Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell!pacbell.com!ucsd!usc!wuarchive!emory!mephisto!mcnc!ncsuvx!news From: hgm@ccvr1.ncsu.edu (Hal G. Meeks) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Cheesy Amiga Video Message-ID: <1990Sep7.140736.18697@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 7 Sep 90 14:07:36 GMT References: <29435@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <939@iceman.jcu.oz> Reply-To: hgm@ccvr1.ncsu.edu (Hal G. Meeks) Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 81 In article <939@iceman.jcu.oz> cpca@iceman.jcu.oz (C Adams) writes: > >With all this stuff about the Amiga being "the machine" for multimedia, I >am wondering why? It's graphics are worse and IBM/Mac have/will have much >more software available for them given the recent crush of multimedia hype. Perhaps a small anecdotal story may help: We recently (as of yesterday) had a "trade show" with vendors in the area participating. Keep in mind that this show is targeted at the University audience, where money is at times a secondary concern. At the last moment, our lone 2000 here has allowed to share a table with a MacII and PS2 Model 70. All were running demos of some sort. Now, the Amiga is not an officially supported machine on this campus, so we had to leave a little placard in front giving Commodore's number as a place to get more information. About an hour before I went to bed, I decided it would be neat to throw together a little demo, since the only thing running was NewTek's Demo Reel #1. I finished it in an hour, and although it was rough around the edges, people seemed to like it. Nothing more than a simple slide show with a couple of anim files thrown in, and a background soundtrack. Nothing fancy, since the target machine had 2 drives and 3 meg of memory (no HD). Reactions are what you would expect from people who have never seen an Amiga; a couple of people looked behind the monitor to see if the music was coming from a tape player. In the real world (I can guarantee you that it exists), time quite literally is money in the video business. The quicker you can get a finished product to a customer, the more money you can make. The amiga is a unique platform in this regard, since it's graphic tools are so well integrated. And none of the software that I used costs a lot of money, which means I can afford more tools to automate tedious processes. I saw a DecStation (believe it was a 5000) running a beautiful aquarium animation (flipping roughly 260 frames while acting as a file server). For roughly the same money, I could buy a VHS edit system, and a well stocked amiga to use as the edit controller and graphics engine. I could then hand out cheap 15 minute tapes to prospective customers. Yes, the Decstation looks a lot nicer, but I suspect I could make more money with the Amiga setup. People are not as critical of video as you might expect; at times 32 colors is adequate to get your point across. I'd certainly like to have more, but I don't want to pay for it (in terms of money and integration with the rest of my software). A well done 4bitplane animation is more memorable than a 24bitplane slideshow. It would be nice if we could all make something like "TinToy" on our home computers, but it would then cease being special. I recommend that you dig up a Siggraph tape from a few years back and look at "Dance of the Stumblers", done on an Amiga 1000 with Aegis Animator. I guess the best words to describe it would be "simple elegance". I've looked briefly at MacroMind's Director, which appears to be the most popular presentation/animation software available for the Mac. I thought about porting some animations over to it, just for fun and out of curiosity. I've dropped the project, for now, because it appears that the 68030 Macintosh doesn't have the horsepower to do what I'm accustomed to doing on my "cheesy" Amiga. Perhaps Apple's new graphics accelerator board will change this. Of course, I am speaking of the present time. Everything is subject to change on all platforms. And, of course, money changes everything (quoting a Brains song). The Military proves this daily ;-). >And when are we EVER going to see UNIX or the toaster??? Soon I hope. I can't express how revolutionary a product the Toaster is, from a video production perspective. --hal -- hgm@ccvr1.cc.ncsu.edu "He was a legendary hero, netoprhm@ncsuvm.bitnet his IQ was zero." Zoogz Rift