CompuServe Messages

Hi John, I enjoyed meeting you at SIGGRAPH. Well I guess four decimal places is a bit extreme, but when I want to render to a Truevision ATVista with some 3D software, that will go nameless here, and I want to use it for video and print, the pixel aspect ratio comes into play. This is especially true if I don't want to render it twice at different resolutions and pixel aspect ratios for video and print. The place where I do most of my work only has a MAC network and MAC printers, so anything I print has to be downloaded via Farallon card to a MAC, massaged and printed out to one of their MAC laser or color printers. Most of this stuff just deals with square pixels. Being "slightly anal" when I pull the image up in Adobe Photoshop, I want a circle to be a circle so to speak. I also want to know that the circle is as humanly and mechanically perfect as possible. I rarely want to depend on dumb luck as I see some of these MAC people use around this facility. Personally I feel that if I accurately stay on top of the technology that I am driving, I will not get as sloppy as these people. I know most MAC people aren't as sloppy as these people, but the impression that I get is that the software will do everything for them including wiping their nose. I also work with a DOS paint program, LUMENA, which only works with the ATVista, but I also have Fractal Design's PAINTER for Windoze and often have to go back and forth between them. When I want to adjust the horizontal scaling (modifying the pixel aspect ratio) to correct the distortion cause by the ATVista framebuffer under the square pixels of Windoze, it asks the operator to input a scaling percentage to one decimal place. If I have accuracy to four decimal places I can round to three, eg. 85.7% from a pixel aspect ratio of 0.8571. I can go back and forth a couple of times without accumulating too much of an error. Here's hoping my circle is as perfectly round as yours! <G> Bryce W.