Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Path: utzoo!utgpu!topix
From: topix@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (R. Munroe)
Subject: Re: Next machine as animation platform
Message-ID: <1990Nov13.043825.9515@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCS Public Access
References: <85866@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 90 04:38:25 GMT

In article <85866@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> mark@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark Jansen) writes:
>
>	I recently got information in the mail about Steven Job's new
>color Next Machine.  You buy his Next Cube with a 32bit graphics board
>that evidently can grab video, compress it in real time and then play
>back video in real time from these compressed files.  Lady on the phone
>priced a bare system at $14K, without hard disk.  Seems to me that this
>is the first workstation that you could use instead as a stand-alone 
>animation computer.  Couldn't you just created rendered graphics, get 
>it into compressed format and then dump, 20 seconds or so.  You wouldn't
>need an Abekas or special single step video recorder.  Am I right? am
>I wrong?
>
>
>
>--
>Mark Jansen, Department of Computer and Information Science
>The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH USA 43210-1277
>mark@cis.ohio-state.edu


Although I'm not sure how the images are compressed, I would be quite amazed
if they could play back in broadcast quality.  An Abekas is specialized to
do just that.  I would expect that a Next is too general (so to speak) a 
platform to handle high quality real time playback.  Besides, you still
need good video epuipment to encode the RGB signal so the animation could
be put to tape.  We use Silicon Graphics workstations which are incredibly
fast beasties, but we still do frame by frame for brodcast quality.


Bob Munroe
topix@utcs.utoronto.ca