CompuServe Messages

Hi Nik, Just as a follow up and FYI, this area is being heavily invested in the Imaging community, so my perspective/experience/instincts (?) tells me that while the need is a certainty, it may be that it comes to us through the back door as it were… For instance there are several companies including Matrox who offer framegrabbing capability in real-time, PCI based and supported in NT. (Including Matrox which has two boards the Meteor and the Comet both with applications software ie hi-level "C" for development.) In addition companies like TRW offer video arrays capable of handling 200mb a second… (pretty impressive), so while it may not be the video/animations market which drives the engine… we'll certainly be taking advantage of it one way or another… If Mark needs some background information on current developments along these lines, a good source for technical imaging and applications is Advanced Imaging a division of PTN… An interesting note to all this is that in the case of the Comet for example, it relies on the SVGA card already in your system… so no new drivers would have to be supported for say 3DS or Ani Studio. NT drivers would address the frame capture directly and pass them through whatever SVGA adapter is available… this would seem to simplify things as video could be captured directly with system RAM and Ani-Studio either through DLL or directly could utilise it in some fashion… I don't know what the challenges are with this but there are other NT applications which are addressing capture in this fashion… So while the Ill Pro and the Targa may be a dead issue, newer emerging technologies based on PCI will certainly take advantage of the facility, and it seems to me Ani Studio is in a uniquely good position to capitalize on this capability…. Thanks, John