Re: AST Vision Plus...

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

In article crownmi@zap.io.org (Myles Fudge) writes...
>
>The card you have and the card I have do essentially the same thing: 
>320x200x16 greyscale digitizing (and softwarewise, it is very simple!).
>The Enhanced card does real-time video digitizing at NTSC 30fps, and a 
>full 60 fields(!)  I have occasionally used the digitizer card to 
>watch B&W TV on my GS screen (when I don't use my VOC).  You can view the 
>digtizing process in realtime full-screen or a 1/4 screen window.  Click 
>the mouse and the image is captured, ready to save to disk.  The card
>also does RGB realtime capture by grabbing a red, then green, then blue 
>image, which is then converted into one image.  The greyscale capture is 
>much more stunning than the color.  However they both beat the pants off 
>the ComputerEyes card.  You can also save the original 'raw' image data 
>for later conversion to other platforms (anyone made an AST.rawimage to 
>SS converter?).  I have heard that the truecolor conversions are quite 
>impressive.  Perhaps Mitch has one of these cards, too.  Check Deja News.

   I have a video capture board in my IIgs, but it's Digital Vision's
ComputerEyes GS board. I've never used a Vision Plus Enhanced card (or 
the two revisions before it) but I can assume it's superior to what 
I have. To get optimal capture results with the CEGS board, it takes
up to 16+ seconds to grab an image (12 seconds to scan video signal,
4 seconds to calculate palette, even when using greyscale). Due to this
slow capture method, your video source must be perfectly still during 
that time. You need a VCR with a still-pause, or when using a video
camera, make sure your subject stays perfectly still (no easy task :)

   Despite that, greyscale scans are fairly decent. I found it works
exceptionally well when using a camcorder using the zoom-macro feature
(image is very crisp, detailed and sharp). Color captures are usually
quite poor, and often completely worthless IMO, although recently I
discovered something. Using it to capture animation (Japanese anime)
gives very nice results, much better than images samples I've seen 
from the AST board. I have some color CEGS samples sitting around
if anyone is interested in looking at a few. :) The CEGS captures
in either 4-bit greyscale or color (16 colors), but it does have a
raw 6-bit (64 colors) save format. Unfortunately I've never found 
software that worked with it properly, usually it just shows the 
image in various shades of green.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca