CompuServe Messages

We will indeed be present at Siggraph. We will be showing our family of SGI special effects products. Our Macintosh products will be on display at the same time but on the other coast – Macworld overlaps Siggraph and forces us to do two shows at once. Sigh. You can render at any resolution – but the correct resolution for NTSC is (as you said) 720 by 486. If you write a smaller image than that, the driver will center it in a field of broadcast black. If you supply an image larger than that, it will clip out the central 720 by 486 region. Image scaling for non-D1 sized images was considered. But, image scaling will necessarily destroy field relationships (since an original scanline will be scaled to more or less than a resulting scanline). On the advice of our professional contacts, we have not included image scaling. One other piece of kit which is required by the Windows version is an Adaptec or another ASPI compatible SCSI disk controller. This is needed to interface the SCSI tape drive to your PC. The Macintosh version does not require an additional SCSI controller since the Mac arlready provides this capability. Performance is quite good – actual tape transport time is always under 2 seconds. YUV/RGB conversion including our expanded encoding takes about 4 seconds on a Quadra 700. I haven't timed the Windows version but speeds on a medium speed 486 should compare to the Quadra 700. The Amiga version has been clocked at under 4 seconds for the entire process on one particularly souped up machine but generally is about the same speed as the Quadra 700 for 040 based Amigas and as much as 11 seconds for 020 based Amigas.