CompuServe Messages

Re: Fractal Design Painter. There has been some discussion here about Adobe Premiere and also Razor Pro being used with the PAR ( Personel Animation Recorder ) for editing and transitions on your PAR animations. Fractal Design Painter is the perfect compliment to 3D Studio for those of you with the PAR who want to touch up and paint on and do image processing on your PAR animations. I have the new Painter 3.0 and it works completely with the PAR,as far as reading and writing. You must set your PAR buffer size a little bigger as per page 109 of the manual to avoid General Protection Faults while saving to the PAR. You can request a specific frame number sequence from the PAR "ani" files after you rename them to "test0000.ani". The sequence is then saved to C drive as one file called the "frm", frame stack file. Another screen comes up to allow you to brouse forward and backward in the stack, paint- ing as you go, or applying a recorded session of commands to the whole stack. It then outputs as a targa sequence back to the PAR. Your PAR set- up screen is merely set to " file name", rather than auto increment. There is no loss of quality or added artifacts. The frames look identical from start to finish as far as quality. The resolution is not changed. It's like having a low cost mini, but slow, version of the Quantel paint- box-Harry suite on your desktop. I use it to manipulate stop motion video animation and motion control video which I have captured with the PAR and TBC-IV. And Painter only costs $ 300 ( or $ 200 at show price) ! Also, there is an excellant training tape for Painter from the Mac-Windows Academy in Florida, 800-527-1914. It is four tapes at $ 50 each. I justs wanted to share my satisfaction with these products for PAR users. David McLaughlin.