CompuServe Thread

No way to do that directly (that I know). Two roundabout possibilities: 1) I'm thinking that AnimMagic would do that directly? It's not a 'normal' effect in AnimMagic, so if you need to know for sure let me know and I'll experiment. 2) Use ADPro to scale and composite the two anims. You would first need to break them apart into constituent frames, and later make another anim from the modified frames. Most all the processing could be done with ARexx, so it wouldn't be that bad. Likely this is the method I'd chose, since it will allow optimizing the palette, and (I think) give better results than AnimMagic. There are probably other ways. I'll be interested in other responses.

Bob – can't help you with off-the-shelf ideas, but I can think of some potential problems to consider: 1. Are they the same resolution? (320 HAM, 640 two color, etc). 2. Their palettes will have to be combined. Perhaps conversion to HAM on both would help here if the mismatch is large. If you could snap out each frame (for both files) to disk, and then bring each one in and shrink them down… saving that new frame to disk.. and then making a new anim from those new frames, that might work well. Except: 3. Are they compatible as far as frame count goes? You might have to make a longer combined anim which is the least common factor count for both. If one had 5 frames, and the other had 4, you'd need 20 frames to make a good loop for both, y'see. Assuming that these are looping anims, that is. – kev

AniMagic would do what you described easily.

Thanks for all the help so far. Let me give you all a little more information. A group of doctors have a sonar machine that outputs 16 gray level image "composit video", that they are now viewing in real-time. They want to capture a subjects heart for 1 cycle. 60 beats per min would mean that we need to capture 30 frames for 1 cycle or at 50 beats 36 frames. They then have the subject exercise and recapture his heart at a somewhat quicker pace – say 100 beats or 18 frames. They then want to be able to view both before and after on the same monitor. Each Anim would be doing a continuous loop until ended by the doctor. They would also have a option to single frame thru the animation. 15 frames per second using ALive is all I have accomplished so far. The AMIGA dealer that I'am working with has some programming dollars available, plus the doctors say we could sell alot of units to other doctors. I picture a CanDo interface and ARexx controlling everything, it needss to be very automated and easy to run. I'am willing to share any Dollar$ I make for some help. Thanks – Bob Naffziger

I can think of 2 ways you might get your results….. 1) use DPaintIII anim brushes; cut out only the necessary area of each anim and then paste them together on same pages…. 2) use The Director to "blit" only the areas needed from both anims to a display buffer…that could be programmed easily. 3) I just thought of this one; use a Toaster; I believe you could get your results from that…..if not try incorporating video into your setup as well? Maybe the Toaster is the best bet, since it digitizes realtime….. best Of! -Scott

bob From your description of the application I would think that you would nonot only want an automatic setup but also a fast one. The draw back to using AniMagic (great prog.) is that the processing takes a long time. I have been experimenting with Delux Video III but the version I have is a little flaky on my A3000. I was also interested in showing two things at once. DVideo is supposed to be able to handle two viewports simultaneously – it works in their demo. It should be possible to play each anim in a separate viewport at the same time. DVideo can do size manipulation of the fly for still pictures and may be able to do this for anims also? An additional idea is to cut the screen size down before digitizing – therefore no image processing would be necessary in the amiga. Then the two anims could be played directly. good luck