#Need FLC Advice
4 messages in this thread
Hi,
I'm looking for a "standard" animation format for distribution of a CD title
containing linear 8 bit children's animation (at 480*360). I hate to bombard
you with a grocery list of (6) questions, but I'm trying to get up to speed on
.FLCs. Your help will be appreciated!
1. What is contained in the animation support libarary?
2. Have you found the .FLC format to be compatable with the vast majority of
MPC II systems, including the "low end" ones? Other formats, such as Quicktime,
are finicky with regard to display devices and/or drivers.
3. I have seen mention here of the .FLC format having a palette that is not
compatable with Windows. Assuming one has control over the environment,
including the abilty to preload a palette with all the colors in the .FLC, is
there still a "palette flash" problem; I'm not sure exactly what you mean by
"incompatible." Also, will the palette issue be resolved with your upcoming
Windows product?
4. Can you recommend software packages that I can use to sync. .FLC animations
with sound?
5. Does the .FLC format lend itself to being stepped through backward and
forward so, given the proper controls, one can manipulate the animation in a
similar way to Quicktime?
and finally…
6. Not asking for any guarantees, but would you expect me to have a problem
displaying .FLCs at 480*360 with concurrent sound on a low end MPC II?
Thanks in advance for your help,
Steve Siegel
Good questions – I would like some feedback from others on the answers.
"1. What is contained in the animation support libarary?" Some manuals, header
files, etc., which help you understand the structure of the FLC and FLI files.
Also, there is info for Visual Basic and C programmers for creating Windows
players for Flic files.
"2. Have you found the .FLC format to be compatable with the vast majority of
MPC II systems?" Yes
"3. I have seen mention here of the .FLC format having a palette that is not
compatable with Windows." Of the 256 colors, you need to use a palette of 236.
The first 10 and last 10 permit Windows to have palettes of its own without
flashing. There may be some exceptions, but this is supposed to work.
Also, will the palette issue be resolved with your upcoming Windows product?"
The issue is bypassed; the Animator Studio products works in truecolor. You
can save out to 256 or 236, etc. colors if you like.
"4. Can you recommend software packages that I can use to sync. .FLC animations
with sound?" Not really. Our player works if you keep the FLC files small
enough so you don't lose synchronization. Check out MOVIE.ZIP (mentioned
below) which assigns sounds to individual frames. You might find that AVI or
Quicktime are good in this regard because the sound and image are linked.
"5. Does the .FLC format lend itself to being stepped through backward and
forward so, given the proper controls, one can manipulate the animation in a
similar way to Quicktime?" Don't know about Quicktime. When I step backwards
while playing a FLC file there is a moment's hesitation before it turns around.
Perhaps saving a Flic backwards, then playing it forwards might avoid problems.
"6. Not asking for any guarantees, but would you expect me to have a problem
displaying .FLCs at 480*360 with concurrent sound on a low end MPC II?" Yes.
No. Well, it depends on what the subject matter of the flic is! If you have a
flic like an architectural walkthrough, every pixel on the screen is getting
changed and the animation could be very sluggish. If you need to get around
that, you might design your images to have a static background and as much as
possible confine the animated portion to a small part, like a campfire, or a
bird flying across the screen.
Hope this helps.
File Info for MOVIE.ZIP
Section: Utilities Contributor: 76427,1717 Size: 404510
Submitted: 2/15/95 Type: Binary Accesses: 751
Title: The Movie Machine v1.5
Keys: MULTIMEDIA WINDOWS ANIMATOR 3DSTUDIO SOUND MUSIC COOL
Latest version of the popular Movie Machine creates multi-media movies and
presentations from sound effects, music, and animations. It supports both FLI
and FLC file formats. Features include assigning WAV files to individual
animation frames, background music (MIDI files), and scripting. It requires
Windows 3.1 and a Windows compatible sound card with drivers installed.
[dl time at 9600 baud: 7 min]
Nik,
Thanks very much for the quick response. I have a couple of follow-up
questions:
1. Does the .FLC file format use rectangle differencing, or is the entire
screen refreshed for every frame? And if the entire screen is refreshed, are
there methods that exist for optimizing playback? (Or, is this somehow an
irrelevant question with regard to flics?)
2. When I asked in my previous message about software packages for
synchronizing sound with .FLCs, I did not mean in a lock-step nature, as in VFW
or QT. What I'm looking for are packages that will allow me to display a flic
on my screen along with a wave file, and edit them together so that when I
launch the .FLC and .WAV concurrently, for short animations, they are
more-or-less synchronized. Since I've read that .FLCs can have associated
sound, I'm assuming that there is commercial software that will allow you
create and synchronize animation and sound, much as Premiere provides this for
QT and VFW.(If nothing available now, will Animator Studio do this?).
The reason this is important to me, is that at this point, it seems that flics
are a very viable format for CD titles. But coupling with sound is also
necessary.
Thanks,
Steve
…associating flics and sound….
The flic format does not have sound associations, so you will have to do it
with something like our Windows player, in the manner you described. Since it
can be done, there must be applications other than ours that do this too.
Animator Studio? I think that will not offer anything different in this
regard.
As far as "oes the .FLC file format use rectangle differencing, or is the
entire screen refreshed for every frame?" I do not know the meaning of
rectangle referencing. However, Flics are stored in a manner that sounds
similar. The flic builds a pretty good picture of frame one, then with each
successive frame records the changes from the preceding frame. So an animation
with lots of foreground movement (like an architectural walkthrough) will have
a larger file size as well as a harder time playing, than a flic with a similar
number of frames that has a static background and very little movement.