Short: DCTV/Imagine Anim Christmas wish/greeting. Author: jbb@koyote.com (Jim Belcher) Uploader: jbb koyote com (Jim Belcher) Type: pix/anim Architecture: generic ===================================================================== Rather than send conventional Christmas cards, I create a video Christmas Card each year. The title for the video Christmas card is my annual opportunity to be creative with art tools, raytracers, etc. This upload is the title I used for this year's card, and is also my sincere wish to everyone out there in Aminetland. This title shows a light aircraft (a PA22 Piper Tripacer, for anyone who's interested) circling a Christmas tree ornament. This archive contains a 7-32 DCTV anim, generated using Imagine, and saved as an anim using Mainactor. I have found anims in Main Actor execute faster than any of the other animation programs I have tried to date (12/15/97), so it has become my media of choice. The archive contains Main Actor timing information, so the anim will execute best using that program. However, there should be no reason why any any program capable of executing 7-32 anims should not be able to execute this anim. I use DCTV heavily in my video business for NTSC anims. Its resolution roughly corresponds to NTSC standards; a DCTV anim in Main Actor in my 4000/030 appears to execute at 60 fields/second. I have had excellent results getting Imagine to render 24 bit raytracings, but very poor results getting it to render DCTV raytracings. For some reason, the aspect ratio comes out wrong in DCTV. If anyone has any insight, I'd be interested in hearing from you. As a result of the above, I tend to render in 24 bit high resolution, and convert the result to DCTV or whatever, using external conversion programs. In this instance, I created an interim 8 bit ILBM version, in the hope of executing it as an anim - the resolution and color was better than DCTV, which is to suggest it exceeded NTSC standards. The anim was successfully built, but would not execute at full frame rates. I toyed with uploading it to the net in mpeg format, but decided that if anyone wanted something other than DCTV, it might or might not be mpeg. For this reason, I have uploaded the original frames in a separate archive (ChmasILBM.lha). If anyone converts this to something other than DCTV, it would be nice if you'd upload the result to Aminet and share it with us. I'd suggest the same name, but with a suitable extension - Christmasmpeg, avi, or whatever. Merry Christmas!