Re: Wondering About Apple II video digitizing

[pubpc1@library.ucla.edu]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
>In article cv985@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Elliott) writes...
>
>>Just curious-
>>I haven't been able to find much in the FAQ about video digitizing on an
>>Apple II- is there a source of info somewhere (WWW etc) on the various
>>cards, software, what the Apple II is capable of in this manner, etc?
>
>As far as capabilities...
[snip]
>    The Apple IIgs is much better suited for video digitizing, having
>more color and resolution (and none of the limitations working with
>color 8-bit Apple II's have). It works great for B&W images, since
>you can use greyscales (16 levels of descending grey) and can get
>near-photographic quality images in 320x200 resolution. Video captures
>using color is possible, but the results aren't generally going to be
>as good as B&W since you can only display 16 colors out of the 4096
>available (you can use multiple palettes, but it gets messy. Works
>for GIFs okay, but not so well on raw-video ;)
>
[snip]
>    The other product for the GS is the Vision Plus Enhanced (originally
>the AST Vision Plus and Visionary GS). It was better than ComputerEyes
>in that it was a real-time capture board, there was no wait time to make
>a video capture (in fact, if you hooked it up to a TV, you could watch
>it on your GS RGB screen, even if slightly choppy :). It did both color
>and greyscale, and with special software, I believe you could covert a
>raw-data image into 256 or 3200 colors (someone else will have to give
>their opinion on that, I've not seen the card before).

Actually, with the Vision cards (Enhanced, AST, or Visionary), you
capture a 12-bit image (4096 colors), which can be saved as raw data.
This is a true color image and if anyone ever writes software to read
the format on other computers, you will get excellent results.

When used on the GS, the only conversion program that can read it, other
than its own software, is Prism.  Prism will read the 12-bit image and
map it to 3200 color mode (200 16-color palettes for 16x200=3200 possible
colors) giving pretty good results.

-Scott G.