Amiga ANIM files

[jeffimix]

I'm wondering how much RAM these files usually take to play. Apparantely on Aminet, there is a MPEG--->ANIM converter, and ANIMs run much faster. Anyone use these for movies?

[iamaboringperson]

this is a very old format, and anyone who has used the amiga for a long time should know about them

they dont use all that much ram really, since they are usually low res, and low no. bitplanes

but their compression is crap

only way to find out, is download some and play them

[JaXanim]

I suppose it depends whether you're just viewing 'em or creating them yourself.

If you wish to create anims on your Amiga, there's a number of tools available, but I've found MainActor to be the best.

If you pop over to my website, you'll find umpteen anim files I've put together and details of how to play 'em.

Cheers,

JaXanim

http://waveguide.v21hosting.co.uk/dloads.html

Sorry this isn't an active link, I'm blowed if I can get the text editor to work! Get message about lengthy Javascript running...!...?

[Vincent]

A bit OT

@JaXanim

Use this as a guide ;-)

{url=http://urladdyhere}displayed name here{/url}

Replacing { and } with [ and ]

:-)

[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

[darksun9210]

yup. i remember the only way to view an Mpeg was to convert it into ANIM format. then you can get a full 50FPS... of either 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128/256 colours. there are some Ham and Ham8 anims out there but they are usually a but slower as the chipset has to do a bit more work and thrash the chipram bus. ANIM files were usually of the order of k's, but could go to megs and megs. so direct hard disk playback was required for big anims so the anim didn't have to be loaded entirly into ram as witrh early players. just need enuff ram for the page buffers. but totally loading into ram is good for max smoothiness.
look up biganim on aminet or something for hard disk playback, or cyberanim for GFX card support, so anim files can be limitless in size, but there isn't really any compression to speak of. at the time when you only had a 7Mhz CPU you need all the CPU time you can get, and on-the-fly decompression with that limit wasn't even considered. also having a lossey based compression wasn't really a good thing for quality. so each frame was as good as the last, and good enuff for a picture in its own right. can't really say that for Mpeg1. mmmm wasn't video CD a success....

[chris]

You missed CDXL out of your history lesson  :-)

Between IFF ANIM and MPEG-1 there was a need to play video files (ie. animation with sound) on hardware that was not fast enough to decode MPEG.  CDXL was first, I think, devised for the CDTV and it plays pretty well on low-end hardware.  It never really caught on, not even in the Amiga market.  A MPEG->CDXL convertor would possibly be quite useful for low-end Amiga owners.

Chris

[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 :-)

[JimS]

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

I remember both of those.. I used REND24 to convert Amiga Lightwave frames to Anim7 format files... They looked pretty good for the time.  Recently, I came across one of those files and converted it over to AVI format for the peecee... still looks cool.

[DaBest]

WOW........talk about remembering the good old days . I still use some of the programs to this date. :-D  :-D  :-D

[darksun9210]

yeah i remember CDXL. i was gob smacked to run ...quarter screen (or quad pixel full screen) on my A500 / A570

theres a set of proggys i either got off a mag coverdisk, or aminet CDXL GUI... adds frame extraction and CDXL building... just need a set of IFF images all the same size and colour depth, and an IFF sound... make your own CDXL's...