| I'll be foolhardy and take the first stab. The Amiga has a hardware
advantage that will add significant cost to a workstation solution:
NTSC compatibility (PAL in 50 Hz countries). Any workstation solution
will have to either add hardware capable of displaying a standard video
signal as a window on the workstation screen, or else record and play
back at workstation resolution.
Now, let's take the original posting bit by bit. Every Amiga sold in a
U.S. computer store these days comes with multimedia authoring software
called AmigaVision. AmigaVision contains an iconic scripting system
which coordinates presentation of video (through a genlock), animation,
sound and still graphics. It also contains device drivers for several
brands of videodisc players.
Since videodisc is frame-addressable, it is straightforward to build an
application containing still frames and action sequences from the
videodisc. As yet there is no "Editor's Workbench" or other
productivity tool to help create these applications. However, MIT has
been doing work along these lines for its non-Amiga systems in the
Media Lab.
AmigaVision can coordinate audio and video playback but is limited by
memory and processor power as to the length of sound sequences.
Recording a videodisc is beyond the scope of this note.
Another possibility is a write-once optical drive. Here video
sequences taken from a video capture card can be recorded as files, and
AmigaVision can play back file-structured sequences, as opposed to
frame-structured sequences. The program is smart enough to cache data
ahead of use, and some animation players allow long animations to be
played from hard disk. I/O bandwidth is an issue: typical Amiga SCSI
interfaces are capable of 300-800 KBytes/sec read rates, slower write
rates. This may be too slow for real-time video frame capture, but
sufficient for playback.
The original note in MULTI-MEDIA mentioned CD-ROM. From the note on
CDTV, it appears that CD-ROM is far too slow to play back real-time
video with only software compression.
So, the key pieces are, IMO: broadcast video display compatibility,
authoring tools, I/O bandwidth and a way to capture video to fixed
media.
Wes
|
| The AVID System, which runs on a MAC II allows you to record video directly to
hard disk for instantaneous playback of any portion.
AVID is a full featured video off-line editing system. It uses large banks of
hard drives to hold all the digitized video. Playback resolution of the video
is not the same as you see on TV, through compression, the images are probably
about 200X200.
In order to play back or record broadcast quality images from memory or disk
(not VIDEO disk or CD) you need a massive amount of disk space and tons of
memory. Brief sequences (less than 10 seconds) are easier to do. Anything
longer...good luck.
Now, if you are just playing back images from a videodisk or CD device, that
is another matter altogether.
Medialab at MIT is an excellent source for information on this subject. They
have been doing a lot of research in this area for the last few years.
Randy
|