mjkobb@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael J Kobb) (05/04/90)
Greetings, I just got the new MacWorld, and I was intrigued by the ad for the new RasterOps Video Colorboard 364. It claims to do live video on the Mac screen seamlessly with other apps, and be a (I think) 24-bit video board as well. It can apparently do 24-bit frame-grabs from the video source, which can be NTSC or S-Video. SO, anybody seen it? Played with it? What's the speed of the frame-grab? How's the video quality? Can the video be scaled? How fast are the rest of the graphics? If they're slow, can they be sped up? How many inputs does it have? I've used MassMicrosystems ColorSpace boards, and they're the best I've seen so far, but for the type of functionality that RasterOps seems to be claiming, you need two boards and a lot of money. The RO is one board for <$2000. --Mike
planting@hobbes.cs.pitt.edu (Harry Plantinga) (05/08/90)
In article <2335@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> mjkobb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael J Kobb) writes: >Greetings, > > I just got the new MacWorld, and I was intrigued by the ad for the new >RasterOps Video Colorboard 364. It claims to do live video on the Mac screen >seamlessly with other apps, and be a (I think) 24-bit video board as well. It >can apparently do 24-bit frame-grabs from the video source, which can be NTSC >or S-Video. > > SO, anybody seen it? Played with it? What's the speed of the frame-grab? >How's the video quality? Can the video be scaled? How fast are the rest of >the graphics? If they're slow, can they be sped up? How many inputs does it >have? > >--Mike I acquired one a few days ago. It has two inputs, an RCA input for NTSC video and an S-Video input. It has a single output, a 15-pin connector (I think) for the monitor. It does indeed display live video in a window, even in the background, and even while you are doing other things. When the program is running in the foreground, the video looks just like a very hi-res television. The video is not as smooth (apparently not 30 frames per second) when the program is operating in the background, but still usable. It displays full-size (approximately 640 x 480) or half-size windows, and the portion of the video signal that is displayed can be reduced. There are controls for contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, white level, black level, and gamma correction. In addition, you can freeze just the R, G, or B component of the video for interesting effects. The software lets you grab a single image or "timed grab" a sequence of images, either to memory or to disk. With a small window, I can grab about 30-50 images to memory (5 MB) at almost frame rate. These can be saved as 8- or 24-bit picts or tiffs. The software seems mature. The speed of the board as a regular video board seems to be the same as any other unaccelerated video board, although I haven't made any measurements. It also works as a larger virtual monitor with pan and zoom when in less than 24-bit mode. I only have two complaints so far. The first is that some lines sometimes appear to the right of the video window, messing up whatever is to the right of the window on the screen. I don't know why it happens, but it doesn't bother me much since I am rarely doing anything else while live video is running on the screen. The second problem is that while it displays rock-steady images from a video camera and from a video tape (hi-8 format), the picture from a stopped video tape ("freeze-frame") is not perfect. Some lines jitter, the top scrunches off to the left a bit, and there is some noise at the bottom. These problems don't appear when playing back a freeze frame on a television. There is a setting ("use alternate PLL") which improves the picture on freeze-frame, but the results are still not 100% perfect--perhaps 95%. Incidentally, I'm selling my RasterOps 264 24-bit video card for $450 or best offer and my MacVision 8-bit grayscale video digitizer for $150 or best offer. Harry Plantinga planting@cs.pitt.edu 225 Alumni Hall Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (412) 624-8407