FAQ


Lights, camera, action! Everything you needed to know about
animation on the Amiga is here, frame by frame.



Q. I love creating animations on my Amiga with Deluxe Paint,
but I keep running out of memory. What can I do?

A. First of all, keep the total number of colours in your
animation to a minimum. If you can, keep to 16 or less. If
you are dealing with images with lots of colours -- maybe
ray traced or digitised use HAM mode. Dithering (using
special pixel patterns to give the illusion of more colours)
uses memory.

Use the lowest resolution screen mode you can get away with.
With HAM mode it is suprising how good low resolution PAL
appears. If you are going to record your animation, use a
video overscan mode. Interlaced modes record well to tape,
but doubles the amount of memory required.

Secondly, buy more memory. If you have an A1200, you should
fill your trapdoor with as much RAM as possible: a total of
6Mb is a minimum useful amount.

Keep movement to a minimum. Remember that it is the
differences between successive frames which is stored: two
identical frames one after the other will only require
enough memory for the first frame, the second will
effectively be "free".

If using a paint program for creating your animation,
remember that the Amiga will also need to keep the paint
program itself in memory. 



Q. Can I render animations with Imagine or Real3D?
A. Yes -- both these programs and all other 3D rendering
packages allow animations to be made automatically. Once you
build your objects you can control their movements in the 3D
"space" and decide how an imaginary camera can track their
movements.

The rendering software will then either generate a series of
still frames or create a single ANIM file. Some software,
like Read3D v3, will allow objects to "collide" and can
alter movements according to the laws of physics.


Q. How can I make an animation of digitised images?
A. Animations of "real" video (people or television for
example) is difficult, as a single frame of colour TV can
consume about a megabyte of memory. Only storing the
differences between successive frames doesn't work very well
with video either. However, that's not to say it isn't
possible.

You will need extra hardware, and the cheapest is probably
the VideoMaster from HiSoft, which will grab low resolution
monochrome video and sound simultaneously. The quality is
strictly for fun, but it's very impressive.

The ProGrab digitiser can grab frames quite quickly
(especially the PCMCIA version), and like the VLAB Y/C
system it will take several runs through a video tape to
make sure all pictures have been digitised.

The best solution is undoubtedly the VLAB Motion card, which
captures video and compresses it with JPEG compression in
real time to store it on disk and play it back. This card
costs £1000 and requires a very fast hard drive.

The MPEG format is designed for video playback, and Amiga
systems do exists. However, they are rare and encoding is
expensive and slow.


Q. I want to play back and record a long animation onto
video tape, how do I do it?

A. Physically connecting the Amiga to the video recorder
depends on your hardware and the quality you need. An A1200
has a colour composite output which can be connected to the
AUX Video In connector on a video recorder, or via a
suitable lead, through the SCART input socket. Remember to
switch your video to AUX IN rather than a TV station.

Some graphics cards (such as the Picasso fitted with Pablo
card or the PowerComputing Flicker Fixer) will also provide
a high quality video signal.

Other models of Amiga may require an external modulator (the
A500 or A2000 for example) or a Genlock (which although
primarily designed to mix Amiga graphics and "live" video
also provides a good video signal from the standard RGB
monitor port).

Recording lengthy animations can be done in three ways:

1. Buy about 32Mb of RAM and store the entire animation in
memory (not always feasible, unfortunately given the price
of memory)

2. Play back the animation is sections, pausing the video
recorder between each. This technique will take practise and
good timing.

3. Store the animation on hard drive and use a program like
Viewtek to play it back in one go. For this to work, you may
need to take all the individual frames which make up your
animation and turn them into one big ANIM file. The best
software for this is The Art Department Professional, which
uses a utility called FRED to combine and edit all the
frames. In this way you can easily create an animation many
megabytes in size, even if you only have a little RAM. 

Viewtek comes with a utility called MakeAnim7 which converts
a standard ANIM file (such as that created with Ad Pro/FRED)
into a new ANIM7 format. (Personal Paint also supports
ANIM7). Files stored in ANIM7 mode play back a lot more
smoothly from disk.


Q. I have lots of different animations and titles which I
would like to combine with Amiga sound effects and music
files. What software do I need?

A. You can make simple animations and sound productions
using little more than ARexx (see last month's Amiga
Masterclass for details) but dedicated software is required
for best results.

Software like MainActor is designed to playback animations
and synchronise sound effects, but you can also achieve a
lot with Multimedia Software such as CanDo or Scala. These
systems require a little more work, but will definitely
provide the best results.


john kennedy