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From: amigan@cup.portal.com (R Michael Medwid)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DCTV Questions?
Message-ID: <36483@cup.portal.com>
Date: 3 Dec 90 05:40:14 GMT
References: <2143@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 38

There are two main questions Ihave re: DCTV.  One regards animation and
one regards simply encoding amiga graphics out to ntsc.  

First off with the version of DCTV software that you receive, does it
support animation?  If so how does it accomplish this..via its own 
paint program and page flipping?  My ideal scenario would eventually
look like this:  I get into Imagine or Sclulpt 4D and create a 40
frame animation and THOSE programs output directly to DCTV format
(heaven..I'm in heaven..).  Ok so that's not gonna happen in the
next 6 months..how about this..I use AREXX in conjection with
Imagine or Sculpt and create an animation outputting images files
as 24 bit..then my program (or even better one provided by DCTV
folks) converts that image to DCTV format and saves that Image (much smaller
than the 24 bit file) and deletes the 24 bit file..then does the same thing
with the next image of the animation only this time in addition to 
converting the image to DCTV format, there is delta compression of the
files to a DCTV ANIM-5-like animation file format.  

Ok so say that DCTV can NOT do either of the above..how is it as an amiga
to ntsc encoder..when you record an Amiga image or animation to video tape,
how does it look.  Here let's assume were trying to take a HAM mode
animation and send it to video tape..again just using dctv as an encoder..
how does it look?  Look at the reds, is there a lot of "herring bone"
effect?  Ghosting?  How about overall picture clarity?  And of course
the obvious question: Can you use DCTV as an amiga-to-ntsc encoder without
converting your images to dctv format?  

I saw DCTV demo'd at Amy Expo in Anaheim a couple of months ago and was
favorably impressed.  However the designers were quite ambiguous as to
what they meant by "animation support".  So of my questions, that's the
one I'm most interested in.  

Oh..some folks may answer "why not just use a genlock to go out to
video tape"..my answer is I just haven't been all that impressed with
the output from most Amiga Genlocks..their final picture quality that
is.  DCTV with its expanded pallet and the fact that it is working 
specifically to ntsc holds promise of greatly expanding the amiga as
a professional video tool in my opinion.