From: andrey@cco.caltech.edu (Andre T. Yew)
Subject: Re: Near/Broadcast Quality Video!!!!!!!! etco
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 16:38:25 GMT

	To the original poster, perhaps it would help a lot
more if you specified how much you're willing to spend.

tope@enea.se (Tommy Petersson) writes:

>The most cost efficient for near broadcast quality work is an Amiga
>with a good CPU accelerator card ('030 or '040) and a Toaster card.
>You may use the Toaster card in the Amiga 3000 family only after some
>minor hardware tweaking, I don't know how it will be with the soon-
>to-be-showed-first-time-on-a-computer-fair Amiga 4000.

	Don't know about this one -- IMO, Video Toaster output
looks pretty ratty.  It also depends on what you mean when
you say broadcast quality.  For a some of us, that means
"when our wonderful Betacam SP tapes are mastered down
to VHS"  and displayed on a $20 color TV (yes we have
a $20 color TV in our lab).

The original poster wrote:

>- 
>- Also being *considered* is the Silicon Graphics Indigo or Elan??
>- Anyone have info on this?  Prices?  Educational discounts may
>- be applicable.  (please excuse the odd sentence construction in
>- the second paragraph).
>- 

	An Indigo would work fine provided you have the money
to get software, support (not cheap at all and you really
need it), and hardware.  What exactly are you trying to do?
(I know, video stuff with some computer-generated graphics,
but can you be more specific?)

	For example, our lab does purely animation work, and
we have three SGIs (Personal IRIS, Crimson Elan, Indigo
XS24) and an IBM RS/6000 (really worthless, avoid like
the plague).  We output single frame to a Betacam deck
through a Tektronix Avanzar board in the Personal IRIS.
The Avanzar is a really nice video board that outputs
just about any video format you can think of in pretty
high quality signals.  We're using both Pixar's Renderman
renderer and TDI Explore 3.0 (buggy for now, but incredibly
powerful when it works) for our animations.  Obviously
this is all very expensive, but if you're using it for
an educational purpose (like we are), you can really
use that to throw your weight around and get great discounts
on equipment and software.  For example, our SGI's were
about 35% off, the IBM was free (but it's still a lemon),
the Avanzar board was 50% off, the Betacam deck was
unbelievably cheap, and TDI was obscenely cheap.  The
catch is we still pay the same support fees as everyone
else, and that's over $10K a year, but it's well worth
it when your computer breaks, as the Crimson did twice,
or when you like to call your regional TDI sales rep
daily with bug reports and questions :).  Also, if you're
doing this for educational work, and since you won't
be making any profit at all, there are lots of sources
of grants that government and private industry are
willing to give.  You just have to be willing to give
a dog-and-pony show every once in a while.

	So what are you trying to do?

--Andre

-- 
Andre Yew                             andrey@tybalt.caltech.edu (131.215.48.100)
From: mikep@hpmwtd.sr.hp.com (Mike Powell)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 03:45:02 GMT
Subject: Rabbits and Helmet-Cams and the like
Organization: HP Santa Rosa Site (NMD MTA MWTD)