CompuServe Messages

Rick, >> It says "Record & Playback True Color, full frame rate 3D Studio animations from hard disk in real time." Is this saying what I think? >> You got it. I have seen the Matrox Ill Pro combined with the Movie Express JPEG board and I was quite impressed. (A Matrox booth was sadly and inexplicably absent at Siggraph, although they did send the friendly and always helpful Alain Legault to answer questions). This is not a cheap combination, though, listing at around $4-5k depending on the version of the Ill Pro that you buy. My personal show favourite in the JPEG cards was the DPS personal animator for the PC (shipping in October, already available for the Amiga). This is a $1995 JPEG card (add a $995 TBC card if you want capture as well) that you put in your PC and then attach a dedicated, direct connect 500mb IDE hard drive giving 3 to 5 minutes of video capacity. Inputs and outputs are composite, s-video, and switchable BetaSP/MII. Software is included for playback/recording and rudimentary editing of the animation. This product has been a big hit on the Amiga platform and is selling like hot cakes and discounts seem to be available. They were showing actual animations (756×486 true colour) as well as live-video off the disk drive. The quality was great, although on close examination I could see a little tearing during fast object motion. It was hard to tell whether this was in the animation itself or was a motion JPEG artifact – I suspect the latter. My feeling is that this would make great final output for many clients, and if not good enough for final output then at least it would make a far superior motion and colour testing method than creating a .fli or .flc file. I'm seriously interested in this card, since I already have a targa+ and don't really want to cough up for another similar framebuffer, like the Ill Pro. I saw a couple of other cards which seemed to be claiming a lot but not necessarily delivering. One interesting one was by ASL in Irvine, CA and the board offered capture and playback at 640×480 or in multiple windows all for $1200. They couldn't show me anything they had captured to disk and were only showing laser disk output of "the Empire Strikes Back" in one or more Windows. Guys get a grip! This product seemed more geared to the Video in a Window multimedia crowd, rather than serious animators. I feel high quality capture and output is going to require a fully dedicated hard-drive, probably bypassing the ISA or VL-Bus entirely – such as in the case of the DPS personal animator card. Martin