CompuServe Messages

Hank I don't know about creating CDs on Amiga – sorry. Depending on content, etc. we create in Director and Authorware on PC, and cut to CD on a PC. I sent the following to Russ, maybe it can help a little. We can talk more. <<<I'm in charge of Video Production, which includes shooting, editing, audio and getting the finished pieces to .AVI, Quicktime, or MPEG. My stuff and elements from graphic production teams go to the authoring team for final assembly. We do CDROM and CD-I versions of the same titles for many clients and 'adjust' projects to fit each format. Clients are made aware of the limitations of each format. For CDROM, we use Director to assemble the graphics, audio and video sequences then Authorware to put it together with the logic. For CD-I, we use Media Mogul (the older OS9 version!!!!) – they're trying to budget the upgrade. Most CDROMS have about 10-15% video and the rest graphics. CD-I titles usually contain more video since it handles full-screen playback of MPEG video with the set-top and portable CD-I players. CDROM full-screen MPEG playback requires hardware add-ons to get consistent playback within MMedia titles – at least for the stuff we're doing. A few of the larger clients (not many) have opted to go with add-on cards, for a fixed number of machines, to get the playback they want. After testing a few, we're currently recommending Jazz Jakarta over ReelMagic for full screen playback. I wasn't in on that decision for some reason, so I don't know the whole story on the research. We don't do commercial releases – only specific training or marketing titles for specific clients. So sometimes we can reccomend minimum hardware, but most times they want to be able to play a title on the lowest common denominator. Call it a weakness in our Marketing dept. to make us have to deal with that in production. Be that as it may, for CDROM most of the video is 320X240. I never try to enlarge or zoom. That's the best that most systems can handle – the good ones. I don't even want to offer full screen playback at this time because most people won't get what they expect. Hardware and software is on the way to allow fullscreen play back – probably by the end of the year. But everone will have to upgrade, I think, or else a new Runtime will be available. I use Intel Smart Video Recorder Pro to digitize video into .AVI files. The Director team sometimes converts these to Quicktime movies depending on how it is to be authored. Video windows are played inside a graphic back ground, using either Media Player or a proprietary shell-out to the MCI device drivers. For MPEG files, we send a BetaSP Master out of house to an MPEG facility. There is an affordable (less than $10,000) hardware solution on SGI Indy – the Cosmo Capture card. It does great MotionJPEG in/out, allowing editing, and the MPEG is pretty clean. It has plenty of compression adjusting settings. However, SGI's MPEG player is crap when compared to a 3rd party player "MPEG Expert" that we found.>>> Anyway, that's an overview. BarryVedros ISI