anderson@watserv1.waterloo.edu (G.Anderson - Computing Services) (07/21/90)
I am currently looking into the necessary hardware and software to allow a MAC II to process standard video (VCR) and add titles etc and output the results to another VCR. Any suggestions and comments would be very helpful. Thanks.
a544@mindlink.UUCP (Rick McCormack) (07/25/90)
Saw a demo of the Maas boards for the Mac IIs yesterday. Canadian price rounds out to about $9,500.00, BUT the entire group seeing the demo were panting with unbridled desire. 2 boards with ability to show video on the Mac screen alone or under/overlayered with Mac desktop, or through any selected color on the desktop, a la chroma-keyed setup. With the cheaper ($3500.00 CDN) board, the combined images (video and Mac) could be output to a VCR. Add the second $6,000 CDN) board, and do flips, inverts, mirroring in horizontal AND vertical planes, zooms, and other incredible things. Work on the Mac screen and/or the NTSC video screen. (Pant, pant.) These were undoubtedly the most sophisticated boards we have seen in our search for new methods of presenting info via the Mac and Video.
russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) (07/26/90)
In article <2617@mindlink.UUCP> a544@mindlink.UUCP (Rick McCormack) writes: >desktop, a la chroma-keyed setup. With the cheaper ($3500.00 CDN) board, the >combined images (video and Mac) could be output to a VCR. Add the second >$6,000 CDN) board, and do flips, inverts, mirroring in horizontal AND vertical >planes, zooms, and other incredible things. Work on the Mac screen and/or the >NTSC video screen. (Pant, pant.) Are you sure it wasn't a dogcow? -- Matthew T. Russotto russotto@eng.umd.edu russotto@wam.umd.edu ][, ][+, ///, ///+, //e, //c, IIGS, //c+ --- Any questions? Hey! Bush has NO LIPS!
carlo@eagle.cvs.rochester.edu (Carlo Tiana) (07/27/90)
In article <2617@mindlink.UUCP> a544@mindlink.UUCP (Rick McCormack) writes: >about a super piece of equipment for many $$ (Canadian, but still!). Does anyone have any ideas what the rest of us with a medium (well, ok, good) power IIci and an ok (nothing fancy - streo, 4 head) VCR can do to play around with NTSC images? For a start, it would be nice to grab frames from VCR tapes or TV, say; I don't care that it be a particular frame, just one frame withing say a second worth of tape. It would be nice too to be able to record a Mac animation to tape, or maybe view it on your large screen TV. Are any of these things possible? Can anyone give me any pointers? Thanks, Carlo. carlo@cvs.rochester.edu
]) (07/27/90)
In article <8631@ur-cc.UUCP> carlo@cvs.rochester.edu (Carlo Tiana) writes: >In article <2617@mindlink.UUCP> a544@mindlink.UUCP (Rick McCormack) writes: >>about a super piece of equipment for many $$ (Canadian, but still!). > >Does anyone have any ideas what the rest of us with a medium (well, ok, >good) power IIci and an ok (nothing fancy - streo, 4 head) VCR can do to >play around with NTSC images? For a start, it would be nice to grab frames >from VCR tapes or TV, say; I don't care that it be a particular frame, just >one frame withing say a second worth of tape. It would be nice too to be >able to record a Mac animation to tape, or maybe view it on your large >screen TV. Are any of these things possible? Can anyone give me any >pointers? >Thanks, Carlo. I just got set up along these lines on my IIci. It's expensive... Raster-Ops ColorVideo 364 board (ComputerWare in Sunnyvale, CA -- list ??$2500??; their price ~ $1600). This is a 24-bit color monitor driver, compatible with the Apple 13" Color Monitor. It has three connectors on the back: Monitor Cable, NTSC (RCA), S-VHS (DIN-4). Mac IIci Installation Warning (from me, not Raster Ops): There's a small plug-in IC in the lower-left corner of the board that will try to occupy the same physical location in Space as the stake-pin connector for the Mac IIci internal speaker if you try to plug the board into the slot nearest the power supply. Pick another slot and all's well. The 364 is packaged with a program called FrameGrabber that simply knocked me out. After playing with it for an hour, I had no choice but to buy the 364. In FG with live video running in a half-size or full 13"-Diagonal window, cmd-G (Grab) will capture the current screen to an open document. cmd-M brings up a menu to do timed-grabs to memory (the menu tells how many grabs max based on available mem) and cmd-<something> will do timed-grabs to disk files (auto-numbered). Recommendation: If you haven't got 8M, Fry's and others, too, one assumes, have 1MB SIMMs at $70 or so. Since I'm not an aggressive price researcher, I'll guess you can beat every price I mention in this article if you want to. Load that memory!! Now the fun really starts! With the trapped images saved to disk as 24-Bit PICT files, fire up Adobe's PhotoShop (I got it for right around $600). PhotoShop reads/writes PICT, PICT2, GIF, MacPaint, and a list of types I can't remember. In it, you can photo-retouch the image at will, duplicating pieces, changing out colors, running the image through something like 20 built-in "filters", resize it, air-brush it, add text, merge and mask images against each other, and dozens of other things I haven't attempted yet. The densest save mode, I think, is 32-bit-per-pixel PICT. Warning: VisionLab on a system *not* 24-bit Color- capable will hang the system trying to read one of these 32-bit PICT files, even with 32-bit QuickDraw installed. One thing this setup can't do is deliver video images back out of the Mac to the VCR or other NTSC/S-VHS output device. The ports are "Data In" to the Mac, only. PhotoShop can print color-sep masters, though. Now I'm trying to learn to draw. :-) ...Kris -- Kristopher Stephens, | (408-746-6047) | krs@uts.amdahl.com | KC6DFS Amdahl Corporation | | | [The opinions expressed above are mine, solely, and do not ] [necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Amdahl Corp. ]