Mike Raiford wrote:

> What amazes me about the Amiga is how frequently it was used for digital 
> effects in a number of TV shows. I just skimmed the Wikipedia article. I 
> guess at some point they were running Lightwave, which is a very 
> expensive professional rendering package, on it.

Check your history. Lightwave *originated* on the Amiga platform! :-D

(It was originally a value-add product for NewTek's "Video Toaster" 
video editing hardware, but eventually became a stand-along product due 
to extreme popularity.)

It always was freakishly expensive, but regarded as "cutting edge" in 
every concievable way. Every time it was reviewed, it got awards. Amiga 
Format rated it Gold more times than I can count. It was showered with 
accolades. Seeminly every new version added serious new features that 
wowed the critics and boggled minds.

All the Amiga magazines repeatedly claimed that the Amiga was being used 
in Babylon 5, Seaquest DSV and Startrek Voyager. There are episodes of 
Red Dwarf where you can see an Amiga 500 on the wall. And so on.

LOL, I like Wikipedia's comment about the Video Toaster: "It was the 

video revolution."

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4885d747$1@news.povray.org...

> That makes no sense. I can't get Windows Movie Maker to do *anything* 
> useful...

Really, you should make a list of all the common, entry-level software that 
anybody can use except you so we can figure out what they have in common ;)

I just had to use WMM a few days ago, never having done movie editing 
before, and I was able to create a 2-hour DVD out of 5 hours of Mini-DV 
tapes, complete with nice-looking transitions effects and titles, all this 
in a short time and with very little trouble (it didn't like one transition 
and got stuck until I removed it). Clearly not a professional application 
due to its limited set of features, but very user-friendly and more than 
sufficient for home usage, like editing family movies.

G.

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Invisible wrote:

> Check your history. Lightwave *originated* on the Amiga platform! :-D
> 
> (It was originally a value-add product for NewTek's "Video Toaster" 
> video editing hardware, but eventually became a stand-along product due 
> to extreme popularity.)
> 
> It always was freakishly expensive, but regarded as "cutting edge" in 
> every concievable way.

Update: Er, yah, it's *still* damned expensive! ;-)

http://www.onevideo.co.uk/index.php?manufacturers_id=26&osCsid=nq146ak8cdsqmj1edokfd8qih5

Although not as expensive as I'd imagined... (I was thinking more like 


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Gilles Tran wrote:

> Really, you should make a list of all the common, entry-level software that 
> anybody can use except you so we can figure out what they have in common ;)

Thank you. Now I feel *so* much less inferior. :-}

Hmm, let's see now. I can operate POV-Ray, a program who's "user 
interface" consists of a text editor and a button that makes it go, but 
I can't figure out 3D Studio Max, a supposedly superior program. Maybe 
it's just that POV-Ray has *a manual*, whereas the illegal pirate copy 
of 3DSM I found didn't have one?

On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM 
do things it's not designed for?

I can't seem to make Photoshop do much, but then I can't figure out the 
GIMP either, so that's about even. (I had no such trouble with 
Photogenics, but that doesn't do very much.)

I spent years using OctaMED, but I'm having trouble figuring out Cubase. 
Maybe because it's just more complicated? IDK.

What else is there? Ooo, I can't make styles work reliably in Word.

I think that's about all... :-P

> Clearly not a professional application 
> due to its limited set of features, but very user-friendly and more than 
> sufficient for home usage, like editing family movies.

Yeah, well, it's free. You wouldn't expect miracles. ;-)

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> The resolution doesn't really compare, but the Amiga was targetted at 
> normal TVs. The Amiga's 640x480 is quite near to modern DVD's 720x564.

The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely 
programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a TV to 
a high resolution monitor.  Even when I got my first LCD monitor I plugged 
it in and it worked!  If you found some weird monitor that didn't quite 
work, chances were that someone could help you out and write the config file 
for you.

> Thing is, up until this point, computer graphics had always been blocky 
> things made out of a dozen flat colours. Computer graphics *looked* like 
> computer graphics. Computer sound *sounded* like computer sound.

Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10 
years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32 
colours.  I would have expected a lot more.

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>> The resolution doesn't really compare, but the Amiga was targetted at 
>> normal TVs. The Amiga's 640x480 is quite near to modern DVD's 720x564.
> 
> The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely 
> programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a 
> TV to a high resolution monitor.

Yeah. The Amiga defaults to TV scanrates, but you can program it to run 
at whatever you want. (Within reason.) The tricky part is figuring out 
what you need to program it to do. (And getting it to do it when you 
can't see a display!)

The *other* tricky part is that ALL games will run at TV scanrates, and 
there's nothing you can do about it...

> Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10 
> years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32 
> colours.  I would have expected a lot more.

16 colours out of 16, verses 32 out of 4,096? Seems like a fairly big 
difference to me. ;-)

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> 16 colours out of 16, verses 32 out of 4,096? Seems like a fairly big 
> difference to me. ;-)

Yeh saying that, we've been stuck at 2^24 out of 2^24 for a while now... ;-)

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scott wrote:

> Yeh saying that, we've been stuck at 2^24 out of 2^24 for a while now... 
> ;-)

Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)

(Similarly, "CD-quality audio" was invented, what, 20 years ago? And it 
still hasn't changed to this day...)

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4885e130$1@news.povray.org...

> On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
> work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
> together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
> can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM do 
> things it's not designed for?

On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done by 
pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more precise 
control. I'll grant that it's never very precise, but then it's a 
no-brainer, made for people who don't read manuals and don't like to type 
numbers in little boxes with funny names.

Perhaps you just don't get purely visual interfaces? GUIs tend to have their 
own paradigms and figuring them out can take time. Sometimes we put the 
blame on the interface (and rightly so, but I won't tell names...) but it 
may be that people differ in the way they can grasp certain visual paradigms 
and not others (no excuse for Word styles though).

G.

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>> On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
>> work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
>> together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
>> can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM do 
>> things it's not designed for?
> 
> On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done by 
> pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more precise 
> control. I'll grant that it's never very precise, but then it's a 
> no-brainer, made for people who don't read manuals and don't like to type 
> numbers in little boxes with funny names.
> 
> Perhaps you just don't get purely visual interfaces? GUIs tend to have their 
> own paradigms and figuring them out can take time. Sometimes we put the 
> blame on the interface (and rightly so, but I won't tell names...) but it 
> may be that people differ in the way they can grasp certain visual paradigms 
> and not others (no excuse for Word styles though).

IIRC I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to make the 
sequence fade to black. I got it to fade, but it was a 2 second fade and 
I wanted 10 seconds. I couldn't find any way of altering this.

I also utterly failed to figure out how to insert a pause.

In the end I just got so thoroughly frustrated with the thing that I 
gave up. To my horror, next time I opened it, it had somehow magically 
"remembered" where all my video files are, and nothing I could do to it 
would make it "forget" that information. At that point I decided to give 
up for good.

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