CompuServe Thread

#disney & sound

4 messages in this thread
#419From: Steven MusseySep 16, 1990 9:11 PM
I am a new Amiga user who jumped in and bought an A3000 machine. My purpose for the machine was to use it to make animated cartoons. Specifically, I purchased the Disney Animation Studio for purposes of creating traditional animation with sound synchronization. The sounds are intended to primarily be speech and sound effects that are synchronized to the action. So far, I have found the software fairly easy to work with until I came to the part about adding sound to the action. I seem to be completely unable to comprehend how sound is supposed to be manipulated on this machine. The Disney software talks about "smus" and "iff" and "instr" files. I purchased the Perfect Sound 3.1 for sound sampling (which, incidentally, seems a bit quirky at times on the A3000, even with operating system 1.3) and it appears that this program will not create files that are compatible with the Disney software. The Disney help-line is still busy so I'm asking for your all's help. Am I right? What sound sampling software WILL work with the Disney Animation Studio? Help!
#420From: Henry LowengardSep 16, 1990 9:46 PM
Disney wants to have the sound files it uses to be named with an instr suffix, as they are in Sonix. I've also had a frustrating time with some sample files not being able to be read even though they are named with .instr. If you have Sonix then you can play sonix instruments also (i think… mebbe I'll check that again) with the !note command. Also – watch it – exposure sheet has very weird habits involving restoring erased and changed lines when it puts up its error messages (i think). I'm still exploring, but Scwab or no, this is poor programming, and it can't be completely blamed on Reichart. jhhl – "Disney Disser"
#452From: Ray LewisSep 17, 1990 9:50 PM
Steven: IFF means interchange file format (or something close to that) and represents a group of file formats used on the Amiga to make sound and visual data interchangeable among programs. A straight IFF sound file (sometimes also calledcan 8SVX IFF file) would be a digitized sound, period. Like a doorbell. Or a voice saying a sentence or phrase. SMUS is a musical score format which is similar. Two music editing programs (Deluxe Music Construction Set and Sonix) that I know of can save out complete, four voice musical scores as SMUS. There may be others. There are player utilities that will then play those songs, if, or course, you have the instrument files they use. That brings us to instr files. I believe that is a Sonix file convention (I have DMCS, not Sonix). The basic concept is this: an IFF digized sample of an instrument sound (or one created from scratch to get a "synth" type sound) is either manipulated so that the are from two to five octaves of that sound represented in the file, or two to five actual separate samples are put together to do this. At any rate, let's say you have a 5 octave "piano" instrument file that is used as one of the instruments in a SMUS music score. When the player program reads the music score, it get the name of the note, its loudness, duration, etc, and looks for the correct section of the instrument file to get the sound, then plays it. The score might also use a "drumkit" instrument file which could have a kick bass in the lowest section, a tom-tom next, a trap drum next, a ride cymbal next, and a wood block sound on top, so that you could access any of those sounds based on how high or low the note you specified when playing the "drumkit" instrument. Anyhow — I have'nt used the Disney Animator, so I can't say for sure how it handles all this. However, in AmigaVision, you can have it play a simple 8SVX/IFF sound file on cure, or have it read a SMUS file, look in a special "instruments" directory to find its instruments (up to four at once) and [ MORE ]
#453From: Ray LewisSep 17, 1990 9:50 PM
[ continuation ] play the song. Does any of this make sense? If not, ask more questions. ?|^] Ray Lewis