#Sanyo
Robert,
as Paul said, I'm _very_ excited about the DPS Personal Animation Recorder
which is soon to be released for the PC (waiting on the software from Gus
Grubba <g>). It's been available for the Amiga for quite a while now and has
received rave reviews. For corporate/industrial work I don't see how it can be
beat _and_ if you have an Exabyte 8500/8505 (for when the output quality needs
to be the best) then you've got the perfect most cost-effective combo for any
situation, IMHO. You see, the DPS will take your rendered .tga files and build
a modified/optimized JPEG animation file on its dedicated harddrive (capacity
3-5 minutes) – kinda like a super-duper .fli file. This building process
doesn't take much longer than just copying them to the hardisk, and hopefully
Gus will find a way of rendering from 3ds directly to it in order to circumvent
that process completely. It's certainly going to be orders of magnitude faster
than recording frame-by-frame to a Sanyo – BTW, sounds like the Sanyo will
_not_ be able to make use of quickpass or multiple edit type technology. You
then have an animation which will play back in realtime and can be recorded to
any tape deck at genlocked 30fps (or 60 fields per second?). If you get a
glitch/dropout on the tape, just record it again in realtime – it's no big deal
(unlike relaying frame-by-frame, ugh)! Whoa, I'm excited! It has composite,
s-vhs and betacam/MII outputs and at maximum quality the output is pretty
stunning (5.5Mhz Video Bandwidth and >60dB S/N) and makes .fli/.flc files look
like doodoo <g,d&r>. I've never been happy with .flc files as a method of
previewing before committing to tape – you invariably miss something and catch
it later _after_ going to tape. The DPS should all but eliminate that problem.
The price is comparable to a Sanyo (about $2600 street) and you'll have a
faster method of doing previews and possibly a means of 1st-generation final
output to vhs, svhs or betaSP. For example, you could record to your home vhs
or svhs for a preview, get approval, then rent a betaSP recording deck for the
day to record final output. If JPEG output is not good enough (although I think
it will be in many cases) you'll have the .tga files on your regular harddisk
to backup to an Exabyte tape and lay to D1/D2/betaSP via Abekas. Personally,
I'll sooo happy to take frame-by-frame work completely out of my business, it's
a bloody minefield. The DPS might very well do it for me.
Gosh, you'd think I worked for DPS or something, but I just got excited,
honest. (calmer now). I have flyers on the Sanyo and the DPS – I'll fax one or
both, if you'd like (just e-mail your fax #).
Martin "in need of a nap now" Foster