Amiga TV Out

At 11:46 PM 11/26/2007, Rod Smallwood wrote: Special effects makers strove for higher quality as the job demanded. Part of the appeal of the Amiga for special effects was the price of the 32-bit hardware and software. SGI hardware and software was an order of magnitude more expensive. NewTek's Lightwave was used by the Babylon 5 special effects group. I know they also used an early 3D Studio on a PC for some of the modeling. (And they used some of my software to convert between 3D file formats; as I recall, the spun shape of the original station was made that way.) Yes, the Amiga had the horsepower to play back animations of useful color depths in real-time. Depending on the image and the requirements, some special effects might even look OK with the straight TV-out. For example, the typical synthetic "computer display" in a cheesy sci-fi show. When you're filming an actor in front of an animation playing on a monitor, low-res is OK. More often for serious output, as in Babylon 5's case, they laid their bitmaps to an 8mm Exabyte tape as data files, then imported into an Abekas framebuffer that could play them back in real time. High quality, no generational loss every time you made an edit or copy. Straight TV-out wasn't a high-quality method of exporting video, though. In the early days, some people used single-frame video recorders to lay down a sequence of animation. This worked reasonably well, within NTSC generational limits. Later, some NewTek Video Toaster-based animators used its higher-quality framebuffer as the output to single-frame recordings. - John