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From: keithd@cadovax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Time to flame at Aegis....
Message-ID: <1607@cadovax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Jun-87 19:44:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: cadovax.1607
Posted: Fri Jun 19 19:44:01 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 04:04:56 EDT
References: <764@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Reply-To: keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle)
Organization: Contel Business Systems, Torrance, CA
Lines: 136

In article <764@gryphon.CTS.COM> jdm@pnet02.CTS.COM (John Mesiavech) writes:
>In addition, it may interest some to know that (at least according to rumor),
>Aegis has bought the commercial rights to the public-domain program ROT ( a
>3-D image editor/animator), and according to word, will be using this program
>as the editor interface to Videoscape 3-D.  As shown by the above message,
>whether VideoScape will see the light of day is problematical.

I was at a semi-private show for "those of you who couldn't make it to Comdex"
yesterday (6/18) put on by the Southern Ca. Amiga reps.  Aegis, Newtek,
CSA, First Byte, Prism, Brown Waugh, and Micro Illusions were all there, 
along with unattended tables representing EA and Word Perfect.

In the dealer's room, NewTek was demoing Digi-Paint, and had a machine
dedicated to a continuously running demo of a HAM page-flip sequence of a 
girl stuttering and periodically saying "Hi, welcome to NewTek" or some such.
The sound was in sync with her lips, and was pretty impressive at first,
but after hearing it over and over and over and over it became a form of
Chinese water torture.  The package doing the work was something to be
called 'Digiffects System'.  When is it going to be out?  *Maybe* in
November but no promises (of what year?).  Supposed to be the last video 
titler/effects package you'll ever need (hah! who are they kidding, you need 
'em ALL).  I only saw a small bit of DigiPaint in operation, they had put up a 
filled circle and were using some fill feature to shade as if 3D.  A control
approximately positions the 'light source'.  However, there seemed to be
a rim around the edge of the circle where the shade effect never went, and 
the more he played with it the less useful it seemed.  Oh well, have to do
more investigation here obviously.  The NewTek table had the most interest,
though it may have primarily appeared that way because they had the biggest
crew of their own people hanging around.

Sonix was playing some stuff that was a full band with vocals.  Not sure
how the vocals were done, all of the words were different, so they weren't
an 'instrument' in the usual sense.  Unfortunately, the choice of tunes was
so much mainstream 'pop' that it just seemed like someone had a tinny
little A.M. radio going in the corner.  Seems like they should come up
with demos that are a little more unusual so that there is enough interest
that people will realize that it's being done on the Amiga.  They could
have taken a rock record and digitized that and you'd be hard pressed to
tell the difference.  This stuff you might have figured was the hotel's
muzak.  You don't need an Amiga to hear that.  Still, I am kind of curious
as to how they managed the voice track, didn't have time to find out.

And I didn't pay much attention to Micro Illusions, can't get to excited about
games since I moved from the Atari 800 to the Amiga and it's artistic
applications.  Especially since all I seem to ever see is various adventures 
and shootemups.  Give me a version of Spellunker or Montezuma's Revenge any 
day. (or Necromancer wouldn't be bad either).

A computer artist, Merydythe Dee was their with some stuff done on
ink-jets, one of her own about 16x22, and a couple of larger ones 24x30
or so by Howard Ganz, a computer artist from oceanside.  Abstract, modern
looking stuff.  I think there isn't enough of this sort of thing going on 
at such get-togethers.

Besides the dealers room, there were 3 scheduled 'meetings' on various
subjects:

1) The Commodore rep showed us a video tape of two TV commercials planned
to be aired in the fall.  Both of them were virtually ALL Amiga graphics,
quick collages of some of the more interesting stuff, much we have all seen
in one form or another.  Their new slogan is "Only The Amiga Makes It
Possible" (or reasonable facimilie).  Looked pretty good I guess, though
by the fall, there will probably be new demos that put those excerpts to
shame.  The rep then went on to show us the Amiga 2000, which was basically
indistinguishable from the 1000 (in his presentation) as he concentrated
primarily on the software (here is the workbench, this is an icon, this is
a screen, here's the demos: robo-city, boing, mandrill, molly, say,
couldn't you pick some *older* demos to show us?  This is an example of 
multitasking, etc. oh, and here's the juggler.  Follow with showing of
MS-DOS on bridge card etc.  Do a directory list, run PFS something)
Q&A period, what is the upgrade policy, well, we only know there is an
upgrade policy.  List price $1995 (not including bridge card).  Slight
mention of 1.3 allowing boot directly from hard disk, some mention of
WB upgrade (?) that provides a faster filesystem for both hard disk and
floppy.  Questions about how users will upgrade their PROMs to 1.3, but
no answers.

2) Richard Lewis, production designer for the Max Headroom show was there,
he also was responsible for the use of Amiga on an Amazing Stories.  He
showed us a video of some of the computer stuff he's been working on for
TV.  He complained about the problem of the TV execs having a hard time
buying the fact that a $2000 box can be as or more useful than their 
$200K boxes (dubner, wavefronts, quantel's etc.) but they are beginning
to be convinced.  Showed a couple of hi-res screens in Dpaint that were
used in Max Headroom.  He's used the Amiga as much or more to help discuss
production issues behind the scenes than actually using them on screen.
Digitized a building on the back lot, used Dpaint to monkey with it to
get ideas on how to modify it so when they use it TV viewers won't
recongize it from the TV show that used the same building last week.  Used
Aegis Animator to orchestrate the action for a shoot from 'Time Bomb' where
a small plane taking off from an airport runway only avoids running into a
larger plane by the intervention of a van which crashes into it.  Used
animator and genlock to experiment with ways of doing a couple of effects
before they were actually done the *expensive* way.  He liked to use the
genlock and DPaint to 'trace' camera images it seemed.  Good idea of using
color-0 shapes in Aegis Animator to 'mask' images coming in from genlock
so that other non-color-0 shapes can move behind some stuff and in front of
others.

3) Aegis CEO (don't remember his name, Volk wasn't even there I don't think)
Gave a big "all of us Amiga owners, developers and dealers all need to band 
together to snowball this thing into bigger things" peptalk.  Tries to play
down the 'Desktop Video' concept for some reason, then proceeds to show a
video which is titled 'Desktop Video on the Amiga' or similar. Showed off 
Videoscape 3D from the video.  No talk about what the user interface is, 
except the example of the ROT 3D program which yes, is apparently the 
groundwork for their object editor.  BAH!  I found that thing pretty 
inaccurate and little more than 'cute'.  I think they might as well start 
from scratch.  Oh well, Q&A period.  Does it do reflection and transparency?  
Yes.  But after further investigation there is still some question as far as 
I'm concerned.  It's not a ray tracer.  All of the demos are reminicent of 
early MAGI demo reels, no reflections, single light source, all objects have 
the same basic 'matte' finish.  It dosen't do texture mapping.  The one 
example on the video that looked like it might be doing reflection turned out 
to have been done with 2 objects (the original and it's reflection).  Can use 
DPaint images as backgrounds.  Since it's not ray traced, even the most 
complex frame demoed took a maximum of 20 seconds to render.  Animation in 
real time with their new compression format that only saves differences from 
one frame to the next.  Don't need a single-framable VCR, but it certainly 
wouldn't hurt.  I'd say it would be a useful product if the object editor was 
friendly and useful (which I'm beginning to have serious doubts about).  
Dosen't hold a candle to CAD-3D (for Atari from Antic Software) in that 
respect.  

Seemed like there was about 100 attendees, but I'm not particularly good
at estimating that.  Apparently it was originally by invitation only, though 
kinda loose.  I found out about it from another developer, and just wandered
in, wasn't sure exactly what the context was.  My guess is, it was as
dealer recruitment effort.  There apparently was a 'lunch' followed by 
a couple of more-secret meetings before the festivities started, which 
looked more like 50 attendees.  Perhaps these were the dealers they were 
courting.

Keith Doyle
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