Improving .ANIM playback speed? Ideas?

[marcfrick2112]

Hello All,
   I was wondering if anyone had some ideas to improve playback speed of animations on an AGA Amiga. I have been making animations using Scenery Animator, Vista Pro, and some little programs from Aminet, then converting them to a DCTV Animation....but in most cases the animation plays very slowly, perhaps a just a few frames per second for the most complex ANIM's.  I tried converting the Anim's to ANIM7, which helps a bit....
 Short of getting a busboard and a PAR card, anyone have ideas to improve playback speed?
My Amiga's specs:
A1200 Power Tower, OS3.9 w/BB 1 and 2, '060/50MHz, 1230 SCSI module, 128MB, 8.5GB HD

Many Thanks,
 

[ChaosLord]

Turn off overscan.

[LaserBack]

what kind of anims are you doing that runs slow on a 060?
which anim player you use?

anyways an old but very faster anim player is viewtek..try that

http://aminet.net/gfx/show/ViewTEK21.lha

[marcfrick2112]

Thanks everyone, Well, I'll try to at least cut down my overscan...
As for what kinds of ANIMs, just Scenery Animator fly-throughs of the Grand Canyon (totally un-original, I know) some messing around with Vista Pro, and ImageFX. I wonder if I am just trying to push my miggy to far.... example: 300-frame DCTV ANIM's, full overscan.... I tried a 600-frame ANIM once, didn't have the patience to let it go through.....

I will check that link for ViewTek out, LaserBack... I have Dopus set up to use it for image files, not 100% sure if I am using it for Anim's.... also, maybe that link is a newer version....

[Framiga]

at that resolution, no way to achieve full broadcast output.

Only solution is PAR.

[HellCoder]

Copy the animation to RAM before you play it. That should help some too I think.

[Karlos]

Whatever happened to PowerMovie? Wasn't it supposed to be a better animation format for AGA amigas?

[Framiga]

it depends what kind of frames is trying to join.

screen depth, resolution details .... for my flying logos theres no way to achieve full broadcast (720*580 at "some colors" with "some details" at 25 fps)

If we are speaking about 16 colors, ok then ... is all another thing.  

[JaXanim]

For all the anims on the WaveGuide website, I used MainActor Broadcast (see link below). The standard version of this (MainActor) is available from Aminet I believe. It's excellent but not as versatile. MainActor will create anims in several formats and can run files of any length very quickly. I made a 70mb LightWave animation which runs great through MA. Another interesting system is ClariSSA, which uses the frames split into two interlacing components. Each half is displayed rapidly in succession to give a super smooth animation (SSA). I tried PowerMovie but try as I may, it never worked for me. It would play the demo anim supplied with the package, but my own stuff just wouldn't run at all. I believe it was written by one of the Power Computing people. I don't think it really got further than the beta stage.

JaX

[Stevo]

Yup, (Clari)SSA seems to be your ticket.

[ChaosLord]

Can ClariSSA play music along with the ANIM?

What is the max resolution anim it can play in HAM8 mode from HD?

[JaXanim]

There's no sound integration with ClariSSA. Also, the compiled anims are proprietary 'SSA' format so you need the built in player module. You can't import them into MainActor for example. MainActor does have sound capability.

With an 060 A1200, I think you would get very good animation speed with HAM8 at 320x512 (LoRes) and reasonable speed at 640x512 (HiRes).

If you wish to integrate soundFX you really need MainActor.

JaX

[amigadave]

marcfrick2112 wrote:
Hello All,
   I was wondering if anyone had some ideas to improve playback speed of animations on an AGA Amiga. I have been making animations using Scenery Animator, Vista Pro, and some little programs from Aminet, then converting them to a DCTV Animation....but in most cases the animation plays very slowly, perhaps a just a few frames per second for the most complex ANIM's.  I tried converting the Anim's to ANIM7, which helps a bit....
 Short of getting a busboard and a PAR card, anyone have ideas to improve playback speed?
My Amiga's specs:
A1200 Power Tower, OS3.9 w/BB 1 and 2, '060/50MHz, 1230 SCSI module, 128MB, 8.5GB HD

Many Thanks,
 

Something does not seem right here, I read the whole thread and all suggestions, but I can't believe that your 060/50mHz can't run a 3bit, or 4bit (DCTV) display animation at a high frame rate???  I have seen stock A3000 with only 030/25mHz accomplish the same task.  It played the entire movie "Back to the Future" from its hard disk using DCTV format. (Could it be that they were using a PAR card and I did not know, or remember it???)

That demonstration was shortly after the original release date of the DCTV and impressed me enough to buy it at $495 which was a lot of money to me at the time.

Send your DCTV animation to me via Pmail and I will try to run it on a few of my Amigas and see what frame rate I get.

[leirbag28]

@marcfrick2112

 Try anim8L !!!   it is the format created by SCALA. So get yourself a copy of the best Amiga Application ever made. You will never regret it.

Also it would be interesting indeed to save a DCTV anim as SSA (ClariSSA format) for higher speed playback.

also maybe you should save your DCTV at 720 x 240 instead of 720 x 480 an it will definitely run alot smoother.  I get perfect smoothness on an 040 @50mhz.

I hope you have AnimWorkshop and ImageDX as this makes the process of converting frames easy.

So what you need is:

SCALA MM300 or MM400
AnimWorkshop 2.0 version for AGA
ClarriSSA or ADORAGE 2.0
save in 720x240 3 bit I think.

[Jose]

Hmm, I though there were anim players that used Gfx cards so that they could play them at faster speed. Granted there would have to be some planar to chunky conversion wich would be a bit messy to get. Can't believe noone has actually tried it ...