Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!herald.usask.ca!telepro!tptbbs!James_Hastings-Trew From: James_Hastings-Trew@tptbbs.UUCP (James Hastings-Trew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.multimedia Subject: DCTV digitized frames Message-ID: Date: 9 Jun 91 00:32:19 GMT Organization: TelePro Technologies Lines: 34 In a message dated Sat 08 Jun 91 05:11, Mikep@hpmwtd.hp.com (mike Powell) wrote: MP> I still think the idea of supplying DCTV with CDTV is a great MP> one.... the quantity/quality/speed of that type of system MP> for things like 'full motion video' (whatever that is :-) would MP> be a BIG plus... although I have yet to see DCTV anims made MP> from successive digitized video frames.... MP> How well does DCTV do with such a task? I tried it out with a laser disk of computer animation. I used the DCTV software to grab each image as a non-interlaced, 3 bitplane image. In the universe of DCTV, 3 bitplanes means that your colours are limited to 8 million or so instead of 16 million. On full motion image, the reduced colour-set is invisible - it IS visible on stills or slowing moving images with lots of large areas of graduated colour as banding. Using standard Amiga anim tools I was able to produce about 5 seconds of full motion, 30 frame per second video with a 200K size anim file. Mind you, all normal ANIM rules apply - if there is too much difference between frames the delta information can get to be larger than the actual frame information. Still, it was neat to see this work on my A2500. I believe that GVP demonstrated about 3 minutes of full-motion video from Back To The Future III running from a hard-drive using the DCTV unit. DCTV frames present dramatic compression of images, mainly by reducing image information down to what would be visible on a standard NTSC composite display. A single DCTV frame can be 70K compared to the 24 bit original file which can easily be over 1 megabyte of information. I once created a DCTV anim which contained 60 frames rendered in Imagine at 736*480 in 24 bit colour. Each frame was 1.2 megs in size - which reduced down to about 70K. The entire anim ended up at 500K - less than half the size of one of the original frames. There is LOTS of potential here.