From: athomson@otago.ac.nz (Alastair Thomson)
Newsgroups: nz.comp
Subject: Re: DO DA CorubaREAD/NEW
Date: 21 Dec 92 09:24:56 +1300
Organization: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

In article <1992Dec19.033035.439@otago.ac.nz>, glurp@otago.ac.nz writes:
> To Alastair; There are a lot more cheap and nice (but slow) 3d rendering
> packages out on the amiga now, but the two nice fast packages are still
> Calagari at US$2000 and LightWave3D at $US2000 (hey you get a free video
> toaster if you want to do NTSC included in that price :)
> An Amiga 4000 with 64meg of memory can probably do quite a few 
> strawberries/week.

Thanks for some real info about things, however what I say still stands. I
looked carefully at what I could get on an Amiga, and price/performance wise a
PC running TOPAS and 3D Studio is better. Sure the packages I saw did some
nice things, however none of them really provided all I need for the kind of
animation I do, notably rotoscoping at full quality.

> 
> For noncompressed video:
> I seem to recall that to do realtime 50 fields per second 24 bit animation
> at reasonable resolution you need >40 megabytes per second data transfer
> rate to display ram, something that very few workstations, and NO personal
> computer can do.
> 

You seem to have missed the point, I am not talking about real time
uncompressed video, only horribly expensive equipment can do that. I am talking
about single frame edited stuff, same as 99% of the world does.

> Back to the Amiga:
> (I'd rather an HP755 but the Amiga was slightly cheaper) The Amiga's main
> claim to fame for video related work, seems to be that it has a lot of
> cheap, high quality (low end professional) video hardware. In the US you
> have the Newtek Video Toaster, which is a complete 24bit framestore, 4
> input video switcher, DVE generator, genlock, 3D rendering 'workstation'
> that only requires the addition of an Amiga 2000, a couple of Time Base
> Correctors, and a VTR or 3 to set up a minimalist editing studio.

Quite correct, however there is a world of difference between low end
professional and true broadcast quality. e.g. S-VHS, Hi-Band U-Matic and Hi8
are all 'low end professional', but they just can't cut it with true pro video
formats e.g. Beta SP, MII, C-format 1", D1/2/3 etc/

> 
> In the rest of the world you have the OpalVision card from Australia which
> when you snap on the DVE chip, genlock, framegrabber, and dual input
> switcher modules does the same thing more or less. You don't get any 3D
> rendering software for this though.

And once again the quality is not true professional, but never mind.

> 
> Actually I would quite like to put an OpalVision board, the DMI compression
> board, Caligari Broadcast 2.0, a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive, a 64megabyte 
> Zorro III (love that name) ram board, and a 16 bit audio card from SunRise
> industries in an Amiga 4000 and see how that worked as a cheap
> animation/editing system. Cost is about US$15000 without VTR.

Sorry, but this is still less functional than the equiv. PC system.

Sure the Amiga can do a lot, but it just doesn't quite make it in the
professional market. Maybe in a year or so (as happened to both the PC and Mac)


I am not in any way saying that the Amiga is not *capable* of doing good
animation. It is, but the software just isn;t quiter there yet. The real point
of all this discussion started out as "who did the DO DA Coruba" animation. To
make a point, I don't believe that it was done on an Amiga, or a PC, or a Mac,
the complexity of it is just too high - too many polygons, too many
environment/reflection maps. On anything but a workstation, it would just take
too long. My guess from its look is that it was produced using Alias, probablt
modelled on an SGI machine, possibly rendered on something else. I will try to
confirm the guess today.

-- 
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                                    |
Alastair Thomson,                   | Phone +64-3-479-8347
University of Otago,                | Fax   +64-3-479-8529
Department of Computer Science,     | e-mail athomson@otago.ac.nz
P.O. Box 56                         |
Dunedin                             |
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