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From: stevel@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Ludtke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: LIVE! digitizer
Message-ID: <11483@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 6 Aug 89 06:37:46 GMT
References: <4810@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM> <5660050@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: stevel@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (Steve Ludtke)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 47

I hate to keep this arguement going, but I feel an excellent product may be
getting an unfair reputation. 

In article <5660050@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> charles@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Charles Brown) writes:
>When it worked extremely poorly I called the company.  They quickly
>sent me a new release of the software.  It also worked very poorly.

What do you mean by "worked very poorly" ? Do you mean you didn't get broadcast
quality results, or you couldn't get a picture at all ? I've had my Live!
for about 2 years, and have gotten excellent results with it from video tape
and directly with a camera. I also think the company deserves some credit for
their support efforts. I reported bug (a minor one) in ver .9 of the software,
and I had an upgrade in my hands at no charge in less than a week.

>I was using a camera designed for broadcast.  It has very high
>resolution and is used by TV stations.  The image was completely
>still.  I also used it with a professional VCR.  The LIVE was
>incapable of syncing.

Does this "broadcast quality" camera put out a NTSC standard video signal. A
lot of professional equipment doesn't. If not, it doesn't suprise me that
Live! couldn't sync. It warns of this on the first page of the manual. If it
does provide a good NTSC signal, did you consider that the hardware might
have been defective ?

>I was not running any other software.  I stand by my criticism of
>LIVE.  It failed more often than it succeeded.

As I said, I couldn't disagree more ! Live did guru occasionally with ver .9
of the software, but ver 1.02 has never gurued on me. As far as image quality
goes, when I used a 3 year old JVC home video camera I could get HAM images
that easily rivaled early digi-view pictures. I could also get reasonably
good quality images from a video tape, something that digi-view couldn't
do at all. If Live!'s HAM conversion (which is does in ~1/6 th of a sec.)
doesn't satisfy you, you have the option of saving a full 12 bit color map
to convert to HAM by some longer method.
I'm not saying Live! is the equivalent of an $800 frame grabber, but for
a couple of hundered dollars, I feel it was well worth the money.

Oh, and just for the record, I'm not associated with A^2 in any way, other
than having purchased a fine product from them.

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Steve Ludtke
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