Re: QuickTime GS movie of jet fighter uploaded to ground

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

In article pubpc1@library.ucla.edu writes...

>Anonymous wrote:
>>
>> Sorry if these questions have already been answered!  I just did a DejaNews
>> search,  and I did not find very much information.  I was wondering if I
>> could convert Quicktime videos for viewing on the GS!
>
>You can easily convert Quicktime videos for viewing on the GS.
>It is not difficult to do, just somewhat time consuming.

    Not necessarily. I was rather intrigued by your efforts at
converting movies, but it sounded much too time consuming, so
I thought there must be an easier way. There is, and I just
tested my theory by doing my own test conversion immediately
after reading your post. Total time? Oh, about 10 minutes. :)

>What you need to do is open the QT movie and go through it frame by
>frame, converting each frame to a separate GIF or TIF file. On
>the GS, they need to be converted to APF or SHR and saved
>together as a PaintWorks animation.  The sound track is converted
>separately and HyperCard is used to synchronize the two.

    Better to let the computer do the work for you. I just did
quick search with Yahoo and found a program that will separate
the movie frames, and output each frame as a GIF image. This
one program only seems to support Windows 'AVI' format, but I'm
sure you could find similar programs to do the same with Mac
QuickTime and possibly even MPEG format. The conversion process
was automatic--it built all the GIF files for me in a couple
of seconds without requiring me in front of the machine.

>I recommend Corel PhotoPaint on the PC or Mac side

    To try the example I gave above, get the shareware program
called GIF Construction Set. The non-registered versions is at
the URL below, and yes, it will convert AVI->GIF automatically.

http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html

>HyperCard is used to combine the audio and video.  Just play
>the synthLAB sequence or sound clip followed by the Animate
>command to start the PaintWorks animation.

    Oh yes, I forgot to mention automating the conversion
process on the Apple IIgs side. For that just use Convert
3200, there is a function within the program to convert
one picture format to another (in this case GIF to Apple
Perferred Format). After I copied the GIF's onto an MS-DOS
floppy disk, I inserted it into my SuperDrive and let
Convert 3200 read the files off disk, convert them, and
then save them onto my hardrive.

    The third and final step, I loaded up DreamGrafix and
told it to 'Compress' all the converted APF images into a
PaintWorks animation (I perfer DreamGrafix as you can tweak
the animation speed afterwards). This of course is also an
automated process, so I once again sat back and relaxed 
while the computer did all the work for me.

>> How long did it take to convert the Su-27 video to GS format?
>
>Several months.  That's because I did it in my spare time,
>converting 10 or 20 frames at each sitting.  If you spend a
>night or two in front of the computers, you can do it faster.

    Heh, well hopefully I've discovered a faster method for
you to try. What took several months should be doable in a
mere matter of minutes (we just need to find a PC program
that does the same for QuickTime and MPEG, but I'm fairly
sure such programs do exist. In the meantime IBM *.AVI
format movies are a snap to do).

>> Im already on the subject of GS video, so might as well ask a few more
>> questions:  How were those MINI-movies created?  (the ones that are not 
>> full screen.  Theres one with a jet flying, the intro to the Dr. Who TV 
>> show, and a few others)
>
>I don't know how those mini-movies were made.  Anyone?

    I was in contact with Ronald Mercer back in the fall, in
fact that is how I managed to collect all the existing Mini-
Movies to upload to Ground. I believe he used an AST Vision
Plus digitizer card (the Visionary GS and VP Enhanced are
the identical board, just with minor fixes). I would have
to ask, but I think he actually started work on a program
that would capture the frames using that card and turn it
into Mini-Movie format.

    There was also the DreamVision movie format that had
picture and sound. I spoke to Steve Chiang about it about
6 years ago in an e-mail conversation, and he explained
a couple of details about how that worked (I think I have
my old mail archived around here somewhere, I should go
dig that up if it still exists).

>If you make any movies, please upload them.  :)

    Speaking of creating movies, the little test I did grew
in size from 511K to well over 1.3 megabytes (I downloaded the
smallest AVI movie I could find for the test, it was 22 frames
that were 320x240 each. I converted them to 320x200 greyscale).
It worked quite well, and not bad considering I did it in a
couple of minutes with very little effort just a few moments
ago. :)

    Writing a program to separate QT/AVI frames and convert
them into APF and then into PaintWorks format (either in 1
or 2 steps) should be doable. The only catch how large just
the movie alone becomes (nevermind sound). I suppose you
could also write a PaintWorks $C2 player that could play
the frames as it reads it, but you'd need a very fast SCSI
interface and hardrive to keep it from getting choppy.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca