#Anim Playback
4 messages in this thread
Mark,
Your welcome. I've had a lot of success outputting my work to the PAR.
My DPS' recommended harddrive was a 540 megabyte Seagate drive which holds
about five minutes of work, and is fine for continuous playback of about 2
minutes, at which time it needs to thermally recalibrate and causes a
"burp" in the playback. So if you need longer than two minutes at a shot
then you need to go with one of the newer, bigger harddrives (but I don't
know the names).
I'll share with you an unusual problem I had with chroma distortion in my
PAR files. I shot a live scene of a video editing suite. The first shot
was a closeup of a Lightwave anim playing back on a monitor. The next
shot was a wider angle view encompassing the room. I took this second
shot and broke it into separate IFF24 images to use as a background image
sequence. Over this sequence I animated some characters working at the
controls of the suite. The problem was that in my final render, the
Lightwave anim playing on the video monitor in the background changed
quite noticeably in its chroma values. Instead of mainly blue with hints
of magenta, it was dominantly magenta (no riff raff!).
I suspected that Filter was the culprit, but it was the same whether on or
off. I ultimately had to export the first scene as IFF24 images and
recompile them as a PAR anim to match the chroma shift in the second
scene. DPS had no answer for me on that one.
On bringing your "already rendered anim frame" to the PAR's disk, the
answer is yes, if you saved your anim as separate framestores or 24 bit
IFFs. The PAR will not accept frames in any other Amiga format. If you
saved your anim as a Lightwave anim that plays back on the switcher, then
no, you cannot transfer that to the PAR.
One last thing, which is more in the way of putting a question to more
knowledgable PAR users than I,… I was told by Lee Stranahan that you
should almost always use Field Rendering with PAR anims for smoother
moving objects in the scene. But recently I read in the October VTU a
paragraph by David Hopkins in which he asserts:
"If you use RGBs, don't use Field Rendering. It looks like Field
Rendering only really works properly with Framestores and since
Framestores are of lower quality than RGBs, you probably don't want to
do that. Try using a small amount of Motion Blur as an alternative."
REALLY??? What's not working? When I look at a Field Rendered RGB in
AdPro, I see a jiggling image that appears to be the result of separately
rendered fields. And my anims are much smoother. Anyone wish to amplify
Mr. Hopkins findings?
Good luck with your animations, Mark!
Sean Hannon
Ad Rats – Stamford, CT
Sean, I have field rendered and also found the motion to be smoother but as
long as the motion continues and nothing stops. If an object stops Mr. Jiggle
will attack the object.<G>
jmb
Sean,
Thanks very much for the reply. I'm trying to get as much info as possible
about the PAR before making the BIG decision!–that is, info from
knowledgeable people who are using it!
As far as my anim is concerned, I saved all the frames as RGB images
(forgive me if I say that I don't know the difference between RGB and 24
bit IFFs), but it seemed to be the best way that I could think of to save
'em, that didn't take up alot of harddrive space.
Still, though, I am thinking more and more of getting the PAR and most
likely a bigger HD, (I guess the bigger the better because you always run
out of space in a hurry!). My last question is: Am I going to need a TBC
to output the anim to video? I've read lots of messages about the PAR
with the DPS TBC IV, and when I went to DPS for info about the PAR, they
also gave me information about their Personal TBC IV. What do you know
about it?
Thanks again!
Mark… autopilot engaged!
Mark,
I have two TBC-IV's connected between my two Panasonic AG-1960s and video
inputs 2 & 3 on my Toaster. Going into video input 1 of my Toaster is my
PAR output, and it does not require a TBC. Also, as I marginally
understand my set-up, my Internal sync is being provided by the PAR. On
the rare occasions when I have output my PAR anims through the component
Beta-SP connectors, something didn't like my Internal sync so I changed
the software to External sync and used the house sync provided by the
suite I was in.
So, I believe the answer is that you don't need a TBC of any kind to
output your PAR anims to tape. And I really like the TBC-IVs for its proc
amp adjustments, its Video Strobe feature, and superior frame grabbing.
One area I ran into trouble is with the Super Black for blacking my tapes.
It blacked my tapes just fine, and the material I recorded on them plays
back on my regular VTRs. But when I try to play them back on my AG-460
camcorder, it plays 3 seconds, then shuts off! This also happens with
tape that just has the Super Black on it. My guess is that there is some
signal recorded onto the tape when the TBC-IV blacks it that my camcorder
can't deal with. Anyone with an answer to that one?
My final thought is that the PAR/TBC-IV combo is pure gold when comes to
framegrabbing lengths of video. The first thing I did was grab "Night on
Bald Mountain" and played back 30 seconds of world class animation that
was virtually indistinguishable from the original. Took my breath away!
Sean Hannon
Ad Rats – Stamford, CT