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3]LIVE! Review
By Emily Quizenberry
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     Live! Video Frame Grabber, A-Squared Distributions, Inc., $295

     The Amiga was still in its infancy when word spread of a wondrous
hardware-software tool that would grab video images in real time and store
them as IFF-format pictures files.
     The possibilities were far-ranging.
     Demo screens made the rounds. JUMPDISK published some Live! art as
early as October 1986.
     It took a long time for Live! to actually reach the Amiga user.
     Live! now exists. It works simply, efficiently and marvelously.
     JUMPDISK purchased a Live! system at AmiEXPO LA and lent it to me for
"three days max" for purposes of this review. I unrepentantly kept it for
two weeks, combining it with both color and black-and-white video cameras,
and a four-head VCR. The results have pleased me. Some of the screens I
produced are shown via the ShowSay script in this issue. The narration tells
which.
     Down to business:
     Live is hardware housed in plastic and measuring 12 by 4 by 1.5 inches.
It attaches to the expansion port on the right side of the Amiga 1000. Live!
is also a bootable, copyable disk that contains the easily learned, mouse-
driven system.
     When the hardware module is plugged into the Amiga, its front reveals
two ports -- video in and video out.
     My first experiment was with a VCR and recorded tapes. Required but not
included with Live! is a cable with standard RCA jacks at either end. Such a
cable is inexpensive and available at such stores as Radio Shack.
     Plug one end of the cable in the VCR's video out and the other end in
the video in port on the front of the Live! module.
     Boot the Live! disk, double-click the Live! program icon, turn on the
VCR, and within a matter of seconds you're watching a black-and-white,
rather electric looking digitized image on the monitor screen.
     Live! will grab an image any time you select SAVE from a pulldown menu.
It then allows you to name the disk file to which the image will be saved,
and stores it there. It will just as easily grab a freeze frame image. Since
my VCR has that capability, I found it useful to click through a given
sequence until I settled on the exact frame I wanted.
     In black-and-white mode and color you can "colorize" or change the
image with mouse tinting. When this is chosen, mousing up and down changes
color intensity, left to right adjusts hue, and up and down with the ALT
button changes saturation. There are also several built-in color palettes
that can be assigned to black-and-white images.
     Switching from black and white to color is as simple as choosing color
from a pulldown menu. 
     Thee default color mode tends to produce a rather fruity range of
colors, wherein facial shadows are light purple, highlights bright white,
and features often blotchy red. While it seems unlikely one would ever
duplicate the delicate colors of a good video signal, Live! does allow for
readjusting colors to personal preference.
     In default, Live! runs at fast speed, refreshing the screen quickly
enough to produce good animation on its screen at 15 frames a second. It
produces what's known as "jaggies," serrated lines created by rather coarse
patterns of pixels. A "smooth images" selector does just that, though at the
expense of a few frames per second. This was of no consequence when I was
working with static images or frozen frames.
     In practical use, I was able to digitize an image off video -- either
real time TV or VCR -- save it to a disk file, take that disk to a nearby
second Amiga with DeluxePaint already loaded, and have the image up on
screen for modifications within a minute.
     My second use of Live! was with a black-and-white video camera, the
same that I use with DigiView. I took several video portraits of long-
suffering friends and quickly turned them into colorful aliens by tinting
with Live!
     The final test was real time digitizing with a camcorder rented for
the occasion. I found the images better than recorded material, but still
short of TV quality.
     Did I mention HAM, the hold-and-modify mode? Live! uses it for a
theoretical 4,096 screen colors at once. A "fast HAM" mode lets you see the
moving image at a rate that's fast enough regard it as animated. The HAM
mode has two features I regard highly -- smooth and sharpen. Both improve
the image significantly.
     In addition to Live!'s SAVE function, it has a CAPTURE feature that
will save several incoming frames in sequence. These are stored in memory,
to start, but a sequence can then be sent to disk and replayed by a public
domain program called Riff, which is on the Live! disk. Unfortunately,
the number of sequential frames you can capture depends on the amount of
memory your Amiga has. With 512K you can only store four frames, though with
2.5 megabytes you can put 55 frames or about 3.6 seconds worth into memory.
My problem with this is my Amega memory expansion unit. It must be removed
for Live! to plug in, and that reduces my Amiga from a whole to half a meg.
     I should also note the capture mode used for Riff stores pictures in a
compressed format not accessible by IFF paint programs.
     The brief manual is clear, to the point and often humorous. Some of the
humor is a bit precious, but that's just the opinion of the termagant in me.
     You could use Live! to create anything from video family albums to true
desktop presentations and professional TV effects. You can also have a lot
of fun with it.
     One last thing need be covered. The main reason I wanted to lay my
hands on Live! was to determine if I would acquire it as a replacement for
DigiView, NewTek's digitizer which I have been using for 1 1/2 years with
satisfaction. This is the stackup:
     Live! is simpler to use than DigiView. No filters to spin.
     Both require a video source, though DigiView will produce good color
with an inexpensive B&W camera.
     Live! is much faster than DigiView. Instant grab is just that with
Live!, whereas DigiView requires three passes, one for red, green and blue
filters.
     Both systems produce IFF art which can be modified by DeluxePaint,
Aegis Images and other paint programs.
     Don't try to change my mind. When JUMPDISK sends my loot for writing
this review, I'm going to apply it to the purchase of Live!.

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