CompuServe Messages

Hi Jon (hey – we're both missing letters from our name!) "…large sequences of TGA files into animator studio for editing and conversion to FLC files." I have heard this report before and I believe that it is a result of poor error message handling from AAStudio and a requirement for disk space that isn't being met. Here's some good stuff from an email I swiped from a programmer: o After any abnormal termination of an Animator Studio program, check your Windows \temp directory (c:\windows\temp, or your equivalent pathname). This directory might contain temporary files that can take up a lot of disk space. Delete the temp files before you restart the program or Windows. Be sure you have sufficient temp space; we recommend 1 – 2 megs per frame of animation or 3 megs per frame of digitized video. o If the video isn't already in our Autodesk RLE format, it will be converted. Then, every modified frame (maybe all frames) is written to a changes-stream in our format. For both of these, the WORST case is for frames our video can't compress well (see igor:/mmprj/anistu/shamu/brian/noise_u.avi) : X*Y*3*Frames (for RGB) + X*Y*Frames (for Alpha, if any) + X*Y*Frames (for Selection, if any) + X*Y*Frames (for Mask, if any) o Example: 320×240 10 frames = 230400 bytes. Every frame painted on at least once: 230400*2=460800. Also figure in the undo disk space set in the preferences dialog. o Finally, when saving, a temporary destination file is used to allow non-destructive cancel. So that's another 230400. I hope that helps explain why you might be running into this problem. " Are there any plans for an upgrade? " Yup. One that should help (but not entirely eliminate) your problem above. "Is it going to run on windows 95?" That's definitely in the picture – perhaps we'll get AAStudio running on Win95 by the time it gets released! "Are there any patches or new drivers?" No. The plan is to address the customer problems with an update (free to registered customers). "I am disappointed with the speed of the product" This is a tough one – we're aware of your difficulty. The problem include the fact that it runs under Windows, which absorbs some of the horse power, and the fact that we (compared to say Premiere) work in an uncompressed truecolor mode. I'm not sure how to address this, although for me it helps to think of our product as pressing the limits of the computer, the way ACAD did when it was first introduced. We realize that other products appear to have faster performance in certain areas and we're looking hard at this issue. Thanks for taking the time for your comments.