CompuServe Thread

I successfully sent my first animation to the EVO-9650 two weeks ago, using the hex codes in a fax from Newtek. The fax also recommended setting the inter-frame delay (in the Record dialog) to twenty seconds. That seemed a bit hokey to me. The VTR takes about twenty seconds to go from stop to record-and-wait, so perhaps that's where Newtek's recommendation came from, but the rendered image sticks around in the Toaster's output buffer until the first segment of the next image overlays it, so unless you are rendering something that renders really, really fast, the twenty second delay is goofy. I reset it to 0.2 seconds (just long enough for the record string to be sent at 4800 bps) and everything works fine. I could probably set it to zero without any problems, but I haven't tried that. I set the deck to stop after one minute of pause mode. I would have liked to have it stop immediately, but one minute is the shortest setting. Then I tried having the record string include a Stop command after the Record NNN Frames command, but that didn't work– the deck didn't record anything. I guess it honors the Stop command right away rather than queueing it up. So, to render 600 frames, the deck will take 20 seconds per frame to reset and record and then another minute in pause, multiplied by 600 frames: 800 minutes, or thirteen hours and twenty minutes of head wear, just for a twenty second animation. Ouch. Perhaps I'll look into saving the frames to disk and then rendering them lickety-split to tape, to save the one minute of pause time per frame. That would cut the total to twenty seconds times 600 frames: 200 minutes of head wear– much better. One wishes there was a way to have the Toaster send two frames (DV1 and DV2) to the deck and for the deck to record those two frames in sequence. That would cut wear and tear by a factor of two. But getting things to sync up just right isn't obviously feasible, unless the GPI trigger could be used in some interesting way…. I recorded frames with the -9650's frame buffer in all three states. Leaving it off produced the clearest recording. Playing the animation back requires the buffer to be on for a stable playback; without the buffer on playback, the top of the image wiggles. Alternatively, playing the tape in an EVO-9850 editing decks works fine; no wiggles. — David "No Wiggles" Schachter