Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!tektronix!percival!baer
From: baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Wanted: specs for Eric Graham's Movie anim file format
Message-ID: <1483@percival.UUCP>
Date: 4 Apr 89 17:08:46 GMT
References: <22556@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer)
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Distribution: usa
Organization: Animators Anonymous Productions
Lines: 39

In article <22556@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> ofer@gandalf.Berkeley.EDU (Ofer Licht) writes:
>Does anyone out there have the specifications to Eric Graham's movie
>anim file format?  Is his "J-compression" algorithm available for
>perusal?
>--------
>I am now able to make the movie package (dilbm, pilbm, movie) function
>consistently (read: no gurus) and find the resulting anims to be 
>significantly faster than those created by makeanim,grabanim,etc.
>The movie anims, however, take longer to create and require more storage
>space.  The storage and speed factors suggest that "J-compression" is
>not quite as good as Jim Kent's "vertical encoding" compression used in
>ANIMs of type 5.  Then why do the movie anims take so much longer to compute?

Nobody has the code for the Movie format except Eric Graham himself.  I
tried to get the code for almost a year from Byte-by-Byte for use with
my Animation:Editor program.  They did promise me several times to send
it, however I still don't have it.  We ended up writing a daemon program
that captures the frames from memory and stores them in a friendlier
format.

As for the observations you made about the size/speed problems, you are
correct.  Movie files are generally MUCH larger than ANIM files, unless
the image has a LOT of dithering or is made of digitized images.  This
is because Movie has a special way to deal with heavily dithered images.
That's why it takes so long to pack, it changes the packing algorithm on
EVERY line!  It takes about an hour to pack 30 frames in Movie, compared
to 2-3 minutes in ANIM.  

If you're making films, you still really need to single frame record the
frames anyway, so you might as well use the format that packs better.
Also, there are MANY ANIM compatable programs out there now, so when you
use Movie, there aren't many tools you can use.  Still, I still wish
Byte-by-Byte would release some of the info about how Movie works.  

-- 
	-Ken Baer.  					 
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