Q:
I'm trying to find the most cost and quality effective way of putting
3ds animations to tape. Is there such a thing as a flic accelerator card
so I can play 400X600 (or even 600X800) animations at a reasonable speed
on a modest system so that I can record them real time.At present I can
get 200X320's to work reasonably well. Is flic speed mainly dependent on
hard drive speed or processor speed? Can I play back a flic that has
been rendered to fields via a cheap video capture card to my video
machine sucessfully.Is there a sound version of a flic? I have lots more
questions. Can anyone help?
A:
The playback speed of realtime flics depends on so many things that you
might consider buying a PAR or even PVR from DPS to avoid headache ;o)
Well, I used 320x200 right as I started with a 486DX2/66 and I still
like it - it looks way better on video than on the monitor, and
not-3D-trained people still find it good enough. As I got a Pentium I
tried to switch to 640x480, but it worked only in some special cases
like flying logos. The problem is that if you change the position of
your camera in a scene like an architectural walktru', the computer has
to update the whole screen. FLC writes only the differences between the
frames and if you let some small objects fly around, a fast computer
could manage even 1024x768...
Here some things that might help you:
Always do a DEFRAG (Speeddisk) on your drive before recording. The
whole flic is placed as one chunk and the reading head jumps only track
to track (on today's drives the track-to-track access time is about 1
ms!)
If you have much memory, and your flics (or parts of them) can fit in
it, use AAPLAYHI with the LOADFLIC function in the script. If you use
AAPLAY for 320x200, you can create some RAM-drives and copy the most
time-critical flics on them before recording. Because a MS RAM-drive can
be only up to 32MB, you can create more than one if you have more than
32 MB of RAM.
The render to fields function has nothing to do with flics. It is only
for single frame recording. A real video signal consists of 60 (50 for
PAL) fields that build the 30 (25) frames per second. A video that is
recorded with frames looks smoother, but I can't imagine that a cheap
movie card could make use of this way of rendering.
There are some rather bad ways to get more speed like playing only the
half of the fields - you get a picture that has every second line from
the screen black - I remember this was used in the videos of the first
CD-ROM version of the game Dune. At that time it was impossible to play
full-screen videos from the Dune movie out of the CD, so they took every
second pixel away! The last Wing Commander has an "interlaced" video
mode for slow computers that does the same.
There is an IPAS IXP process called LOSSY_I.IXP that does it. A demo can
be found on my IPAS resource page and on the "Inside 3DS" CD-ROM.
There is NO sound version of the FLI/C format, but there are some flic
players that can play a WAV or MIDI file at the same time.