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Author Topic: Is a PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) useful anymore?  (Read 3372 times)

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Offline Ral-ClanTopic starter

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Is a PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) useful anymore?
« on: December 17, 2007, 05:41:13 PM »
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?

 
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Offline Ral-ClanTopic starter

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Re: Is a PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) useful anymore?
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2007, 09:12:08 PM »
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.
Music I've made using Amigas and other retro-instruments: http://theovoids.bandcamp.com