Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: mbc@po.cwru.edu (Michael B. Comet) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: MINI-REVIEW: DPS Personal Animation Recorder Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 16 Aug 1993 15:52:39 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 100 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <24oag7$7kg@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: mbc@po.cwru.edu (Michael B. Comet) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, animation, commercial Hello to all in Renderland! I have just gotten my DPS PAR a couple days ago. Since I know others who read this are thinking of getting one, I thought I'd post my view of it. I will try to keep if brief. I am not affiliated with DPS. MANUAL AND INTERFACE The manual is very good, and is nice and compact. The user interface is equally friendly and has the look of a traditional VTR for playback. The software takes up very little room on the standard amiga drive, though it requires at least 1 Meg of RAM to run at all times. STILLS AND ANIMATION PLAYBACK In my Amiga 3000/25 with the recommended Seagate 500 Meg drive, I obtained true 30fps playback. Very smooth, very good quality. I have heard that there are problems playing back at slower speeds, though I haven't encountered that. You can also drag the frame bar back and forth and move one frame at a time with a mouse click. Using the latter -- i.e, Rewind and Fast Forward -- the frames actually go by faster than 30 fps! Those that use AREXX will be happy to know that the software has and AREXX port so you can sequence playback and so on using it. The quality at the highest level Q23 is essentially identical (to me) to the original image. For stills, the storage benefits alone are remarkable. For animations, the program sets the Q level for you. I have seen it work at around 19 to 14 depending on the image. 14 is pretty acceptable for video using both composite and SVHS (sorry, I can't test MII/Betacam output). However, JPEG type artifacting is still slightly noticeable. The NTSC composite output is very good, and the SVHS was almost identical to the RGB from my Firecracker board. DEFICIENCIES There are not really too many deficiencies in the device. However there are some things that are important to know. One item is that animations, while they can be looped on playback, do not loop without a pause. That is, if you have a 30 frame anim and play it, there will be about a 1/2 second pause on the last frame. To do a perfect pause-free loop you must append the animation to itself some number of times. The software can do this quite easily so it is not really a problem, though more drive space gets eaten this way. Also relating to projects, there seems to be no way in the software to rename projects. Also, with merging of animations in different projects, I have not been able to find a way to splice together anims from the different subdirectories. Playback speed is normally 30fps; however there is a button to select slow playback. As far as I can tell, you can set it only to preset values: from 30fps to 15fps, then 7.5fps, and some more down lower. I would like to see user adjustable settings here. OVERALL In all I have to say the PAR is great for 24 bit animations. There is no longer any hassle of single framing with tape, etc., and it enables the animator to view the anim easily and cut, paste, splice and mutilate anims into a final piece. It also has great capacity for still frame storage. One really great thing is that everything happens with just the click of a button. No longer do you have to wait to decompress JPEG images to show as stills. No longer do you have to wait to load up animations. Just click on a still frame and it appears on the output. Click on an animation, and the first frame is shown. Hit play and it goes. Really nice. For those looking for a single frames alternative at a reasonable price, this is a great product. CONTACT INFORMATION Digital Processing Systems 11 Spiral Drive, Suite 10 Florence, KY 41042 USA Phone: 606-371-5533 Fax: 606-371-3729 PS: The best thing is it comes in a big box with that really cool picture of the VTR on the front eating the tape. Impress your friends! -- +======================================================================+ | Michael B. Comet - Software Engineer / Graphics Artist - CWRU | | mbc@po.CWRU.Edu - "Silence those who oppose the freedom of speech" | +======================================================================+ --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews