CompuServe Messages

JD, if you want to do professional stuff, stick with an A3000 or an accelerated A2000-series machine. Anything less would have you climbing up the walls, especially when doing #-D animation. Buy as much RAM as you can afford — anything less than 5 Meg and you'll hit a wall within months. A large, fast hard disk is a must. One quick comment about the 3000: its deinterlaced output will do you no good if you're doing video — what looks great without interlace flicker may turn out to be a disaster when you turn interlace back on. So stick with the normal RGB output. (the large connector, not the VGA-type one) I suggest you pick up the latest issue of Byte for a detailed look at the Video Toaster, a $1600 board that packs a lot of studio functions in one unit. It will serve as switcher, character generator (with antialiased fonts), DVE unit (although the compressed image doesn't look as good as those $xx,xxx units), luminance keyer, genlock and dual 24-bit frame store. Software bundled with the Toaster includes a 24-Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. If you don't want to buy a single-frame controller, the HAM-E from Black Belt Systems (GO AMIGAVEN) will display images in quasi-24-bit quality, and will animate at full Amiga speed. On a fast machine, it means 15-30 frames a second — not as smooth as a single-frame controller, but more interactive and less expensive. I have no idea how well a Toaster and HAM-E can live together. The de facto animation/paint program is Deluxe Paint III; the only mode it doesn't support is HAM, i.e. it will let you use up to 64 colors at once, but to get all 4096 you must buy a HAM paint program. And of course, HAM-E comes with its own paint program, as does the Toaster. Blaq!