CompuServe Messages

>For what it's worth, don't count out the Video Toaster yet! IMHO it's only real >strike is that it accepts and outputs composite video only right now. Well, I wasn't counting the Video Toaster out by any means — only that I am kind of committed now to the PC world (with 3DStudio, hundreds of True Type fonts, Ani Pro, etc. etc.) and also that I can't really afford the kind of money that a comparable Toaster environment (A/B, TBCs and Chromakey) would cost (just conservatively I figure it to be 5K more). I'm sure Lightwave is nice — but I don't even want to THINK about ray-tracing… life's way too short for that. As it is I'm hoping that release 3 of 3DS will bring the speed up (don't we ALL want to render in real time!) No matter how much better something is, the tradeoff in time is a killer in the video production world. Also… I think people make too much of DVE — no matter how many "killer" 3D DVEs you have, the odds are high that you aren't going to make much use of them in most production environments. Let's face it, one or two of those effects a production go a long way (I've seen a lot of overkill in DVEs just because they can be done — kind of like Morphing after T2). To my way of thinking, a good Chromakey beats the hell out of any DVE you can do — and the Toaster doesn't even have one. But I'm not out to Toaster bash — I think it's wonderful that ANY of this stuff is available to us (less than professional) video types. The pros (and you may be one) can afford to use the best — some of us are just lucky to get things like 3DS and the VM.