4]--------------------- 3]Morton's Musings 3]By Morton A. Kevelson 4]--------------------- 3]AMUSE GETS TOASTED Amuse, New York's Amiga user group, meets about twice a month at the School of Visual Arts. The SVA is close enough to mid-Manhattan that it is easy to get to via public transportation, yet far enough off the beaten path that you stand a reasonable chance of finding a place to park within a reasonable time if you choose to drive. Meetings are typically attended by a moderate group of 50 to 100 Amiga enthusiasts who barely fill a fourth of the lecture hall. The capacity crowd at the first Amuse meeting in December was indicative of the interest NewTek's Video Toaster is generating in the Amiga and video communities. The Video Toaster demonstration, which was made possible through the courtesy of Amagination, one of New York City's major Amiga dealers, was all the more intriguing by the unexpected presence of NewTek's own marketing representative, Mark Randall. Randall, who was in New York City on legitimate NewTek business, was easily persuaded to postpone his flight back to Topeka. If you can imagine watching a 75-minute product demonstration while sitting in the dark on the floor of a crowded lecture hall without getting bored and without seeing any features more than once, then you will have some idea of how much is packed into the Video Toaster. Add to this the frequent exclamations of surprise and the sporadic bursts of applause from the large number of video professionals who were scattered through the crowd and you will also realize that the Video Toaster does what it does very well indeed. A complete Video Toaster setup requires an Amiga, three composite video monitors and at least two sources of time base corrected video. One of the monitors displays the user interface to the Toaster's control software. The other two monitors show the video being manipulated and the results. The current version of the control software contains 128 video effects on four operating screens. These 128 effects are a selection of the hundreds which NewTek programmers have developed or conceived. The Toaster's control software is open ended in that NewTek will be offering special effects expansion modules which will let you add additional features. The Toaster, with its twin 24 bit frame buffers, is able to perform all of its special effects in real time with a resolution about twice that of the Amiga's. Real time in the video world means 60 video fields per second. Randall emphasized that although the Toaster only generates composite video, the signal it generates is true broadcast quality. NewTek's definition of broadcast quality is a signal that is good enough that professional broadcasters will use it. In fact, the Toaster's video bandwidth is high enough that it is comparable to Super VHS. Randall also demonstrated LightWave 3D and ToasterPaint, the 3D rendering and animation software and the 24 bit paint program that comes with the Toaster. Although ToasterPaint's user interface is virtually identical to that of DigiPaint 3, NewTek's HAM paint program, it is a completely new program under the hood. ToasterPaint creates 24 bit color images, with four times the Amiga's resolution on the Amiga, using the HAM display mode for visualization. The images are then transferred to the Toaster's frame buffers for display. LightWave 3D was designed to be a powerful yet easy to use program with an intuitive user interface. Randall demonstrated some of what LightWave3D can do by loading a predefined spaceship object and then moving the spaceship through a complex path. A light and a camera were then added to the scene, both of which were also moved through their own path which rotated about, and always faced the spaceship as it moved through its path. LightWave 3D then proceeded to create the entire sequence of in-between frames, which resulted in a wire frame 3D animation in just a few moments. Chroma keying is just about the only important effect of interest to video professionals that the Toaster cannot do. Chroma keying replaces a single background color in one video signal with the image from a second video signal. This is essentially the reverse of what happens when the Amiga's video output is genlocked to an external video signal. Chroma keying is used in the video industry to place actors, originally taped in a studio against a blue background, in front of a more exotic environment. Randall did indicate a prototype add-on board for Toaster chroma keying has been developed. A release date was not available. Randall indicated NewTek will not be developing a Toaster for the PC or Apple Macintosh computers. The hardware required to convert the video output from either of these systems to standard NTSC video that the Toaster could work with, would cost more than the Toaster itself. As it is, the Toaster is raising plenty of eyebrows at video industry trade shows. Video professionals, after seeing a demo of the Toaster and its software, inquire as to its price. Their response to the $1,595 price tag is that "it seems to be reasonable for the 3D animation software and how much is it for the frame buffer?" Upon being told that $1,595 buys both the hardware as well as the software, they frequently walk away shaking their heads in disbelief. Video professionals are accustomed to paying tens of thousands for hardware systems that do what the Toaster does. The Toaster is definitely shaking up the video industry. A number of industry publications have already announced pending features. I expect the Amiga will continue to be the personal computer of choice for the video market. 3]THE REST OF THE WORLD A standard MS/DOS platform for multimedia was proposed at the last Microsoft Corp. Multimedia Developers Conference. The base system is an 80286-based PC which could be easily upgraded, at what is considered to be a reasonable cost of about $1,500, to the point where it would be feasible to run multimedia applications. It was agreed it would be better to work with an 80386-based system, or at least one based on the 80386SX. However, it seems there are not enough 80386 systems around to encourage software development. The $1,500 upgrade cost is for the addition of a VGA card with monitor and at least two megabytes of RAM. The base system should also include a pointing device such as a mouse, at least a 30 megabyte hard drive and a CD ROM drive. Upon due consideration of the above, I came to the conclusion that a one megabyte Amiga 500P with a second floppy disk drive meets all requirements for a multimedia base system as envisioned at the Multimedia Developers Conference. What all this really signifies is the Amiga succeeded in achieving five years ago via technological superiority and finesse, what the rest of the world is on the verge of accomplishing via brute force. The cost of memory and microprocessor power, which has dropped dramatically in the past year, is making an approximation of multimedia possible on the MS/DOS systems. For now the 80386SX based systems are being sold for well under $2,000. This price includes the computer with two megabytes of RAM, a 40 megabyte hard drive, a 3 1/2 inch high density floppy, VGA graphics, a VGA monitor, Microsoft Windows 3.0 and a mouse. Although such a system still does not have the mulitasking and multimedia capabilities of a similarly priced and configured Amiga 2000, most potential buyers will easily overlook the Amiga in favor of compatibility with the established norm. Add to this the fact the 256 color VGA graphics is being put to good use by many game manufacturers and it seems the Amiga is facing a real threat. At the moment, the Amiga 500, at less than $1,000 for a fully configured system, still holds the price advantage as the choice for a home machine. However, as the prices for memory and microprocessor power continue to drop, the MS/DOS systems will seem to be increasingly competitive. Commodore best do some serious thinking about improving the price and performance of the Amiga before it is too late. 3]QUARTERBACK TOOLS Remember Quarterback Tools? I talked about it in the last issue. It seems the version I first received had some serious problems with several hard disk interfaces including Commodore's 2090/2090A, Supra's Wordsync, Interactive Video System's Trumpcard and Trumpcard Professional and the Microbotics Hardframe. I also discovered a flaw which caused Quarterback Tools to crash the system while attempting to recover a corrupted file. If you decided to buy Quarterback Tools based on my previous comments, there is no need to fret. Just two days before I received my copy of the January 1991 JUMPDISK, I received version 1.3C of Quarterback Tools. This update fixes all of these problems and several others. All remains tranquil as the updates flow like a river. 3]68040 BLUES Has your 50 megahertz, 68030-based, accelerated Amiga seemed a little sluggish lately? Have you been quietly pining away while you wait for those 68040-based accelerators to appear on the market? Well your wait may soon be over. Motorola has begun shipping production quantities of the 68040 in late November. Prices are still a bit steep, a healthy $595 per chip if you buy only 1000 at a time. However, you can expect this to come down as production catches up to demand by the second half of 1991. All this comes as good news to the makers of the 68030-based NeXT computer, which has been criticized as being to slow. 3]HARD DRIVE ATTRACTIONS Looks like movies are becoming the way to prove just how fast your hard drive interface really is. The last box office hit to be released on hard drive was a three-minute clip from "Predator" staring Arnold you-know-who. This was showing in the ICD booth, at the World of Commodore Amiga, running at 24 frames per second with stereo sound running off a WD SC8320 hard drive on an Amiga 2000 fitted with a GVP A3001 Accelerator and an ICD AdSCSI 2000 Host Adaptor. The film could be speeded and slowed under joystick control over a range of 1/16th normal speed to 8 times normal speed. Each 49338-byte HAM frame included 1290 bytes of stereo sound. Total data was 320 megabytes. This performance represented a sustained data rate of 1,188,864 bytes per second. While I do not intend to belittle this achievement, it seems this sort of thing has already been going on for some time now. Just look at laser video disc players, which are designed to play real time video at 30 frames per second with full stereo sound and an hour of video on single disc. The key to this sort of activity on a hard drive is a combination of high data transfer speeds, a large memory buffer and a high capacity hard drive. Hard drives rotate at about 3600 revolutions per minute or about 60 times per second. This is just about the video field rate. If the hard drive has enough capacity to store several video fields on each track and if the system can read and buffer an entire track in a single revolution of the hard disk's platter, then your up and running. Of course the data on the hard drive must also be carefully organized so the read heads to not have to change tracks in the middle of a video frame. 3]I JUST GOT A BABY! Actually, I just got Micro-Systems Software's Baby! The Writer's Tool, which I will call Baby! for the remainder of this segment. Baby! is a stand- alone electronic dictionary and thesaurus that works on any Amiga with 512 kilobytes of RAM and a hard drive. Diapers are not required. Baby! is delivered on three floppy disks with a pink manual printed with blue ink. The dictionary has 80,000 words with 23,000 root words. The thesaurus has 1.4 million cross references. The dictionary and thesaurus utilize the Proximity/ Merriam-Webster, Inc. Linguibase and Thesaurus. Baby! utilizes the same thesaurus which is supplied with the excellence! word processor from the same company. The thesaurus is able to provide synonyms and antonyms as well as words which are related, comparative, and contrasting to the selected word; a total of five categories. Although not intended as a spell checker, the dictionary will offer a list of alternatives for words that it cannot find. The dictionary can also be used for crossword suggestions by entering the unknown word with question marks as a filler for the missing characters. If your word processor uses the Amiga's clipboard.device as its cut and paste buffer, then it can communicate with Baby! Baby! lets you copy its dictionary definitions one word at a time to the clipboard.device. However, it will not let you copy an entire definition at once as this would be a copyright violation. The program's display options can be customized by adding a variety of TOOLTYPES to its Workbench icon. These options include the choice of output font as well as its foreground and background Workbench colors. Interestingly enough, the display font I liked the best was the one that was supplied with Electric Thesaurus from Softwood, Inc. that I talked about last month. Baby! can also be set to open on another application's custom display screen instead of the Workbench screen. Baby! is also able to guess words phonetically. It successfully determined that 'phrogue' was frogs; actually I was looking for the singular, but I will give it credit for this one. Baby! is definitely a case of one upmanship. It always puzzles me how competitive products can be released to the public with such temporal proximity. Now what's that I hear about a major Amiga word processor developer going in for fertility treatments? I'M OPEN TO FEEDBACK If you have any comments or suggestions regarding this column, or if you have some particular topic you would like to discuss, then feel free to drop me a note. I normally do not respond directly to individual requests, however, I will promise to read everything you submit. My address follows: Morton Kevelson P.O. Box 290260-0005 Homecrest Station Brooklyn, NY 11229-0005 DEVELOPERS MENTIONED NewTek, Inc. 215 East 8th Street Topeka, KS 66603 913-354-1146 800-843-8934 ICD 1220 Rock St. Rockford, IL 61101 815-968-2228 Central Coast Software 424 Vista Avenue Golden, CO 80401 303-526-1030 Micro-Systems Software, Inc. 12798 W. Forest Hills Boulevard, Suite 202 West Palm Beach, Florida 33414-9982 407-790-0772 SoftWood, Inc. P.O. Box 51209 Phoenix, Arizona 85076 800-247-8314