Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!husc7!hadeishi
From: hadeishi@husc7.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga for video presentations
Message-ID: <1538@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 31-Mar-87 13:09:58 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.1538
Posted: Tue Mar 31 13:09:58 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 2-Apr-87 01:37:56 EST
References: <1478@munnari.oz>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: hadeishi@husc7.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Distribution: world
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 37
Keywords: video, presentation, graphics, Aegis Impact, Storyboard?
Summary: The next "simple little slideshow utility" from EA will do the trick


	I suppose it is a bit premature to be announcing a product here,
but what the ----.  Some of you may remember the cute little slideshow
utility on the Electronic Arts Utility Disk #1, which allowed you to
scroll and fade DPaint IFF images, driven by a script.  Well, the next release
has been enhanced in various ways, and among other things it supports
full video (overscan displays), panning over large bitmaps, limited cross
fading and partial picture fading (this is a hack involving color map
twiddling, but it is easy to set up a picture to do the latter in DPaint,
and somewhat more difficult to the the former with DPaint II w/ stencils),
and other things which have yet to be implemented, so I won't announce them
here.  In any case, it sounds like the basics of what you want to do
(scroll graphs, fade in portions of images at a time) can be done with
the cute utility.

	They (EA) keep on asking me to add features to the thing (after
they saw what the current version could do, they decided to make it a
relatively full-blown slideshow presentation utility) so it may be a while
before it finally gets out there.  If I weren't in school, it'd be
done in a few weeks, but I'm in school.  I'm working frantically on it
over Spring Break (yeah, I know, but I have to pay for my wife's
trip to London this week somehow) and I hope to get all of the new features
implemented by the end of the week.

	What you will see is a fairly simple but flexible presentation utility
which can do quite a lot for you, although of course it won't automatically
generate graphs from input data or anything like that (but what else is
multitaking for?  Use a dedicated graphing utility.)  But if you're willing
to graph it on your PC, copy it over using a Bridge card, gussy it up in
DPaint II, and then plop it onto your RAMdisk and fire up SlideShow
concurrently, I suspect you'd have a pretty flexible and powerful
video presentation environment on your hands.  (Or, you could graph it with
Impact!, and fiddle with DPaint II to get sections of it ready to be
faded in/out, and then fire up SlideShow, or, or, or . . . Now THAT's what
I call synergy!)

				-Mitsu