Morph Plus  Bob Downs, Jan '93  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ Morphing.... "a sequence of phonemes constituting a minimal unit of grammar or syntax and as such a representation, member, or contextual varient of a morpheme in a specific environment". Only kidding. This was the only listing that I could find for morphing in all of my dictionaries! Metamorphosis on the other hand is listed as "to transform in form or nature". In the real digital world morphing is the term given to the transition of two or more images, where one image evolves into another. The best known example of this was the fairly recent Michael Jackson videos. These days the technique is very common in television advertising and movies. As Amiga owners and with the appropriate hardware (24 Bit graphics card and high quality genlock) we can produce the same quality to video at a fraction of the cost. REQUIREMENTS * Version 2.0 Workbench or greater * A hard drive. * In excess of 4 megabytes of memory. * An accelerated Amiga is highly recomended! Morph Plus has the following features... * Video style effects on static images. * Fully programmable using the ARexx language. * The ability to morph, twirl, rotate, ripple, wave, spherize and perspective scale. On first sight the packaging for this product gives the impression that it is something different from previous software released by this company. ASDG, an American company have been producing powerful software for the Amiga since it was first released, most notably Art Dept Pro. This product, Morph Plus, is their most ambitious release to date. Inside the packaging there is a hard cover ringbound manual, three disks, a USA registration card and some promotional material for ASDG's other products. These are listed straight from the brochure at the end of this review. The supplied disks are formatted as FFS and consequently require Workbench 2.0 or later. For the small amount of extra disk space that this provides I really can't see the point in alienating the multitude of Workbench 1.3 owners. It makes far more sense to compress the data as most other software companies are doing these days. On the other side of the coin ASDG have used the Commodore installer and this works very well making installation very simple. There are two versions of the program provided. The first is for standard 68000 based units and a version for accelerated models. "The Morph Plus package is compatible with the entire family of Amiga computers. These include the A500, A600, A1000, A2000, A2500, A2500/30, A3000, A3000T and the A4000 Amiga computers". All programs in the Morph Plus package require at least kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and a hard drive to run. For A500, A600, A1000 and A2000 machines, an accelerator is highly recommended. If you will be using Art Department Professional with Morph Plus' modules, then you must have at least ADPro version 2.1.0 or higher". So goes the manual! This product will run on 1 megabyte of memory according to the manual but don't expect to do anything serious if this is all the memory you have. To quote from the manual "...we suggest a minimum of four megabytes of expansion memory in order to get any substantial work accomplished. Also if you use the {high quality} features found in many parts of the program, more memory will be required"...unquote. The very nature of this kind of image processing program requires large amounts of memory. For serious work expect to need 8 megabytes plus. With this amount of memory you should be able to use all the features of this product. Morph Plus (and rightly so) performs all image processing in 24 Bit. A 640 x 512 image will require in excess of 1 megabyte of contiguous memory. In order to morph, at least two images are required. Add the memory required for work space by the program and you can see why this kind of image manipulation is so memory intensive. The Morph Plus program is split up into three separate segments; MORPH PLUS, MORPH and FRED. The main program, MORPH PLUS has the familiar ADPro look and is used for general image manipulation. It would have been more aptly named as ADPro2, or anything else for that matter to separate it from the Morph component of the package. It is so much like ADPro that I have ported all the loaders/savers and operators that I use into it, leaving me with one less program on the hard drive. MORPH is used for morphing (surprise surprise) and requires Morph Plus to be running in the background. "FRED" allows batch processing of a sequence of images. It also requires Morph Plus to be running in the background. I haven't tried to use this module as yet. I would have liked to have been able to comment on it here but because of the capabilities and power that this promises, I can see a lot of time being required to come to grips with it. I am not aware of any other software currently available that has this capability. Morph Plus has a very useful magnify capability that provides infinite control for setting control points. It also takes a different approach to specifying these points using connected single line vectors that can be moved around separately. Other similar software uses a grid system that is easier to use but does not produce the same high quality result as Morph Plus. Control points are used in products of this nature to indicate to the program the Start and End points. If correctly situated they will "drag" rather than fade that small area of the image to a new position giving a true morph effect. It is in this area that Morph Plus excells. Twirl, rotate, wave, ripple, spherize and perspective scale work wonderfully well, interpolating each pixel to produce a perfect result.  The Manual The manual provided is poor. There are sections missing in the tutorials for example. There is no excuse for sloppy work of this nature, more so as the manual is essential reading for this package, particularly when using the advanced features. ADPro owners will find the new single image manipulation modes to be straightforward enough. At the time of writing this product was retailing at around $A330. CONCLUSIONS This product is vastly different to all the other morphing programs available at the time of writing (Cinemorph/ImageFX, Image Master and Visionaire) offering unprecedented power and infinite control when morphing. ASDG claim up to 250% speed advantages over other similar products. In real terms, comparing apples with apples (the finished result, similar quality) I didn't notice any significant speed advantages between any of them. The manual is a must read because of the complexity of the program and also because of the confusing layout of the software, which is very unforgiving. If you get it wrong the system will either "crash" or at best you will have to start all over again. For the best possible RESULTS using available software you can't do better than this package. I would have liked to have seen more effort put into finishing the software and the manual prior to its release. _______________________________________________________ Soap Box I have access to IBM and Macintosh systems and have owned an Amiga from day one. I look at the high quality bullet proof products on these "other" systems with envy. Easy to use, powerful and bug free. If I was a computer novice in the market for a system TODAY and did my homework the Amiga would be at the bottom of the list unless I specifically needed a system for video and graphics. I'm not knocking the Amiga. What infuriates me is third party developers not taking the Amiga seriously enough to put a bit of extra EFFORT and expense into their products to finish them off properly. The majority of developers seem to have the attitude that sloppy work will sell. We buy it so I guess it does! Logic would seem to indicate that if high quality productivity products were available for the best computer made the aforementioned novice would buy it and the developers in turn would sell more of their wares. Wake up developers, what you could get by with in 1986 isn't in the race in the 90's. There are developers producing high quality products on two other systems in the market place these days. Take a look as a novice would!  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[