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From: jkellow@bach.helios.nd.edu (John Kellow)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Animating images on PC's and Workstations
Message-ID: <1991Jun10.185556.10123@news.nd.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 91 18:55:56 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1991Jun10.185556.10123
Sender: news@news.nd.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: University of Notre Dame,  Notre Dame
Lines: 31



I just read the press release on Apple's new system software called
QuickTime for including multimedia in applications.  It includes
support for animating images, playing digitized sounds, compressing
images, controlling video equipment, and playing digitized video
from a hard disk.  It sounded very promising so I was wondering, Whats
the current state of the art in animating images on PCs and Workstations?
I'm not talking about special multimedia hardware, just ordinary
PC's, Macs, Sparcstations, Amigas, etc.

I've used NCSA Image on the Mac and Sun Sparcstation to animate some
of my experimental data and these programs work well when all of the
images are loaded into memory, but I work with small images (105x68,
about the size of a postage stamp on a Sun color monitor, usually I
zoom them up to 2x or 3x).  I've also played around with xgrasp, but
these images are also small, about 320x200.  All of these programs
animate 8 bit color mapped images with the same colormap.  Is there
something prohibitive about changing the colormap every frame?

So where are the bottlenecks for doing TV quality animation on a PC 
or Workstation (what is TV quality anyway 640x480x24bit? 16bit?).
Is the limitation in disk->host memory, host memory->framebuffer memory,
host processor speed ?  It seems that things are moving in the direction
of desktop computers being able handle digital video like they handle
digital sound now, but I can't really see it on the current generation
of machines.


John Kellow
kellow@ndcvx.cc.nd.edu