from memory and stores them in a friendlier format. As for the observations you made about the size/speed problems, you are correct. Movie files are generally MUCH larger than ANIM files, unless the image has a LOT of dithering or is made of digitized images. This is because Movie has a special way to deal with heavily dithered images. That's why it takes so long to pack, it changes the packing algorithm on EVERY line! It takes about an hour to pack 30 frames in Movie, compared to 2-3 minutes in ANIM. If you're making films, you still really need to single frame record the frames anyway, so you might as well use the format that packs better. Also, there are MANY ANIM compatable programs out there now, so when you use Movie, there aren't many tools you can use. Still, I still wish Byte-by-Byte would release some of the info about how Movie works. -- -Ken Baer. // Hash Enterprises: When the Going gets Wierd, the Wierd go Professional \X/ USENET - baer@percival.UUCP, PLINK - KEN BAER, BIX - kbaer, "while (AINTGOTNOSATISFACTION) { do stuff }" - RJ Mical
bhine@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Butler Hine sst) (04/06/89)
While we're on this subject, does anyone have the source to an IFF ANIM compressor (the 'standard' format, not Byte-by-Byte's)? I am playing with the QRT ray tracer and would like to create and pack animations on a Vax, instead of creating the frames and downloading them to my Amiga to pack them. I have the executables for a couple of ANIM packers on my Amiga, but don't have any source. Thanks. Butler Hine hine@galileo.arc.nasa.gov
ofer@saruman.Berkeley.EDU (Ofer Licht) (04/06/89)
In article <23495@ames.arc.nasa.gov> bhine@pioneer.UUCP (Butler Hine sst) writes: >While we're on this subject, does anyone have the source to an IFF ANIM >compressor (the 'standard' format, not Byte-by-Byte's)? > Butler Hine > hine@galileo.arc.nasa.gov Grabanim is available on Disk 2 of the DEVCON88 disks. This includes source. I am working on porting it to UNIX. If anyone has done this already, let me know. Ofer Licht ofer@gandalf