CompuServe Messages

Hi Madeline: I spent over 18 months rendering to disk and then to tape and I must caution you in what you wish to do as being very problematic. The way to do it IS to render to the HD first for the following reasons. 1. VCRs are mechanical devices that take quite a beating especially during the pause mode and this is where most of your machine time will be spent waiting for the next frame to finish rendering. 2. While the VCR is on pause spinning the head on your tape it is wearing out the tape, clogging the heads, etc. 3. Rendering to tape, while in theory sounds great, it can leave you without recourse if you have some bad frames or problems in the animation that did not show up during the still test renderings. If you render to HD then if you see a problem you can always go back to your problem frames and just rerender those saving all the good ones and all that time. 4. Hard drives are far less expensive than machine repair. Today, a more practical approach to recording animation is to purchase a PAR and dedicated harddrive. You can render to it and then record your animation in real time, don't need an editing VCR, and you can record to any tape format that records NTSC in composite, Y/C of betacam component. A 1G. harddrive will hold 8-10 minutes of animation. In most animation applications it can replace your targa+ framebuffer and in all applications it can replace the diaquest controller. Cost is less than $3000 and more than likely you can figure on spending $2500 for all you will need. To do rotoscoping, framegrabbing, and special efects an addon TBC card will run another $8-900. No more wear and tear on your VCR from frame by frame recording. Regarding your immediate problem of the funny stripe? Hard to say but you should check to make sure you've excluded the memory segment for the targa+ in your memory manager. as in x=D000-dfff.