CompuServe Thread

Laurie, Your wish is my command. We specifically purchased three 40MHz Warp Engines to really show off what Scala MultiMedia and our InfoChannel product could do at the National Association of Broadcasters convention (NAB) and the National Cable Television Association convention (NCTA). One of the biggest problems with the A4000 is the very slow Fast RAM access time. This affects many of the Scala page transitions, causing hesitation and jittering. In some cases, it really throws off the timing of the entire presentation. This is especially noticable when working with multiple animations. Since memory expansion is in the same "bus" as the 68040, Fast RAM access increased by up to a factor of four, using one 16MB, 60ns SIMM. Animation playback, using Scala's "DiskAnim" and ordinary RAM playback is considerably faster. DiskAnim allows you "spool" an animation off the hard drive using minimal RAM for buffering. With DiskAnim, we were able to playback a 10MB (704×480, 128 colors, High-Res Interlaced) animation on a 1GB Seagate "Hawk" SCSI-II hard drive with up to 20 to 24 fps. With RAM playback, 30 fps could be achieved. Scala also has several pre-loading methods (In Scala speak called "Snapload"), with dynamic, static and none options. The dynamic option has a look-ahead option that will pre-load the next event. The static option will pre-load everything to RAM, if possible. None, means of course, no pre-loading. The Warp Engine performed so well, that even with the Snapload "none" option, everything synced up fine. No pre-loading was necessary. For the shows, we used a "Warped" A4000, with 16 MB of RAM, Hawk Hard Drive, the DPS Personal Animation Recorder (PAR), DPS Personal TBC-IV, SunRize AD516 Sound Board and Digital Creations SuperGen SX genlock and of course, our Scala InfoChannel product. The presentation involved video playback from the PAR, Stereo audio from the AD516, keying/overlaying from the SuperGen SX between Scala graphics and PAR video. It all worked fabulously. We are extremely impressed with the Warp Engine, and we highly, highly recommend it for your multimedia needs. Regards, John Chang Technical Support Manager Scala, Inc.