sutherla@qtp.ufl.edu (Scott Sutherland) (03/20/91)
I was playing around with the ANIM playback A/V icon in AmigaVision. It has some nice features like LOOP/NO_LOOP (and how many times), X and Y offsets to move the ANIM, and other stuff. I did run into one problem, though, for which I cannot find a solution. I created an ANIM using Imagine and loaded it into AmigaVision. It is 20 frames and does not have very large DIFF files, so it should play back really fast on my 25MHz A3000 (6 Megs of RAM). I pre-loaded it and then played it in looping fashion. The playback looks as if it is going at less than 10 fps. The same is true if I do NOT loop it. Now, I tried loading this into Animation Station and it plays back at what appears to be at least 40 fps (maybe as high as 60 fps). Playing it back using FAST mode and "use any delay timing" mode give the same result in playback speed, confirming my guess that Imagine did NOT put any timing delay information within the playback. It also plays back this fast with AniMagic. In the ANIM requestor I see NO options to set the ANIM playback speed. I really want to use AV and not the other programs I have for playing ANIMS because I am trying to time the ANIM playback to coincide with some live video over which I am genlocking it. I pre-load the ANIM, load it into the simple IFF image viewer to show the first frame of the ANIM, add a mouse click WAIT icon (ANY CLICK/NO POINTER), and then add the ANIM icon. I use the X and Y displacements to fine tune the position of my animated character w.r.t. the 'live' (actually pre-recorded) actors. I can then roll back the video a few seconds and just before the desired scene appears I can click the mouse button to start the ANIM. That brings up another point. Since I preloaded the ANIM into RAM I would EXPECT that, when I click the mouse button to transition between the STILL view of the first frame and the ANIM, the ANIM would start IMMEDIATELY. This is NOT the case, however. There is a definite delay between the mouse click and the start of the ANIM playback. Note that I selected NO transition and that the transition speed is set to FAST (although it should have no effect with NO TRANSITION). Any ideas as to why this is and/or how to correct it? This is a minor problem but still an incovenience. Thanks, Scott Sutherland sutherla@qtp.ufl.edu