pc lightwave to amiga

[rednova]

Dear Friends:

Is it possible to render an IFF animation in pc lightwave, then transfer the anim
to an amiga 2000 (using some kind of network/hardware) save it to amiga HD
then play the anim in amiga ?
Is this possible ?
Thank you !!!

[Matt_H]

Can PC Lightwave output to IFF? If so, then probably yes. Otherwise you'll need to render to a format that PC Lightwave does support and then convert that file to an Amiga-friendly format.

[rednova]

Dear Amigans:

I just checked lightwave on my pc.  It does not output anims to iff,
but it allows you to render the whole anim to single iff individual frames.
If I transfer these to amiga, will there be an amiga program that lets you
convert single iff frames into a complete iff animation ?
I have great news coming:
I just also checked aladdin 4d on winUAE emulation (pc) and found out
that aladdin 4d can output an animation to a iff anim.
Imagine !!!  render an aladdin 4d iff anim superfast on the pc, then transfer to amiga
and playback the anim !!!  This is great !!!
What are the best ways to transfer anim from pc to amiga ?
Thank you !!!

[Sean Cunningham]

If I remember right, ADPro might be able to do the conversion.  They'd included a batch processor in the later versions.  Programs like Pageflipper Plus and I'm sure ImageFX.  

The best way to transfer between systems would likely be over ethernet using a TCP stack and/or Samba.  This could be done via FTP client or rcp in a shell (remote copy program).  Back in the A4000/A1200 days I believe rcp offered the fastest performance at roughly twice the speed of copying via standard filesystem tools over NFS.  I don't know that we ever tried FTP.

[Duce]

Transfer method I would use would be to just use a simple SAMBA/CIFS share that both the Amiga and PC have access to over Ethernet.

Personally, I just have a FreeNAS box with oodles of storage on it that's accessible to my pc's and Amiga systems running off an L2 managed 24 port gigabit ethernet switch.  Have used it before in somewhat similar situations, but using Blender for PC as well as on my SAM with the NAS as the drop site for projects.

Obviously, you aren't going to get gigabit speeds out of a legacy Amiga ethernet device, but it should be plenty quick.

[Sean Cunningham]

What I remember, it's dicey even getting fast ethernet speeds from an Amiga realized but that was likely attributed to the Commodore stack more than hardware limits, perhaps.  Maybe this modern SAMBA fixes the slow networking speed of 1994.  

A two-step process via intermediary storage you might as well go thumb drive and sneaker net, if you've added USB to the Amiga.

[gertsy]

Dear Amigans:

I just checked lightwave on my pc.  It does not output anims to iff,
but it allows you to render the whole anim to single iff individual frames.
If I transfer these to amiga, will there be an amiga program that lets you
convert single iff frames into a complete iff animation ?
I have great news coming:
I just also checked aladdin 4d on winUAE emulation (pc) and found out
that aladdin 4d can output an animation to a iff anim.
Imagine !!!  render an aladdin 4d iff anim superfast on the pc, then transfer to amiga
and playback the anim !!!  This is great !!!
What are the best ways to transfer anim from pc to amiga ?
Thank you !!!

Sorry I might be missing the excitement here but it's obviously easier to just play it on the PC.

[klx300r]

Sorry I might be missing the excitement here but it's obviously easier to just play it on the PC.

now we all know there's no fun in that;)

[Sean Cunningham]

I must admit I am curious why the desire to go through the trouble of not only transferring the raw frames but then compile and compress them to play back in ANIM form, given it's an animation created on a PC that would ideally be played back as a full color AVI or Quicktime on that PC with direct access to the frames.

Regardless of all of this, something for the OP to keep in mind for future experiments in animation is that it is always a better idea to render to an image sequence, whether that's ILBM or TGA or whatever, regardless of platform or application, rather than directly to an ANIM file (or any compressed movie file), if for no other reason than in case you crash at frame 250 of a 500 frame render.  

Compiling the frames to an ANIM as a post process offers more advantages than disadvantages and is a good habit to get into if you plan to ever do this sort of thing professionally.

[JimS]

I had pretty good luck using Rend24 to convert 24bit frames into something the Amiga could play.