CompuServe Thread

Director and FantaVs?

2 messages in this thread
#49938From: Jim VentolaJan 14, 1993 11:50 PM
I have been playing around with FantaVision. It's great fun. But I would like to make interactive things with it. That is, I would like to play the anims it creates from The Director. If a button were clicked, the FantaVison anim would be played. Ideally, I would like to be able to have the buttons on the same screen, with the anim above in its own window. There is a FantaVision player, but it doesn't have ARexx so I don't know how to invoke it. Or else: is there any way to convert FantaVision films to ANIM format–a painless way, that is. I thought of trying to grab each screen, but gee… Have any ideas? I remember reading that the program was still being supported by its authors. Is that true? If so, I would like to find out what if any plans there may be for an upgrade. . It is, BTW, an amazing program. My 1987 copy runs perfectly under 2.04. I can even load a pic of the wrong resolution now without a crash. (I am not sure who gets the credit for that: the original programmers or the folks at Commodore. I'll give credit to both.)
#50152From: Keith DoyleJan 18, 1993 11:35 PM
I've used Fantavision a little, but I have no idea about the current support status of it. There used to be a program that could be used to capture single frames of any double buffered output and save it as an ANIM, I used it a long time ago to grab an Aegis Animator sequence and a Sculpt-3D Movie and convert it into an ANIM. I think it was a utility produced by Martin Hash on one of his animation utility program disks, but I don't remember which one. It could be rather tedious, but with enough fiddling it did work, and I haven't seen any other utility like it. It would watch the front screen address and detect when a double-buffering switch occurred as a trigger for when to grab the screen as an ANIM frame. You'd tell it how many frames to grab and it would keep going until the number you give it was satisfied. Yeah, here we go, it was called ConvertANIM, and it was by HASH, but I've got it on a disk all by itself marked BETA, so I don't know how it was finally released. Keith