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ChromaStudio-24 Product Specification Factsheet.
╜1993 Floppyshop
This document acts as a rough guide to some of the many features available to
a Chroma user, and may give magazine reviewers and the otherwise curious a
list of facts about the product, which might be used as a base comparison
against other similar packages. This information contains the minimum of
'waffle' and can all be verified.
Purpose:
* Chroma is designed primarily as an art/animation package, but includes
many of the features of an image processing studio, morphing package and much
more besides.
Capabilities:
* Animation package:
Animating 'films' in both 256 colour and true colour modes.
* Art package:
Painting and drawing using one or more frames. Since Chroma is frame based,
the number of screens available to you is limited only by free memory.
* Image processing software:
Touching up and altering pre-generated pictures and animations.
* Field Distortion software:
Warping and bending of images in 256 colour and true colour modes, to create
short films or single pictures.
* Field Morphing software:
Merging of two distinct images, with the automatic generation of the in
between frames, to create a smooth animation from the first image to the
second.
Features:
* ChromaStudio is based on a video editing unit, making the handling of
multi-frame films more accessible and much easier to understand.
* Images and animations are held in memory as a sort of pseudo compressed
digital videotape, rather than in separate GEM windows. This allows animations
to be dealt with like real film. Internal compression averages at around 6:1
on most animations, but is variable from one animation to the next.
* Up to 4000 frames or images may be held in memory at once, depending on
available memory.
* On-line help describes the function of the icon beneath the mouse pointer
and also displays the keyboard shortcut for the relevant tool.
* Chroma works in both true colour and 256 colours, with mode and resolution
being configurable from inside the program. This may be changed at any time
without exiting from Chroma.
* True colour is handled like 256 colour mode, except that when you change a
colour in the displayed palette, the colours in your pictures do not change.
This allows any colour (or colours) in the 256 colour palette to be changed as
often as you like, to generate a new colour, without affecting the image. We
came to the conclusion quite early on, that colour wheels and such like are a
waste of useful screen area and of no practical use.
* Chroma has its own virtual screen emulator built in. Canvas size is
independent of screen size and can be anything from 320*200 up to 1280*960
pixels. The screen acts as a window directly onto the canvas, and can be
scrolled or dragged around with the mouse. This allows you to edit images with
a greater resolution than that handled by the Falcon, and re-save them at
their original size.
* The screen acts on the canvas like a parallax adjustable zoom lens. There
is no 'zoom studio', just different levels of magnification. All studios,
including every tool within them, function at any zoom level. This including
morphing, image processing and even animation.
* Magnification varies from 1:1 up to 8:1 with response time being
effectively zero, making it possible to change zoom levels using the keyboard
even during a line or box dragging operation. The zoom level can also be
altered during animation playback.
* Users no longer need to hunt around for the palette selector, since it is
always at the bottom of the screen. This does not cover part of the image
since the screen has been expanded vertically to accept this feature. This
feature is removed when viewing animations.
* 16 built in pens and 4 custom brush buffers allow more flexible cut and
paste operations without interfering with the drawing tools.
* 4 types of bezier/beta curves and splines are available which do NOT
require SpeedoGDOS to operate, thus freeing up more RAM for your
frames/animations.
* Brushes can be flipped, scaled, rotated, perspected and pasted above or
below the canvas in real time, without delays.
* Brushes and screens can be automatically re-mapped to fit a new palette,
even one containing colours very different from the original.
* Images and animations can be made to overlay, underlay, preceed, append,
insert or patch from disk directly onto those already held in memory. Palettes
may be re-mapped as necessary, during these operations.
* Fill types include solid, Gourad, texture, contour, tri-grad and quad-grad,
all possible in 256 colour mode as well as true colour.
* The ability to import and export FLI and FLC animation formats makes Chroma
compatible with Animator PRO on the PC.
* Tools can be 'tweened', allowing a curve to begin life as a line and end up
as a figure 8. This can be done with many tools and is the heart of the
animation unit.
* Tweening may be performed over all frames or over a segment of frames,
either backwards or forwards.
Software specifications:
* Simple, custom written WIMP environment, based loosely on a mixture of
interfaces, including GEM, Windows and NeXTstep. Screen redraws are
instantaneous in most modes.
* Written in 100% 68030 assembly language, Chroma utilises the improved
instruction set and dual caching capabilies of the new chip wherever possible,
offering speed improvements over GEM based software which are at least
comparable to a processor upgrade.
* Certain sections of highly time intensive code have been written in
DSP56001 assembly language, offering performance very close to that of the
Silicon Graphics Indy workstation (see benchmarks below). Unlike many current
Falcon products, Chroma's DSP code is purpose written on the spot, as opposed
to pinching it from the NeXT platform.
* The upper palette limitation of 262,144 colours has been blatently
disregarded and as far as we are concerned, it is now 16,777,216. This gives
access to 256 greyscales rather than the usual limit of 64.
* All operations performed by Chroma are realtime. The user need not hang
around waiting for a rotated block to redraw itself.
* Chroma is resolution independent. You can run it from any Desktop
resolution even if you wish to draw in a different one. Upon exit, you will be
returned to the resolution from which Chroma was run.
* Virtual memory drivers such as OUTSIDE are fully supported, offering users
anything between 4 and about 500 meg of RAM.
* Compatible with MultiTos, Chroma doesn't care what you happen to be doing
in the background, it just shuts everything else off until you wish to access
the Desktop or quit the program.
* Base memory consumption in 320*200*256 is about 512k, leaving almost
everything else for your animations.
* Chroma is not hard disk hungry. The combined size of the executable and
external files amounts to around 200k.
* Chroma is almost completely crash proof, and any bugs we may have missed
will almost certainly be eliminated before release date. We do not hard wire
the system to prevent crashes, we just avoid bad bugs in the first place!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speed comparisons: ( Field warping 720*486 pixels, 100 lines )
100 control lines is not a typical situation, since excellent results can be
obtained using 15-30 lines. The number of lines greatly affects rendering
time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine : Processor : Clock rate : Cols : Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Atari ST : MC68000 : 8MHz : 16 colour : 10 hours
486 PC : I80486 DX : 33MHz : 256 greyscale : 30 minutes
Falcon030 : MCDSP56001 : 32MHz : true colour : 18 minutes
SGI4D 25 : MIPS RS4000 : 110MHz : true colour : 2 minutes
References:
The Falcon and ST tests were performed using our own software, the PC timings
being extrapolated from a small image rendered in a leading PC morphing
package and the SGI timings were taken directly from SIGGRAPH Proceedings 1992.
Douglas Little of the BLACK SCORPION Development Team '93
ChromaStudio-24 is due to be released towards the end of 1993 and will be
distributed by Floppyshop, PO Box 273, Aberdeen, AB9 8SJ, Scotland, U.K. It
will be well publicised in the specialist computer press, nearer to the
release date.