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Author Topic: Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes  (Read 16587 times)

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Offline atronTopic starter

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Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes
« on: December 03, 2016, 04:12:54 PM »
Hi guys, in recent months I got back into actually doing something with my Amiga again. First, I ripped out this old green battery and after I had assembled the whole thing again, I got into a conversation with a friend about the capabilities of the Amiga. So I came up with the idea having the Amiga show a video of about 3-4 mins on an HD flat screen in exactly the same way as a PC does in full screen mode (in 16:9 format); in principle, that should be possible (I guessed :)

Looking around on youtube I found some converted videos playing on an Amiga, but all with lots of conversion artifacts, or just very short.

My goal became to create a HAM8 video where each frame has its own color palette and a *very* small (if at all) number of artifacts. Finally I found one tool, released in 2015, that gives excellent HAM8 results whereas other tools have some disadvantages:
* ppmtoilbm: generates a fixed grey palette. The result is to get several conversion artefacts.
* avi4hv doesn't generate separate palettes either. The player is well done (and fast), but the converted frames have lots of artifacts (didn't try avi4aga yet, but I guess it doesn't create different color palettes either?).

The best HAM8 converter I found is png2ilbm. It was released 2014/15 and generates really good HAM8 pictures: http://bgafc.t-hosting.hu/prgv.php?p=2

Players: cyberanim cannot play anim videos with different color palettes. I used viewtek to play the video.

My procedure was to decode it with ffmpeg into separate frames (=files), convert each frame to HAM8, and use the Amiga tool animconvert to put it into one anim file again.

Finally, I came up with a 3min video playing at 25 FPS (320x251) with a very small number of artifacts. Even text (black on an almost white wall) displays well in the presence of other colors.

The final video (with added original music) can be seen here:
[youtube]WwWEtXd_vDo[/youtube]

PS: I havent't tried AnimFX and Wavetracer yet (just learned about them some days ago). I'd be interested if anybody knows if they generate separate color palettes and what the HAM8 quality is (in comparison to the original video).
« Last Edit: December 09, 2016, 09:02:15 AM by atron »
 

Offline skolman

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2016, 06:07:40 AM »
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Offline kolla

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2016, 11:38:26 PM »
Pretty cool, is the ham8 anim available somewhere? Would like to see how it appears on my various systems :)
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Offline chris

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #3 on: December 05, 2016, 12:02:42 AM »
Presumably it is "easy" to convert from what you have to a full CDXL file with audio?  You might have to lose some resolution though, I think CDXL only supports up to 3/4 screen resolution (although that may well have been a limit to what the hardware could play back, rather than the format).
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Offline atronTopic starter

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes
« Reply #4 on: December 05, 2016, 05:21:35 AM »
Quote from: kolla;817310
Pretty cool, is the ham8 anim available somewhere? Would like to see how it appears on my various systems :)

I am not distributing this anim file because it contains copyrighted content.
However, I can convert an other video if you send me a link.
 

Offline atronTopic starter

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #5 on: December 05, 2016, 06:09:31 AM »
Quote from: chris;817312
Presumably it is "easy" to convert from what you have to a full CDXL file with audio?  You might have to lose some resolution though, I think CDXL only supports up to 3/4 screen resolution (although that may well have been a limit to what the hardware could play back, rather than the format).

Yes CDXL looks interesting, but I couldn't find any player nor converter  for it. My main interest then became to use this new HAM8 converter  (png2ilbm, released in 2015) as it produces excellent HAM8 conversion  results. If the HAM8 conversion of a CDXL converter is of similar  quality and it also adds sound, then that would of course be awesome  (however, playing sound also requires some resources, etc.)
 

Offline vince_6

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #6 on: December 05, 2016, 10:18:30 AM »
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Offline atronTopic starter

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #7 on: December 05, 2016, 03:46:01 PM »
Quote from: vince_6;817333
Here are two of mine with sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnwSStRQjs
Real Amiga hardware.

I like this one, looks quite convenient with mainactor. It's also similar to what I did by loading it into memory. But why are the colors so different compared to the original video? Is this mainactor's HAM8 conversion or some other conversion effect?

What I mean is:
Original video at 3:05 : https://youtu.be/xyfu8pv5nws?t=3m5s
Your video at 1:46 : https://youtu.be/fJnwSStRQjs?t=1m46s
(the links should take you directly to the right frames)

In the original video Scrat's space suit is grey and his head is brown, but in your video Scrat's space suit is brown-ish and his head is blue!

So the sound file is loaded as a separate file? In principle I could do the same then, just need to play it with mainactor and figure out how to create this sound file format! Is it playing the iffs from memory, but the aiff sound file from disk?
 

Offline chris

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #8 on: December 05, 2016, 04:59:48 PM »
Quote from: atron;817324
Yes CDXL looks interesting, but I couldn't find any player nor converter  for it. My main interest then became to use this new HAM8 converter  (png2ilbm, released in 2015) as it produces excellent HAM8 conversion  results. If the HAM8 conversion of a CDXL converter is of similar  quality and it also adds sound, then that would of course be awesome  (however, playing sound also requires some resources, etc.)


There are a few players.  Multiview is one, have a look on Aminet for others (looks like there's an improved CDXL Datatype on there too, which supports the palette-per-frame you will need).

As for creating them... the only tools I know of are the old Commodore ones (I've never used them).  I'll have a quick nose around the DevCD tonight and see what they do!
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Offline vince_6

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2016, 05:28:59 PM »
There is an option to playback from hdd but can't really remember for sound.
As for the colors don't know what happened, probably it is the crappy usb composite capture card.
Same happened to amimastergear video and I did some color retouch before uploading cause looked kinda dull.
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Offline chris

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #10 on: December 05, 2016, 06:22:08 PM »
Quote from: chris;817350
As for creating them... the only tools I know of are the old Commodore ones (I've never used them).  I'll have a quick nose around the DevCD tonight and see what they do!


Right.. the XL Toolkit 1.10 is on the DevCD.  There's an AdPro loader/saver for CDXL.  It also contains a load of command line tools and limited documentation on how to use them, but running with no arguments gives a bit of info.
XLMake looks like it quite simply takes a batch of IFF files and compiles them into a CDXL. It has an audio option but I don't really understand it.
XLAudio inserts audio into an existing CDXL, I think it needs to be an IFF file again, I'm guessing 8SVX.
I didn't try them out but if they don't object to your frames they should just work!

There appears to be a legally dubious archive of the XL Toolkit on http://cd32-allianz.de/ under Entwickler - Einführung.
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Offline psxphill

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #11 on: December 05, 2016, 07:34:09 PM »
Quote from: chris;817312
You might have to lose some resolution though, I think CDXL only supports up to 3/4 screen resolution (although that may well have been a limit to what the hardware could play back, rather than the format).

I believe the limitations are due to the CDTV (and later CD32) drives.

https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=CDXL#File_format

This player should give enough information about what needs to be written.

http://aminet.net/package/gfx/show/cdxl_player

Audio needs to be 11025/8bits.
Video can be ham8, but you can only use 12 bit palette entries. It's still better than ham6 as you have 256 starting colours with 4 bits per channel and each pixel you can change 6 bits per channel. However it's not as good as real ham8.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2016, 07:50:03 PM by psxphill »
 

Offline magnetic

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes
« Reply #12 on: December 06, 2016, 02:29:34 AM »
really cool bro!
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Offline atronTopic starter

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Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #13 on: December 09, 2016, 05:37:23 AM »
Quote from: chris;817355

XLMake looks like it quite simply takes a batch of IFF files and compiles them into a CDXL. It has an audio option but I don't really understand it.


That's a nice website. convert2cdxl looks like the most convenient way of converting to CDXL. It converts it to videos with only 12 frames/s (hopefully there is a way to tweak this ;).
 

Offline NovaCoder

Re: Having fun with HAM8 videos
« Reply #14 on: December 09, 2016, 06:09:36 AM »
This is about the best I could do on real hardware with sound using MooVid

[youtube]PeGbGRJLxwE[/youtube]
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