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Welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
A computer that can talk thanks to a built-in speech chip.
A computer with exceptional graphics and sound capabilities.
A computer that can do multitasking.
It's called the Amiga 500 and at under $1,000, some say it's got the best price performance
ratio of any computer on the market.
Today we take a look at the Commodore Amiga on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by CompuServe, featuring an online reference
library, Wall Street reports, at-home shopping, airline reservations, games, and hundreds
of other services.
CompuServe, helping people get the most from computers.
Additional funding is provided by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte.
Byte's detailed technical articles on new hardware, software, and languages cover developments
in computer technology worldwide.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
I'm Stuart Shafae and this is Gary Kildall.
Gary, I'm playing a game called Interceptor here from Electronic Arts.
It's a new F-18 flight simulation game written for the Amiga and as you can see, the graphics
and the sound are spectacular.
When you talk about the Amiga, one tends to talk about graphics and sound.
It's a pretty good general purpose computer, but it's kind of the Rodney Dangerfield of
personal computers.
It doesn't get very much respect among the IBMs and the Macs of the world.
Why is that?
Well, Stuart, part of it is the Commodore heritage.
The Commodore brand name is associated with the low-end computers.
When it first came out, it was pitted up against the Atari 520ST.
The 520ST was about $500 and this came out at about $1,500, so it really didn't match
up.
And moving up market is difficult because, of course, there's distribution channels that
they didn't have established.
There's a cumulated software base we found with the Mac and the IBM PC and the Amiga
just didn't have that.
Now, we're starting to see some really good software being written for the Amiga, so that
situation may change.
Okay, Gary, we're going to take a look at the new Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000 and we'll
see some of the new exciting software that is being written for the Amiga.
We're going to begin by going to Oakland, California and taking a look at a man who
uses an Amiga plus DigiView and Deluxe Paint to make a living as a professional photographer
and designer.
Larry Keenan is a San Francisco photographer who has added the Amiga to his collection
of photographic equipment.
Working with a video camera, a digitizer, and a software package called DigiView, Larry
can create new images directly on screen.
Basically, it was a logical extension of my business because I work with a lot of different
elements in photos that the digitizing process was like another brush.
It's just another technique.
It allows me to take a photograph that I've already have in a stock file and resize it,
take out elements.
For instance, you have a favorite photograph that you want to use for something and it's
got telephone lines all in it.
It's got cyclone fences, lots of problems.
And you can go in and you can digitize these areas out.
Larry is well known for his ad work and magazine covers and increasingly for his artwork decorating
software packages.
The computer gives him a definite advantage in dealing with the deadlines imposed by commercial
work and it lets him be more independent.
This is the main difference in this technology.
It allows artists, photographers, illustrators, anyone in the art field to take an image,
digitize it on their own terms and present it rather than being a victim of a technician
basically doing it and you have no input, none.
Making the switch from a sharp lens to a fuzzy monitor is not without its problems.
Larry regrets the low resolution of a computer screen compared to photographic film and he
finds it hard to keep up with constant changes in the technology.
But he's optimistic.
The trick is to learn the process because that won't change, just the quality will change
in the future and that's the important part.
Joining us in the studio now is Heidi Turnipseed.
Heidi is an animator with Five Rings Company in Southern California.
Next to Heidi is Adams Douglas, Director of Product Development with Micro Illusions in
Southern California.
Carrie?
Heidi, you're now using computers to help you with classical animation techniques.
Why did you choose an Amiga over an IBM PC or Mac?
Well, it was advertised as having full animation capability, the Blitter technology and the
4-channel sound, the 4096 colors and the very reasonable price were all factors.
So the graphics really drew the machine off.
Absolutely.
Now, you have a program here with Photon, I guess, that you're using for your animation.
Can you show us how it works?
Here's an animation pencil test that I shot of my 10 drawing cycle of a galloping horse
and I'm able to test the animation at home, alter the drawings, re-digitize them and save
them back to disk until I've polished them.
So the black and white drawings are not drawn on the machine itself, they're done externally?
That's right.
Okay.
And what was your next step after this?
At this point, I animated a rider on a separate level, digitized that, mapped it onto the
galloping horse frames, saved them separately so that I can always refer to a horse alone
if I want to, and then I called them up in a paint program and colored them.
Could you pull that up for us?
And while you're loading that version, Adams, let me ask you about the software she's using.
What's it called and how does it work?
Okay, this is the cell animator module of our Photon Video line of products and they're
a set of modules you can use for various video applications either at home or professionally.
This particular one is a tool for animators to use to arrange frames, play them back in
any order, reload them, edit them, and it does support all of the graphics modes available
on the Amiga.
With any type of memory you might have, it'll dynamically adjust to that.
Now, Adams, there's usually a graphics picture that takes an awful lot of storage, so how
much memory does it require to do animation?
Usually you can fit on an 8 megabyte Amiga, which is what we got sitting here.
Depending on the graphics mode, if you're in pencil test mode, which takes up the least
space, you can fit well over 1,000 frames.
And the longer, more complex colored sequences, you can go down, it goes down to like 100
frames.
But you have great versatility in the way you can play those frames back out, so it's
not as much of a constraint as it would be if you were only playing it back on the screen.
Heidi, how are we doing with the next generation of the horse here?
Well, we've loaded up the last frame.
And?
I'm going to call it up here.
And here we have the full color version of the previous scene.
Now, how do you do the coloring process here?
Do you color each individual frame?
Yes, I do.
And I have the capability of filling a shape and incorporating the line around the outside
of the shape so that the line is actually a deeper shade of the fill color.
This is something that is impossible due to the man hour requirements where it could be
done in traditional cell animation.
Now, how about the video output from this?
Is this commercially usable, like for broadcast, for example?
Well, apparently with a third-party Genlock product that has just come out on the market,
it is.
And I'm going to be anxious to test that myself.
Heidi, you've got another demonstration with a background in it.
And I want to ask you to load that up also now.
And I want to ask you one more question while Heidi's doing that.
What kind of hardware configuration do you need to run something like PhotonCell N?
It will run on a standard Amiga with, we would recommend at least a megabyte of memory.
And you could load.
You can run it on a 500, you're saying?
Oh, yeah, you could run it on a 500 easily.
There's no special hardware video requirements.
Those are added as options depending on what you want to do with what you create.
Okay, Heidi, what do we have now?
What we have here is a full-color animation sequence that I built from my original pencil
drawings using the Amiga computer.
I utilized the computer to color each frame, pick them up onto the full-color background
that I painted using the Photon paint program, saved each discrete frame to disk.
There are 80 frames here.
And colored each frame myself in the computer.
Okay, very nice.
What does this mean to the animation industry?
Well, it means that I, as an individual classical animator, can produce my own full-color animation
sequence in my own home.
All right, so you can be competitive with big studios, huh?
You bet.
Heidi, thank you very much.
In just a minute, we'll take a look and listen to the music capabilities of the Amiga with
a hot new program called Music X.
So stay with us.
Joining us in the studio now is David Joyner.
David's a programmer with Micro Illusions and the developer of Music X.
And back with us, Adams Douglas.
David, we've seen how an Amiga can be used for professional animation.
What does an Amiga do for you as a musician?
Well, it allows me to essentially set up a multi-track recording studio in my home.
The synthesizers nowadays all have what is called MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument
Digital Interface.
It's like a set of agreements between various music synthesizer manufacturers as to how
their various instruments can communicate with each other.
And the computer can receive that information and process it in various ways.
And I will now try, attempt to record a performance and show you how it works.
I'll set the tempo to some reasonable value, 131 quarter notes per minute.
I'll now start to record.
The drum machine, which has been synchronized to the computer, will automatically start.
So now you're making a visual recording.
And I'll stop that, store it into the machine.
Now if I go back to the beginning and play again, you can see it's got controls just
like a tape recorder.
Fast forward, rewind, and play.
This program has been designed to work on various levels.
On the surface level, it's very simple.
But at the same time, you can dig down deep into its innards and sort of...
But right now what you've done is you've recorded one segment of music.
And how many segments can you record now?
You can record up to 250 segments in the computer, although 20 of them can play at once.
Okay.
So can you show us how you manage some of those segments?
Here's the editing screen.
Well, there's various different editors.
I'll show you the simplest one, which is the bar editor, which shows the music as a series
of bars.
And in fact, you can drag notes around.
Shut that off.
Anyway...
So what are some of the other controls that you have?
Well, I'll show you some of the other screens.
There is the librarian screen, which allows you to send sound data to the synthesizer
and make the synthesizer play different sounds.
You can store the various patches from the synthesizer onto disk.
There's going to be...
Let's see.
We have filters.
What these allow you to do is process your playing in real time and change your performances.
Here's an example of...
This takes a second to load.
And the key map editor, which allows you to redefine the behavior of the musical keyboard,
sort of like musical keyboard macros, which you can assign a sequence of notes to a key
on the keyboard.
And I've always been interested in the idea of sort of co-composition, co-performance,
not just a human composing and not just a computer composing all by itself, but together
in a synthesis.
There's a lot of things that I'm interested in developing in experimental techniques in
music.
So you see this as more of a combination of the talents of the machine and the talents
of the performer.
Exactly.
David, what does MusicX do that's new in terms of this kind of music software?
Well, it's new in the sense that it's affordable.
It runs on a machine that's affordable and a machine that has color.
The Amiga is a very creative machine.
I think it has a very creative spirit to it.
And I think that many musicians are attracted to that, and they're dying for an excuse to
buy one.
Adam, MusicX is in development now, right?
I mean, you're still working on this thing.
When's it going to hit the market?
This will be out in about two months.
Okay.
And you said it's reasonable.
What will it cost?
$290, I believe, something like that.
Although by the time this program airs, it may be less than two months.
Okay.
And is this for the professional musician, primarily MusicX, or is it for a person who's
not a performer and can still take advantage of this?
Well, I think the program can adapt to various levels of talent.
If you're an amateur musician, sort of like I am, I'm really sort of a musician techie,
I like to be able to compose on a screen because I'm not that great of a keyboard player.
On the other hand, I want something that the professional can also use in his work.
One last question.
We've heard of the Atari ST a lot from musicians.
How does that compare to an Amiga for what you're doing?
Well, I think the Amiga is a little bit more polished in the way it's designed.
And I'm hoping that MusicX will be able to support a lot more features because of the
multitasking power of the Amiga.
David Adams, thank you very much.
Now we know about the music and graphics capabilities of the Amiga.
There are also scientific applications on the Amiga.
Wendy Woods has a report from the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Foundation in San Francisco.
Now you see it, now you don't.
The letter E vanishes when the motion stops.
In this experiment, the lines with the black squares appear to be crooked.
But when the color is changed to green, they are straight.
These are two of dozens of visual experiments being conducted at San Francisco's Smith Kettlewell
Eye Research Foundation, where a team headed by Dr. Ken Nakayama is studying human visual
perception and specifically how motion is involved in helping us to see.
Dr. Nakayama creates these experiments using Amigas, running deluxe paint software from
Electronic Arts.
Well, the Amiga, especially at the time that it emerged about two years ago, was really
the only thing on the block to do the kind of things that we wanted to do.
It has a really great graphics capability, as you're probably aware.
It has special hardware which enables you to move images around without even the CPU
knowing it's happening, essentially.
So you can just do things very, very fast.
You can't do it on the previous machine.
Dr. Nakayama feels that Amigas, and micros in general, are opening a whole new field
of vision research.
The motion that you can achieve on a computer screen simply cannot be duplicated by standard
eye tests.
People here are pioneering the use of low-cost micros with technically sophisticated graphics
in vision research.
And eventually, these Amiga graphics experiments may end up in clinical settings to test actual
patients with vision problems.
In San Francisco, for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods.
With us in the studio now are Tim Jennison, president of NewTek of Topeka, Kansas, and
next to Tim, the vice president of NewTek, Paul Montgomery.
Stuart, so far we've seen the Amiga used for animation and for a musician's tool.
We have a TV camera sitting here, so I guess we've covered all the bases.
We're up to video on the Amiga.
Tim, why did you choose the Amiga as a target for your product, a video product?
Well, the Amiga, of all the computers on the market, is really most well-suited for video
use.
Right out of the box, it's without any other display cards.
It's got NTSC video.
It can display 4,096 colors at once, which is really enough to get a photographic quality
image on the screen.
Plus, with certain coprocessor chips and internal circuits, it's really a powerhouse.
It's got the throughput and the horsepower to do what we need to do.
And what does your product consist of?
Well, the video toaster is a peripheral that turns the Amiga into a professional video
box.
It really consists of four main sections.
First of all, it's a display card, and it carries the Amiga past 4,096 colors, so you
can display really millions of colors on the screen at once with more resolution.
And certain Amiga software packages can already take advantage of that increased resolution
and color.
Second, it's a frame grabber, or a video digitizer, so it can grab frames from a VCR or a camera
60 times a second in full color.
You can use that all by itself to capture frames for saving on disk and later recall.
You can import the images into a paint program and do cut and paste operations, for example.
We'll see how it works.
Okay.
First of all, we're looking at the toaster now, displaying live video 60 times a second.
And this is coming off the camera that's sitting on our desk right here.
The camera runs into the toaster, and the toaster runs into this monitor.
I can slow down the frame rate so you can see that it is really capturing images.
If you want to move your hand, Gary, you can see that it's really...
A little delayed.
Yeah.
Okay, some of the effects it can do.
This is tumbling around the X axis, tumbling around the Y axis.
This is a zoom.
These are typically effects that would be very expensive if you hadn't...
You'd go buy broadcast quality kind of material.
Mm-hmm.
These effects might cost $20,000 on up to $300,000 to do with traditional video equipment.
This is a moving blind effect.
Here's a quad mosaic, and then there's kind of a kaleidoscope effect there.
This is a 16-level mosaic.
We can do a receding mosaic, which is kind of interesting.
And zoom in.
And we can do what we call an infinity slide, like an infinity mirror effect you'd see at
the barber shop.
Here is a mirror effect reflected around the center.
This is called pixelization.
It's a very popular effect in commercials.
It gives it kind of a high-tech computer look.
This is called a push-on.
This is used widely as a transition from one scene to another in a video.
The picture flying around on the screen is an example of what a TV engineer would call
an ADO effect.
And this is...
You would pay a lot of money to get this kind of effect.
Another ADO type effect is the sphere, which is usually reserved for the very expensive
broadcast equipment.
The beauty of the toaster is that these are all software-based effects.
So the more software we write for the toaster, the more effects it will do.
Paul, who's the customer for this kind of a board?
The customer is one of the 7 million camcorder owners in the U.S. right now.
It is education.
It is corporate sales and training tapes.
It's anyone who really has an interest in video or a need to do video.
This will give them that slick television look that people are becoming accustomed to.
So for example, if I had a small business and I wanted to have video in my PR department
and I could build myself, right?
Absolutely.
You don't see this right now, replacing things like ADOs and professional quality broadcast
effects equipment, do you or do you?
Well, I do because even if a station has these very high-quality units, they're typically
a kind of a precious resource.
And you have to line up to use them.
And if you're renting time on them, it's typically $300 an hour for the really top stuff.
So now a small ad agency has access to this sort of thing.
And even a TV news department has to line up for this sort of thing.
Now they could get those effects very cheaply.
What would the next steps be?
What are the things you're trying to add to the video toaster as you improve it?
We've got a number of add-on products planned for it.
We'd really like to get the entire production process into a single box.
And we're working on all the remaining bits and pieces to do that so we can really truly
have desktop video.
When you say desktop video, that's obviously sort of an analogy to the desktop publishing
situation.
Paul, what do you really mean by desktop video?
Desktop video is the marriage of personal computers and video.
So it gives a much more professional quality to equipment that traditionally is very expensive.
Using the computer technology, you can do it now fairly cheap.
Do you think the consumer is going to really be doing the full editing in their home in
the future?
If it's easy enough.
And that's what we've really tried to keep in the system.
Do you see that trend?
Yes, absolutely.
How much does the toaster package consist of, Tim?
What do you get and how much does it cost?
Well, for a whole system, you would need a VCR, a camera or a camcorder, the Amiga and
the toaster card.
All told, you would pay somewhere around $2,000 for everything.
And how about the toaster product itself?
I mean, what is that?
The toaster itself is listed for $799.
And that's a board?
That's a board that goes into the Amiga.
Do you see some combination, as Gary mentioned, we've seen music and we've seen animation
so far in this program, now video, of really taking these things together and going into
a real comprehensive creative work environment?
Absolutely, yeah.
And you guys working on that in any direction or working with other?
We're working on an NTSC paint program that would take the output of this and manipulate
it in millions of colors, an animation product, a titling product.
So I see that.
And it's also compatible with all Amiga software.
Okay, gentlemen, thank you very much.
That's our look at the Commodore Amiga.
Hope we'll see you here again next week on the Computer Chronicles.
In the random access file this week, yet another company has announced a rewritable optical
disk storage system for PCs.
But this time, Advanced Graphic Applications of New York says it will actually ship its
system this November.
The rewritable laser disk drive will have 650 megabytes capacity and use 5 1⁄4-inch
disks.
The company says the drive will operate as a standard DOS peripheral.
The price is $5,000.
Apple says it'll be coming out with a fix for its new version 6.0 of the Mac operating
system software.
The new version, dubbed 6.01, is due out any day.
A variety of bugs showed up in 6.0, and the new release contains 19 patches that reportedly
correct the problems.
Software maker Broderbund has announced a new venture with 11 Japanese partners to convert
successful Japanese software titles to popular American computer formats.
The new joint venture, called Kyodai Software, will be based in San Rafael, California.
They're promising 12 new software titles in the first year.
Symantec, most well-known for its MS-DOS program, such as Q&A, has unveiled five new software
packages for the Macintosh.
The programs include a planning, writing, and presentation package called More2, an
electronic mail system called Inbox, and three program development packages in C and Pascal.
Time for this week's software review.
Here's Paul Schindler.
You know, a blank spreadsheet can be anything, but above all, it's intimidating.
It is, in short, a tool so flexible that it's useless, kind of like a personal computer
without software.
Microsoft Excel can sometimes seem that way, as can any electronic spreadsheet.
What do you do with the blank screen?
Enter Heizer Software.
For $4, you get a floppy and a catalog listing more than 500 templates and macros which can
help you figure out how to make the most of your spreadsheet.
Like this guided tour of Excel.
It's self-written in Excel.
It shows you how you can take advantage of the software's power.
Or there's this income tax worksheet template from the sample disk.
It sure beats writing your own from scratch.
Each of these came from another user, like you, who felt it would be useful.
They sent it to Heizer, who charges customers from $5 to $50 and shares the proceeds with
the authors.
So, spend $4 for the sample disk, or see if Heizer wants to distribute your template.
Microsoft Excel templates from Heizer Software in Pleasant Hill, California.
For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Paul Schindler.
The new video display safety law in Suffolk County, New York, has gotten lots of press
attention lately, but last week, NYNEX threatened that it would close its directory assistance
operation on Long Island because of the new VDT law.
NYNEX says the law imposes unnecessary costs on the company, which would have to be passed
on to consumers.
The Suffolk County VDT law requires employers to provide visual rest breaks, non-glare screens,
and free eye care.
Computer researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say they've come up with a new sophisticated
speech recognition system that can understand any human voice speaking at a normal, rapid
rate.
The system is called Sphinx.
It currently has a 1,000-word vocabulary.
Finally, scientists at the Hughes Research Lab in California say they've developed a
prototype for the first three-dimensional stacked microprocessor.
The chunk of silicon is about the size of a tuna fish can.
It includes 1,024 separate processors in a 32-by-32 array.
The researchers say they hope to build a 3-D chip with more than 16,000 processors that
could have the power of the world's largest supercomputer, but use only 50 watts of power
and be small enough to fit in your hand.
That's it for this week's Random Access.
We'll see you next time.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by CompuServe, featuring an online reference
library, Wall Street reports, at-home shopping, airline reservations, games, and hundreds
of other services.
CompuServe, helping people get the most from computers.
Additional funding is provided by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte.
Byte's detailed technical articles on new hardware, software, and languages cover developments
in computer technology worldwide.
For a transcript of this week's Computer Chronicles, send $3 to PTV Publications, Host Office Box
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