CompuServe Messages

Michael, If you can afford a PAR buy it. I've never talked to anyone who had one that was unhappy with their purchase. The PAR is one of the easiest ways to go for broadcast quality with no limitations on camera movements or images changing from frame to frame. Even if you decided to get a PC down the road the PAR in an 020 or 030 Amiga can act as a digital disk recorder. (just add an ethernet card to each machine to get frames in) If you can't afford the PAR I guess talking about the quality doesn't help. One of the problems that you'll find with programs like ML or Clarissa is that as you move the camera, or have large parts of the screen move or change color, the playback rate slows down. That's because there's a fixed limit to how fast you can get information off the drive and it takes more information to describe the changes from frame to frame. For an animation where a small character moves against a still background (like most Sierra games) it works fine. If you tried to keep the character in the center of the screen and move the background you'd be changing 20 to 30 times as many pixels per frame and the animation would slow down accordingly. I guess the big factor in deciding on a PAR is how good you want your anims to look and how much you're willing to spend. ;^) Ham8 looks nice but you won't get anything that looks like Seaquest or Babylon 5 without a PAR. Jeff H…