Is a PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) useful anymore?

[Ral-Clan]

I've noticed that the old GVP Personal Animation recorder cards are very cheap nowadays.

Can they still be useful?  I'm not entirely sure what one would use it for nowadays?

From what I understand, it would store frames from various applications and play back the sequences as animations, whereas these high res animations would bog down even an accelerated Amiga.  The output from the PAR could then be recorded to video tape.

But nowadays, if I were to get into animation on the Amiga (and I would like to), wouldn't it make more sense to store all the frames on a CD-ROM and have a PC assemble them into an MPEG2 video or something?

Or is there some advantage to the PAR?

If I was simply doing DeluxePaint type animation, is an 040 accelerated Amiga not up to the task of playing it back at full speed for output to an external recorder?  I always thought the Amiga was natively good at playing back anims.

But I suppose 24-bit full 720x480 animations are too much, and that's where the PAR would come into effect.  Still, is it worth buying a PAR for this, or is it better to just assemble the frames and render MPEGs on a PC?

 

[bloodline]

I find it hard to see how PAR could be useful now! I would suggest using UAE instead.

[hardlink]

The PAR's main use is when your target output is live analog video, either NTSC or PAL, for instance as one input to a Video Toaster, showing long Lightwave generated animations in real time. If your target is digital, such as some type of MPEG compression, it would be of no advantage.

The other use is coupling a DPS PAR with a DPS TBC-IV. You can then capture and play back live video or images, not just animations. Makes a neat stop-motion or time-lapse recording setup. I am working on a dual PAR+TBCIV setup to record stereo video since the TBC's can be genlocked to synchronize the 2 video streams.

[Ral-Clan]

Okay, great, thanks.  I did realize it has potential as a stop motion animation workstation (apparently Wallace & Grommit shorts were done with one).  But then you need the TBC too which starts to make the setup a little expensive, considering the age of the hardware.