How useful is a DCTV

[amigadave]

fiat1100d wrote:

amigadave wrote:
The DCTV was/is a great piece of hardware.  I went to a show once and saw a stock A3000 playing from the hard drive, the complete "Back to the Future II" movie that had been converted, "frame by frame" to the DCTV format.  I was amazed and decided that I had to get one.

Frame by frame? So how much time was needed for the whole conversion? I read of many seconds per frame!!

I don't know how long it took them to convert each frame of the movie to an animation frame in DCTV format, but I am sure they used a batch processing program to do it.  What I don't know is what method they used to digitize the movie frames/fields into digital format to then convert to DCTV format from 24bit.  All I know is that I was blown away that the movie was streaming from the hard drive and displaying at full screen, full speed, full color composite NTSC resolution from a stock A3000.  Everyone that saw it was looking under the table to try to find the VCR that must have been playing a tape.  It was an unbelievable accomplishment for the time, given the computing power and hard drive performance available at the time (around 1990 I think).

[yogisumo]

amigadave wrote:

I am surprised that more was not done with the DCTV format and hardware and the Amiga, as it gets great display results with tiny file sizes and full screen, full color animations can be run with just an 68030 and SCSI-2 (and perhaps even IDE) hard drives.  DCTV Paint was recognized as one of the best paint programs available for the Amiga for a long time.

I am a strong believer in DCTV and early Amigas (that's why I own more than a few of them).   :-D

The problem was probably the price and timing.  I paid about $550 Canadian for mine.  Also, I think they came out fairly late when the Amiga was on the way out.  I remember meeting one of the Digital Creations people demoing Brilliance at a show in Toronto.  None of the people talking to him were serious "artists" and he seemed annoyed (my impression/memory) that C= and Amiga were starting to have problems.  Kind of seeing the writing on the wall?

[leirbag28]

@everyone

Let me say this: The DCTV is an incredible piece of hardware still able to compete with high end PCs when it comes to animations.

Never bother with Digitizing features of the DCTV especially trying to convert movie frames..................the easiest way to convert Movie frames or even pictures is to use a PC with Quicktime Pro.....and convert the movie into individual JPEGS and then transfer them to your amiga and convert them to DCTV or even 24bit IFF then to DCTV...........the best possible quality you will ever get in the universe on a DCTV and its quite excellent.

I would even use WinUAE for the IFF conversions for much much faster rendering...then put the results on your real Amiga.

a PC can covert 300 frames to JPEG in the same time it takes a 68030 Amiga to convert 1 frame!  so time is money dude.........

You will never know how cool a DCTV is till you see it in full blown action running animations on a plain a500 with 32mb RAM and a 68030 @50mhz

its a GFX card with Native Composite NTSC/PAL video OUT.

I happen to have the ultra rare DCTV RGB adaptor and a SuperGen SX genlock connected to it :-)

awe freakin sum.

Think of your A500 with a DCTV attached as an iPOD photo NANo

simply to display true color images
good enough

[Crom00]

DCTV was great- I remember using it on a CSPPC-060 and it was fast. Please note that with with large amounts of data onsreen it tended to slow down a bit. There was a progream fro the folks that created asim cd filesystem that allowed you to playback any IFF animation off of a hard drive instead of loading it into ram. So the possibilities were pretty cool for the hardware. I still have mine, even though I've sold all but my amiga 500...

I used it for scenic video displays...

With $39 dvd players that can playback divx, jpegs and video files, the dctv setup is actually more expensive to run than off the shelf hardware.

I used to do 24 bit paintwork for my photoshop class becuase the Macs at my University were always booked and Photoshop 2.0 (at the time) was SLOWWWWWW on early PPC Macs... I had to use a A2000 with an A2630 accelarator to get my assignments done. Later I swithced to the Emplant and a Retina card...I would go back and forth between PS 2.5 and DCTV paint and Brilliance.

You can also render lightwave animations to the DCTV format. Did this with an A3000 040 machine that was on 24/7 rendering animations.

Good luck!
M