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Mike Raiford wrote:
> I'll agree, Windows 3.x sucked. :)
I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably
slowly while my little "14 MHz" Amiga 1200 ran rings around them. It
wasn't until I started doing seriously compute-bounded work that I
actually *believed* that the numbers weren't lying. The Amiga just
seemed dramatically faster in every respect.
(On the other hand... You know how Linux is supposed to be "fast"? I
tried running Debian on my Amiga 1200. Waiting for Gnome to start up
is... well let me put it this way. It makes a 486 SX look like greased
lightning. From typing "startx" to having a usable desktop takes about
20 *minutes*!! Not kidding!!)
>> (Bearing in mind, my first ray-traced scene - a mesh torus with a
>> procedural wood texture and one light source - took well over 2
>> *hours* to render at 320x200 pixels. What can I say? No FPU...)
>
> POV-Ray was why I sought to by a math-coprocessor. Remarkable speed up
> of that app. ;)
Oh hell yeah. I can remember adding a 20 MHz FPU to my Amiga and
watching Fractuallity suddenly get an order of magnitude faster. ;-)
"Wow, it's so fast!" I cried.
Watching it yesterday, with FPU and all, there didn't seem to be much
"fast" about it!
>> In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video
>> tools actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase, Cakewalk,
>> Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)
>
> If you've ever really used Photoshop, some things that are trivial to do
> in that program all the sudden become very difficult in other programs.
I'm sure. (E.g., colour seperations...)
> Remember that video you posted on the making of that webcomic. That was
> PS.
I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
> I've taken old faded pictures (some with missing pieces, where the
> emulsion was scratched or torn away) and brought them back to their
> original color, replaced the missing pieces, and got rid of the texture.
I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
> There are advantages to the expensive packages ;)
I won't deny that. ;-)
>> Today, anybody with sufficient technical bent can easily sit down with
>> a computer and cut CDs of their music, or burn DVDs of their graphics
>> and animations. It's not even expensive any more.
>
> Heck. You can do this for free, too ;)
Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>> We are truly living in the future, my friends...
>
> Where's my flying car? XD
Yeah, I'm still wondering about that...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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John VanSickle wrote:
> The management at Commodore should take all of the blame for the fall of
> Commodore. Developing killer new technology should have been top
> priority. Hindsight being 20-20, they should have designed the OS with
> the highest possible degree of resource management (IE, not assume that
> all graphics would be 8-bit forever), and then opened up the hardware
> architecture and allowed clones.
Well, let's be fair here. The Amiga 1200 already has 24-bit colour and
up to 12 bits per pixel. And it's still register compatible with the old
chips.
If you had the money, there *were* in fact boards like the famous
Piccaso that give you true 24-bit graphics. (Damned expensive though!)
All "properly-written" applcations would transparently use this without
even knowing it. What more resource management do you want?
The *problem* was all those games that bypass the OS and hit the metal
directly to wring every last drop of speed out of the system.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as you change any hardware, all your games
break. (Or at least the vast majority of them.)
> As it was, some of the later CEOs did nothing more than collect their
> salaries.
Apparently so.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Mike Raiford wrote:
>
>> I'll agree, Windows 3.x sucked. :)
>
> I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably
> slowly while my little "14 MHz" Amiga 1200 ran rings around them. It
> wasn't until I started doing seriously compute-bounded work that I
> actually *believed* that the numbers weren't lying. The Amiga just
> seemed dramatically faster in every respect.
>
> (On the other hand... You know how Linux is supposed to be "fast"? I
> tried running Debian on my Amiga 1200. Waiting for Gnome to start up
> is... well let me put it this way. It makes a 486 SX look like greased
> lightning. From typing "startx" to having a usable desktop takes about
> 20 *minutes*!! Not kidding!!)
>
>>> (Bearing in mind, my first ray-traced scene - a mesh torus with a
>>> procedural wood texture and one light source - took well over 2
>>> *hours* to render at 320x200 pixels. What can I say? No FPU...)
>>
>> POV-Ray was why I sought to by a math-coprocessor. Remarkable speed up
>> of that app. ;)
>
> Oh hell yeah. I can remember adding a 20 MHz FPU to my Amiga and
> watching Fractuallity suddenly get an order of magnitude faster. ;-)
> "Wow, it's so fast!" I cried.
>
> Watching it yesterday, with FPU and all, there didn't seem to be much
> "fast" about it!
>
>>> In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video
>>> tools actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase,
>>> Cakewalk, Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)
>>
>> If you've ever really used Photoshop, some things that are trivial to
>> do in that program all the sudden become very difficult in other
>> programs.
>
> I'm sure. (E.g., colour seperations...)
>
>> Remember that video you posted on the making of that webcomic. That
>> was PS.
>
> I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
>
PS Elememts is ... meh .. It lacks some key features, such as Masking.
Hell... lacking that alone is grounds for death IMO. You're better of
with GIMP. ;)
>> I've taken old faded pictures (some with missing pieces, where the
>> emulsion was scratched or torn away) and brought them back to their
>> original color, replaced the missing pieces, and got rid of the texture.
>
> I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
>
Depends. Small tears and missing chunks are really easy using clone and
heal tools. Larger tears and missing chunks require a more "creative"
approach. See the attached images.
>> There are advantages to the expensive packages ;)
>
> I won't deny that. ;-)
>
>>> Today, anybody with sufficient technical bent can easily sit down
>>> with a computer and cut CDs of their music, or burn DVDs of their
>>> graphics and animations. It's not even expensive any more.
>>
>> Heck. You can do this for free, too ;)
>
> Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>
Well, assuming you already have the PC... If you don't you can still
accomplish your goal for under $1000.
I've seen someone actually make a pretty impressive short film using
Windows Movie Maker and a $50 pocket camera.
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scott wrote:
> Looking on Wikipedia, the Amiga A600 was introduced in March 1992.
>
> In September 1991, Acorn launched their A5000 that had a processor with
> 14x more MIPS, up to 256 colours on screen at once at 800x600 with no
> special trickery, 8 independent sound channels that could be assigned to
> any stereo location, 8 bit logarithmic DACs that sounded like 12 bit
> (apparently) and a high-density floppy drive as standard (1.6MB).
The Amiga 1200 offers up to 256 colours at once, no tricks. It was
released in Oct 1992.
(The Amiga also offers even more colours if you use special tricks,
ranging from the simple ones that impose very few limitations, to
complex ones that are only really useful "for show".)
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.
> There again, it was twice the price of the A600...
Heh. Yeah. ;-)
And I'm sure if you pay even more money, you can get better specs.
Predator was released years earlier and featured some impressive
computer graphics; that computer had to come form somewhere. But
certainly you wouldn't find one in somebody's *house*!
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. And
then suddenly there was this amazing machine that seemed to produce
pictures and sound that were drastically closer to reality... it was a
very exciting time!
These days, nobody really thinks about it much. Heh, the digital
revolution isn't "here", it's "happened". Nobody even talks about it any
more. ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
>
> And I'm sure if you pay even more money, you can get better specs.
> Predator was released years earlier and featured some impressive
> computer graphics; that computer had to come form somewhere. But
> certainly you wouldn't find one in somebody's *house*!
>
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.
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>> I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
>>
>
> PS Elememts is ... meh .. It lacks some key features, such as Masking.
> Hell... lacking that alone is grounds for death IMO. You're better of
> with GIMP. ;)
I got it free with my shiny new Wacom tablet. ;-)
>> I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
>
> Depends. Small tears and missing chunks are really easy using clone and
> heal tools. Larger tears and missing chunks require a more "creative"
> approach. See the attached images.
OK, that's just absurd. The sofa and the rug are *exactly* the same
colour. How the hell can the machine tell them apart? Additionally, how
on earth can it tell what colour they were originally? That's impossible...
>>> Heck. You can do this for free, too ;)
>>
>> Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>>
>
> Well, assuming you already have the PC... If you don't you can still
> accomplish your goal for under $1000.
Well, yeah. I mean, if you just want to render some 3D scenes with
POV-Ray and stick them on a DVD, you don't even need that much. You can
probably buy a PC with a DVD burner and some movie authorising software
anything with such a slow CPU, but if you wait long enough it'll do it.
> I've seen someone actually make a pretty impressive short film using
> Windows Movie Maker and a $50 pocket camera.
That makes no sense. I can't get Windows Movie Maker to do *anything*
useful...
(But then, I can't get 3D Studio Max to do anything beyond rendering
polygon meshes either, and yet it's ment to be "the most powerful
modeller in the world"...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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."
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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. ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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