CompuServe Messages

Paul, You asked about assembling anims on the VLAB just a little too early for me to give you a hands on assessment — I've been "picking my nose" trying to figure out what program to use to generate images to do just that, but have not actually done the procedure (yet!). The user manual talks primarily of individual images (BMP, IFF, RGB8/N, YUVN, PGM, PPM, QRT, SUNRASTER, VLAB, XIPAINT, JPEG formats) and then `sucking' them into MovieShop (the VLAB Motion video editing software), supporting both field and frame rendering! I'm not sure if one can take an already compiled animation and just feed it to MovieShop, but here is a quote from the manual: "So, if your animation is stored in one of the supported file formats: You can directly read the images with MovieShop – no conversion is necessary!" That wording suggests to me one might be able to read compiled anims directly but I certainly wouldn't get my hopes up on this speculation — as long as you have the individual images or can regenerate them you are ready for action! From a hands on experience perspective, the VLAB does a darn good job of outputing individual images from captured video. At a 50 percent JPEG factor, the images I output had terrible JPEG artifacts, but at 75 percent images started to look really good! The procedure to output images went so well that I have a lot of confidence importing images into MovieShop will be just as good and easy <grin>. Storing `scenes' and reloading them is a trivial task for any project you are working on. You end up storing the video stream as an AmigaDOS file on any AmigaDOS partition you want. What it does do to you, however, is make you appreciate the falling prices on large hard discs! A small example: I spent a little time last nite playing with a few of the transitions (shift, flip, and fade) and a little bit of titling on a video clip that was about 15 secs long. Saving out this completed `scene' created an AmigaDOS file that was 7.1Mb big (I was operating at a 50 percent JPEG factor!). Another example: a different video `scene' I digitized and saved out at a 80 percent JPEG factor that ran for about 15 seconds also, cost me 17.1Mb. Well you get the idea — more hard drive space is better <grin>! And remember this is space outside of that already used by MovieShop (a dedicated hard disk if you are a wise one). As for using saved `scenes' later in other projects, it should be obvious now that that is a no brainer <grin>! There is one constrain in doing this however, the project you are working on and the imported `scene' need to be at the same JPEG factor. A little planning could go along way 🙂 EdV