Amiga ANIM files

[DonnyEMU]

OMG you guys SOOO need a history lesson...

1) Anims aren't slow, in fact they were brought out at a time in which most computers didn't even have an FPU (Floating Point Math) chip.

Let's journey back, to the days of the late 80s early 90s..

There wasn't any such thing as animation files (except autodesk flic files which had low numbers of colors and limited 320x200 resolution).

The IFF format was the first universally recognized file format, it emcompassed image files, sounds, and animation. It was totally expandable to as long as you registered "new" variations with Commodore and EA. Apple liked it so much for sound they registered a form called an "AIF" which is a waveform style file which is still one of their system formats today.

Deluxe Paint and VideoScape 3d were the first Amiga programs to really mainstream IFF anim files.  Back in those days having a 32 bit imaged displayed on your computer WASN'T a reality.

By the time MPEG-1 came along, it was considered SLOW . I couldn't get my amiga to display a 160x120 window on mpeg without buying a huge accelerator I couldn't afford. Yet anim files were a fast good alternative for slow processors. As time over took the amiga and standards, MPEG gave way to mpeg 2 and finally CPUs were powerful enough to handle drawing at high speeds in true color. So Anims faded.

Most of the cool amiga demos were submitted to contests (and I am not talking about the euro demos) as "Anim" files.

These playback best with a bitplaned system (not the chunky color of picasso/CGX) and are very fast. They will play on any Amiga system, even ones not fast enough to play MPEG files. They look great even though most of them lack true color (except for a few various extended Anim formats).

They play well though and faster than MPEGs on my emulated Amiga. The compression is mostly lossless too (meaning no aproximation).

It's just a fact that anims play faster than MPEGs do.. If they don't I'd change my anim player software, or drop down in resolution and check em out.

Leo Schwab made some great anim files that trounce on Pixars work of the day (the bicycles, reds dream etc)..

Great Amiga programs (if you can find them that support anims)..

Aegis AniMagic (the adobe premiere of anim sfx)
AmigaVision (authoring system extraordinare)
Deluxe Paint
Brilliance!
Photon Paint!
VideoScape 3d (get 2.0, this is the grandad of lightwave)
Broderbund Fantavision (cool tweening animator)

You really should experience these for yourself.

Here's some interesting documentation still on the web regarding IFF.. The first animation format ever with compression..

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/developer/75lwsdk/docs/filefmts/eaiff85.html

[DonnyEMU]

I missed CDXL because it was never mainstream. Also Commodore kept CDXL off mainstream Amigas at the time, and here we never got to see it. I have a few Amiga Mails that describe the format, but it was never standard.. Most Amiga owners of the day didn't see CDTV as an Amiga (but a competitor to the CD-I box).

There were also no commercial playback software or authoring for it available on the shelf either.. But you are right CDXL was a video format (again another higher speed than MPEG not requiring a mondo cpu)

[DonnyEMU]

Anyone remember Anim 7?? Anyone remember IFF24 (one picture at 640x400 in 24 bits barely fit on an 880k disk).

As far as videoCD (aka Mpeg1)  this came about on CDTV's competitor product Phillips CD-I. They are regular CDs that you can fit about an hour of video on (but not 2 hours like today's DVDs). CD-I had the "mpeg module". It was very expensive and the video quality lacked because it was only around 352x244...   Commodore saw that CDTV wasn't competing with CD-I very well and added an MPEG module to CD32 (CDTV's sucessor). It wasn't till way after the Multimedia Intel PCs hit that people really discovered video CD (and that was after DVD was announced). Mainly because you can copy VideoCD content with a regular CD burner. Now people use that format mostly for "home videos". Anyway that's far from a 7 mhz cpu..

did you know Microsoft follows IFF for .WAV files they are R-IFFs :-)