STILLSTORE V1.9 Copyright 1990 by Richard Bourne and Richard Murray Documentation by Richard Bourne Compiled with The Director by the Right Answers Group. Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) 1301 16th Avenue NW Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2M OL4 StillStore is a program designed for freelance, corporate and broadcast television. It loads and displays IFF images of any resolution interchangeably from a list file or as inputted directly. The user may easily skip forward or backward one or more pictures in the list. A "generic" display is always just a few seconds away. The program can be used "on air" with no concern that a pull-down menu will suddenly appear in the viewable area. The program also provides for a precise "cue" for changing windows/screens. While the major purpose is to load "news windows" of 1/4 screen size, StillStore can also handle full-sized and overscanned images. Therefore provision is made to work either from a lower-screen menu (news window mode) or via voice prompts using Amiga speech! Other features include three slide show modes, and a screen positioning feature. THIS DOCUMENTATION IS IN TWO PARTS: I. Specific instructions for StillStore. II. A general description of still store usage, and the broadcast environment in which StillStore evolved. I. STILLSTORE INSTRUCTIONS A. INSTALLATION: Be sure to install erase.font within your "fonts" directory. You will also have to make a subdirectory called "erase", and copy the file on this disk named "8" to it. If you would prefer not to do this, you must assign fonts: to the directory you install "erase" and "erase.font" in for the program to work! You also must have "black", "N0000" and "HRWindows" in the same directory with StillStore. Projector may either be in the same directory or in your default "c" (command) directory. The "voice" mode requires the AmigaDos "say" command to be available. StillStore looks for it in Sys:Utilities, and copies it to RAM: for faster access. B. PROCEDURES: 1. In a typical news production session, Broadcast News reporters prepare Amiga order forms requesting that particular shots from their ENG stories be digitized as an "elements" (window displays). As an alternative, they may select from our library of over 700 images already prepared for this purpose, some of which are very "generic" (environment, the courts, fire, disaster, etc.) 2. Our graphics "majors" (5 students of a class of 30) are shifted to the Chyron/Amiga position in rotation. The person on duty grabs the images using FG software and the FrameGrabber. We set up the screen format to 640 x 400, dithered for crisp images with the smoothest color blending, and specify 1/4 screen size. The resulting pictures are almost perfectly-sized for our window, needing only slight trimming! All raw images are saved onto the hard drive. 3. Now we quit FG and run Deluxe Paint III in 640 x 400 16-color mode. We jump to the "Scratch" screen and load "HRWindows". This is a set of white borders on a black background, positioned exactly where we want our windows to appear, with sports graphics framed in left screen, and news graphics in right screen! The white frame is a stencil, so that it will not be affected when a brush is stamped on it. (A copy of hrwindows is included on this disk). 4. Next, we load a framegrabbed image on screen 1. We pick it up as a brush, jump to the Scratch screen, and paste it within the appropriate window of HRWindows. A stencil turned on for color 1 ensures that we don't damage the window borders while stamping a picture in place. We use a filled rectangle and the right mouse button as an eraser to wipe away anything which spills beyond the frame. 5. The Amiga cue sheet book contains a set of cue sheets for each "Format Disk" for news, sports and weather. We look for the next available number (eg N0599), and the disk it should be recorded on, then save it with that filename. At the same time we note on the cue sheet the number, picture description, creator's name and date. 6. The format disks each contain six directories, labelled simply "A" to "F". Each directory holds six pictures. 7. Once all pictures specified on the graphics order form are found or created, we use CLIMate to transfer them into the proper directory on the hard drive, so that we can load them speedily during the live production. 8. We decided when we began our picture database that each picture would be given a number and name, such as "N0077- AttackHelicopter". The hyphen and name is a safeguard against misprinted numbers. However, we still have to strip the hyphen and name so that we can use just the first five characters as the load name! 9. Finally, we may use a text editor to prepare a file called "piclist", which is a list of all the pictures you wish to use within a production. If you don't prepare such a list, you can still use StillStore, but the list commands will not function. 10. Just prior to rehearsal, we run StillStore. The way to do this is to "cd" to the directory in which the StillStore files are located. Then type: Projector StillStore.film [Return] 11. Once StillStore (.film) is running, you'll see a selection of menus at the bottom of the screen. Each choice requires a one-letter shortcut. At any time, you may simply type a five-character (one letter, four digits) picture identifier and press RETURN. Even fairly detailed hi-res images load in about 3 seconds. You get a "[picname] loading" and "[picname] waiting" prompt. Another RETURN displays the picture precisely when you wish it, or when you are "cued". [F][RETURN] (FORWARD) will display the name of the first picture from "piclist" the first time you push it. Each subsequent time you enter [F][RETURN] you'll get the next picture in "piclist". A second RETURN confirms your choice as though you had typed the name, and the picture will load! An error message will display if you try to go past the end of the list. [B][RETURN] (BACKWARD) will step backward through the list and display the name of a picture. Pressing RETURN again will load the picture, or you can continue to press F-Return as many times as you wish. You'll get an error message if you try to back up before picture 1 in "piclist". [R][RETURN] (RESET) will reset you to the start of "piclist", so that the FORWARD command will give you picture 1. [V][RETURN] (VOICE) will turn off all screen menus, and prompt you entirely with Amiga speech. Due to DMA problems in hi-res and overscan, the speech may suffer from a severe sore throat at times, but you can learn to understand it. A set of mini- earphones can preserve the sanity of your control room crew. Voice would be preferable when you wish to display full-screen pictures with no menu overprinting them. Remember, Voice mode will not work unless the "say" command is in Sys:utilities when you start StillStore. [S][RETURN] (SCREEN MENUS) will disable speech and turn on the screen menus. [P][RETURN] (POSITION) will allow you to use your cursor keys to position screens or windows. It is very useful for various sizes of overscan, which will require re-centering. Press Escape when you are done. [T][RETURN] (TOGGLE) will swap between the normal screen position and the one you have set up with the POSITION command. [G][RETURN] (GENERIC) will copy a standard news/sports logo from s fast ram buffer and await a press of RETURN to display it. Very handy when you suddenly can't find a custom picture, or a late story breaks. You will not lose your place in the "piclist". [Q][QUIT] (QUIT) is the one command which never requires documentation! C: BUGS AND PROBLEMS: 1. In order to handle very large hi-res overscan pictures, I limited the number of buffers to two, in chip memory. Unfortunately, as a series of pictures are loaded in, memory is used and reclaimed, with the usual fragmentation. This is aggravated by intermixing overscanned with regular pictures, or worse, by mixing various reolutions. Eventually, rather than crash, Director/Projector will abort to WorkBench or CLI. The only cure I can see is a modification in new versions of these two programs which would set aside a fixed amount of memory for each buffer, larger than the maximum size of picture to be loaded. This memory would be re-used again and again, and never freed until you quit the program. 2. Director/Projector are very good at cleaning up as they quit. However, some memory fragmentation always remains. Our operators like to do a reboot sometime within 10 minutes of showtime, to avoid cumulative problems with this annoyance. 3. I had some difficulty getting keyboard input into StillStore without having it type on the screen. The INCLI command didn't seem to work for me, so I invented a solution: "erase.font", the font that isn't! Every character is a blank, so you can type an input in the Voice mode and it won't appear on screen! 3. The problem with garbled speech has already been mentioned. I guess it is unavoidable in hi-res due to DMA interference. Amazingly enough, it sometimes disappears in certain overscan sizes, such as 674 x 444! 4. Otherwise, the program is quite friendly, and will advise you if it can't find a file. I have disabled mouse ABORT, so that the Q command is the only way out. II. GENERAL DESCRIPTION A. INTRODUCTION: In broadcast jargon, a "still store" is a device capable of storing video images on magnetic or optical media, and recalling them in sequences or randomly. Examples of such units would be the Abekas A42, Leitch Still File or Ampex ESS-3. These units start at prices many times higher than a lavishly-equipped Amiga system. In fairness, however, they generally digitize in at least 8-bit color (256 colors from 16.7 million) and some handle 24-bit color (16.7 million colors, ALL on-screen at once!) Most are capable of digitizing and storing up to several hundred frames per hard drive (they can also store twice as many single fields, but with only half the vertical detail of a frame). Other features range from removable hard media and tape streaming to multi-image browse capability, digital resizing, reshaping and motion effects. At SAIT, where 150 students study broadcast production in the Cinema, Television, Stage and Radio Program, the Amiga has become the machine of choice for character generation, digital effects, animation and still storage. STILLSTORE's beta version was written by Richard Murray, a second-year TV student, in 1988. It was an instant hit on "Newsfile", a half-hour weekly show produced for local cable by TV and Broadcast News majors. Stillstore is a program written in "The Director", a BASIC- like high-level compiled language marketed by the Right Answers group. The Director has some tremendously powerful graphics and sound capabilities, and yet is as easy to use as BASIC. Some, including myself, would argue that it has most of the power left out of AmigaBasic, particularly in IFF picture, font and sound loading and displaying. The Right Answers group have authorized free distribution of "The Projector", which can play back compiled programs. This disk therefore contains StillStore.Film, the compiled version, and "The Projector" which allows program execution. These may be freely distributed and used as long as the preamble accompanies the materials. The scripted program is available from me for a shareware fee of $20.00, and your written agreement to credit the original authors in any revisions, as well as to provide me with a sample of such updates. The disk also contains a generous number of IFF windows which have been used on "NewsFile" news and sports stories, and a few sample weathermaps as well. B. WHY "STILLSTORE"?: Some people in the Amiga community have suggested that useful commercial software already exists for storing and displaying images, in such programs as L!C!A!, TVShow, Aegis VideoTitler SEG and others. I have tested them all, and find that none of them allow RANDOM ACCESS to pictures without disturbing the screen display via a pull-down menu. Many are quite effective at displaying sequences, however, and I encourage commercial software developers to incorporate the features of StillStore either in new versions of existing slideshow software or in entirely new products. Potential users of StillStore would include cable companies, broadcast training programs, corporate video departments, production houses, and smaller-market broadcast stations. When we see 8-bit and higher-quality video boards for Amy, the appeal will be that much greater, though of course we will then require a software revision to use them. C. HARDWARE CONFIGURATION: The main Amiga system at SAIT consists of an Amiga 2000 with 2090A card and 40 meg Seagate hard drive, a 2 meg memory expansion (total memory, 3 megs.), a Magni 4004 genlock (2 internal cards plus external remote control unit), and a Progressive Peripherals Framegrabber. The Amiga sits beside a Chyron RGU character generator on the production desk in our main control room. The Magni genlock is fed a black burst signal from a Leitch slave sync generator, so that the color output of the Magni will arrive in time and phase at a video input which feeds all five busses (selection rows) on our Central Dynamics CD-480-5 switcher. We can therefore wipe or fade to the Amiga signal full- screen, or set up a "Split Screen Window" to display Amiga images beside a news or sports anchorperson. Everything can be previewed before we put it "on air". The Amiga also occupies an input on "Key 2", where we can "externally key" logos and animations over background video. Unlike desktop video, wherein you pass video through the genlock and it synchronizes Amiga video and overlays it (downstream keying), we take TWO Amiga signals into our switcher and let it do the keying. The Magni has a "key out" signal, which is just a black & white video "silhouette" of all non-color-0 Amiga colors. The white areas trigger the keyer in our switcher to display the MAGNI's color video ONLY in the areas that aren't color 0. We can also switch the Magni to send a key signal derived from the BRIGHTNESS of the Amiga's colors, but this is not used much except with Video Effects 3D, which seems to totally confuse the Magni about what is color 0!. Using a switcher to do the keying allows us to fade or WIPE Amiga keyed logos onto background video, or to use the switcher's key border generator to instantly achieve black, white or colored outline or drop-shadowed borders on Amiga text. There are many sources for background video to be used with the Amiga ... including two Sony BVH 2000 1" Type C machines, and a Sony 5850 U-Matic. All VTRs are "time-base corrected", meaning that they are perfectly timed with other signals at the switcher, and do not suffer from any "jitters". We also use three studio cameras, a Chyron RGU for simple titling and backgrounds, a frame synchronizer which can freeze one frame of video, and a background color generator which can provide a full screen of any imaginable video color. Having multiple VTR's allows us to "layer" Amiga images, to achieve more colors in the final screen. This is done by recording an Amiga background picture, then playing it back through the switcher and keying another Amiga element. The multi-generation quality of 1" broadcast tape allows us up to half-a-dozen overlays if necessary. The input to the Framegrabber is fed from a routing switcher, so that we can instantly select any source for digitizing. All Amiga input and output signals are also available on our video and audio patch bays. D. SUPPORTING SOFTWARE: The software workhorses for all of our production graphics are CLIMate, a mouse operated "DOS helper" which helps us keep our graphics disks in order; Deluxe Paint III, our paint system of choice, and a very fast creator of animations as well; FrameGrabber "FG" software, which controls the capturing of images, and StillStore, which calls the stills up for airing as required. We have many other useful programs which are not quite as central to regular production, including both Pro Video Gold and Broadcast Titler for character generation; Sculpt Animate 4D for 3D animation/rendering; Pixmate, for recoloring, special effects and changing screen formats of images; and Video Effects 3D for the smoothest ADO-style effects we have found.