#Anim Playback
Mark,
Your welcome. I've had a lot of success outputting my work to the PAR.
My DPS' recommended harddrive was a 540 megabyte Seagate drive which holds
about five minutes of work, and is fine for continuous playback of about 2
minutes, at which time it needs to thermally recalibrate and causes a
"burp" in the playback. So if you need longer than two minutes at a shot
then you need to go with one of the newer, bigger harddrives (but I don't
know the names).
I'll share with you an unusual problem I had with chroma distortion in my
PAR files. I shot a live scene of a video editing suite. The first shot
was a closeup of a Lightwave anim playing back on a monitor. The next
shot was a wider angle view encompassing the room. I took this second
shot and broke it into separate IFF24 images to use as a background image
sequence. Over this sequence I animated some characters working at the
controls of the suite. The problem was that in my final render, the
Lightwave anim playing on the video monitor in the background changed
quite noticeably in its chroma values. Instead of mainly blue with hints
of magenta, it was dominantly magenta (no riff raff!).
I suspected that Filter was the culprit, but it was the same whether on or
off. I ultimately had to export the first scene as IFF24 images and
recompile them as a PAR anim to match the chroma shift in the second
scene. DPS had no answer for me on that one.
On bringing your "already rendered anim frame" to the PAR's disk, the
answer is yes, if you saved your anim as separate framestores or 24 bit
IFFs. The PAR will not accept frames in any other Amiga format. If you
saved your anim as a Lightwave anim that plays back on the switcher, then
no, you cannot transfer that to the PAR.
One last thing, which is more in the way of putting a question to more
knowledgable PAR users than I,… I was told by Lee Stranahan that you
should almost always use Field Rendering with PAR anims for smoother
moving objects in the scene. But recently I read in the October VTU a
paragraph by David Hopkins in which he asserts:
"If you use RGBs, don't use Field Rendering. It looks like Field
Rendering only really works properly with Framestores and since
Framestores are of lower quality than RGBs, you probably don't want to
do that. Try using a small amount of Motion Blur as an alternative."
REALLY??? What's not working? When I look at a Field Rendered RGB in
AdPro, I see a jiggling image that appears to be the result of separately
rendered fields. And my anims are much smoother. Anyone wish to amplify
Mr. Hopkins findings?
Good luck with your animations, Mark!
Sean Hannon
Ad Rats – Stamford, CT