Re: Graphics Conversion (was Re: NetScape 5)

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article Joe Kohn <joko@crl.com> writes...

>I just uploaded "gifdisk.shk" to ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple2/upload
>
>I'm not sure how long it takes before that file will be moved to the Dec98
>directory so that you can download it, but hopefully, it'll be soon.

    I just downloaded it. You can actually FTP invisible files from
the '/upload' directory if you know the exact name of any file that
is sitting in there. :)

>There are 77 GIFs in that file. Some of the GIFs started out as SHRs, and
>others were actually converted from Single Hi Res graphics to GIF format. I
>did all the conversions myself, years ago, using SHRConvert (the predecessor
>to SuperConvert) and some of the graphics are real nice looking and some are
>real dogs (with apologies to Bernie) ;-)
>
>Please...everyone....download those GIF graphics and use _your_ favorite
>graphics conversion program to convert them to standard 16 color 320 x 200
>Super Hi Res graphics. And, time how long it takes. Then post your times.

    Well, I decided to give it a try and came up with some rather
surprising results. Perhaps it has to do with the fact almost all the
images are already in 320x200 resolution with 16 or less colors, or
because I set an option incorrectly, but Convert 3200 came dead last
in this race. I should probably try it again with larger GIF images
that have a color depth of 256 colors, the results might be very
different.

Using my IIgs running at 15 MHz, with all programs reading and
writing to my SCSI hardrive connected through a 1 MB RamFAST SCSI,
I came up with the following results:

LordHighGiffer.............0 min, 50 sec
SHRView 3.6................2 min, 30 sec
Convert 3200..............30 min, 50 sec

    Time calculated is a bit rough since I didn't have a stopwatch
handy and just watched a digital clock (I started each test when
the seconds hit 0 and rounded off to the nearest second at the end).
So I'd say it's accurate with +/-10 seconds.

    I'm still curious why Convert 3200 took so long. I had the 77
GIF images loaded from '/HD/GIF' and saved to '/HD/GIF/TEST'. The
color options were set to use 16 colors (1 palette), the image
size was left at 320x200 (the default) and I told it to convert
all images in selected folder (I didn't choose "I believe in god"
as an option). Did I forgot to set something, or perhaps picked
an option that unnecessarily slowed things down? I'm interested
in hearing what results other people got...

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca