From: boberg@lysator.liu.se (Stefan Boberg)
Subject: Re: Amiga and Quicktime
Organization: Lysator Academic Computer Society, Linkoping University, Sweden
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 18:05:04 GMT

barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:

>In article <1bknfdINNeu9@gap.caltech.edu> jsurace@cco.caltech.edu (Jason A. Surace) writes:
>>barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
>>>   Try taking an Amiga ANIM, play it in a 320x200 window on a
>>>1280x512 screen, and then resize the windowto a bizarre shape 
>>>(160x300, for instance).  Does the animation automatically resize
>>>while it is playing?  This would assume that you found a way to
>>>play ANIMs in a window in the first place, which no ANIM player 
>>>will do.

  ... because it's of no use. MultiView will support viewing ANIM's in a window
(or part of window for that matter) as soon as someone writes a datatype for 
it. Scaling Amiga ANIMS is not any more difficult than scaling QuickTime ANIMs,
but it's so useless that nobody has seen any point in making such an ANIM
player.

>> Except for one thing: I'll admit, it may be neat to be able to rescale
>>on the fly, and all that stuff, but is that anything more than a gimmick?
>> <...>
>   For now, even Apple developers have admitted that QuickTime is a gimmick,
>for now.  This is again a case of Apple thinking long-term.  QuickTime 
>animations are all rendered at a higher resolution than Amiga ANIMs, and
>all seem to be 24-bit.  As faster Macintosh systems are released, playback of
>the existing animations will improve.

>   For example, let's say Apple releases Macintoshes two years from now that
>are four times faster than the fastest Macs today, and Commodore also 
>releases Amigas two years from now that are four times faster than the A4000. 
>Would the playback of existing ANIMs improve on the new Amigas?  No.

  You're wrong (again) Marc. Animation speed will always improve with faster 
Amigas.

>  The existing ANIMs are hard-coded to 320x200 or 320x400 32-color 
>graphics, and better hardware will not improve the existing animations. 
>However, on the faster Macintosh, the playback existing QuickTime animations 
>will improve dramatically.  

  QuickTime animations are no different from Amiga ANIMs in this respect.
QuickTime is not able to add information that is not stored in the animation
file. If the source animation was 300*100 you will still only have 300*100 
unique pixels regardless what size you scale the images to. Period. 

  BTW, The QuickTime ANIMs that I have seen so far were only some 80*80 
pixels large (qualified estimate), and the reason for it is that 
decompression would be even slower with more detailed images since JPEG-
type decompression is very expensive CPU-power-wise.

>Eventually, Macintoshes will be released that 
>will be able  to play existing QuickTime animations at 60 fps on the full 
>screen, at very high resolutions, in full 24-bit TrueColor.  When this 
>happens, the animations will become truly useful.

  Eventually, we will have battery-driven cars that are useful. In the
meantime most people will choose to use gasoline-driven cars because
the current battery-driven cars aren't useful.

>>(I can't believe I'm trying to argue with Marc Barrett)

>   Yes, you must be crazy to argue with a Master Debater such as me! :-) :-)
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  More like: "A master of fact distortion" ... The guy who ignores all facts
that don't support his point of view and invents new facts to support it.

>| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
-- 
Stefan Boberg - AP & EE student at Linkoping Institute of Technology, Sweden
 Author of LhA, ArjA and LhArcA. Co-author of Alien Breed, Project X ...
  EMail: boberg@lysator.liu.se, lha@augs.se           FIDO: 2:204/404.7
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics