CompuServe Messages

The absolutely niftiest, cost-effective solution for your needs may be an A1200 or A4000 (depending on your budget) plus a DCTV with RGB converter. You might wonder why you'd need the latter given the former's frame-output and color rendering capabilities. Space! A DCTV composite image takes up a fraction of the space of a normal graphic and can be animated at high frame rates. Render a 3-D anim using Aladdin 4D or whatever, then auto-convert over to DCTV format (most 3-D programs have DCTV support, now) and dump directly to videotape. You'll benefit from the AGA's inherent high-quality imagery and DCTV's ability to store images efficiently and play them back fast. Plus, with a genlock, you can mix RGB, composite and live video. Plus-plus, you'll have DCTV's video digitizing capability, titling capability, a fine paint program, image enhancement features, and more. An A1200 with sufficient RAM, a hard drive and a DCTV unit could do extremely nice 3-D anim/video work for a street price of perhaps two grand, not including monitor. For high-end video, opt for the DMI Digital Editmaster board, which would fit in an A4000 and set you back about two grand. It'll do real-time video framegrabbing, storing images in compressed form on hard drive and retrieving them in real time. It'll render 100,000 shaded polygons a second from your 3-D software, and walk your dog. Nothing on any other platform can touch it at the price, based on the descriptions I've read. Check out AVID magazine (the Amiga Video magazine) for interesting comments in this regard. Get one of the new higher end sound boards and you'll really be in business. The Bars 'N' Pipes people are coming out with a high-end audio board early in '93 for around 500 bucks and Commodore's music-capable DSP module ought to be arriving too. The Mac and PC worlds are making progress in video, and after all have huge resources. But there's still a huge shakeout going on. Wither Quicktime or DVI? Only one of those standards is likely to prevail in the computer mainstream. Meanwhile, Apple and IBM are plotting the "Power PC" line that will change standards once again. In the short run you're going to pay for the privilege of using either platform. Heck, just to get composite output from a PC (so you can dump to video) will cost you about $400, minimum, and chew up a slot. Things start adding up pretty fast. Bottom line is that, for video, the Amiga in comparison appears a very steady and cost-effective platform. P.S. Don't assume the Amiga world will be standing still in the next year or two as MPEG standardizes. There are hints of new Amiga operating system features along multimedia lines, as well.