VTR Skipping Frames
Ahah! I had a feeling you'd have a good answer or come up with
another variable for the animation-to-video equation <g>. Good for
you! Well, the Abekas is certainly going to be tempting for animation
houses that have that kind of budget. Unfortunately, I can NOT count
myself in with that group. I'm more of a "shoestring" operation and
if I had bought or leased anything in the $15k region I'd probably be
bankrupt by now – my wife forced me back to earth on that issue,
before I made a potentially disastrous mistake <g>. Most of the
smaller outfits or freelancers are typically looking at a $6-8k type
investment in video equipment. The options discussed here over the
last couple of years were typically a frame accurate deck, e.g.
AG7750 or EVO9650, a framebuffer, and a single frame controller.
Recently, a new option is the Exabyte-to-Abekas method, and in the
next month or two, a motion JPEG card. Both well within the $6k
investment. Actually, that investment this still pretty steep for me:
the Personal Animation Recorder and an Exabyte 8500 may still be a
big stretch for my budget. I'd probably get the former first, since I
believe I could benefit it right now and then wait for a project that
could at least partially justify the purchase of the latter, since I
can probably manage without it for now. I don't think you could use
the latter very well without the former (or laying to say, hi-8 or
svhs) because of mistake potential.
This may be a bit of a dubious theory, but, a motion JPEG card may
actually SAVE you money in the long run, and time too, which we all
know equals money. This is because if you didn't have a frame
accurate vtr and controller before, the only way of previewing your
stuff was flics (preview type or quarter screen colour) and
full-colour stills viewed on a framebuffer. This is a pretty
hit-and-miss method and often you lay-off your video (paying somebody
for each frame) and then discover …. argh a mistake! Then you
re-render and pay the eager service bureau again! And maybe again!
Now, you probably would have caught this mistake if you could do
full-colour, full-frame, solid 30fps tests on your trusty faithful
motion JPEG card, AND, you would never have had to leave the comfort
of your PC to find out you'd made a mistake.
In conclusion, you could save time, money, sanity, loss-of-hair and
many other wonderful things. 'Course, if you are well-heeled you
already do this kind of high-quality testing, only with a CRV.
Remember the Caribbean project? We probably layed-off each scene 2 or
more times because of "anomalies" we didn't catch in our tests. The
first laying-off ending up being our high-quality motion and colour
test <g>.
Anyway, do you have any thoughts on whether field rendering will work
on the motion JPEG cards? Did it work on the Bandit?