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1993-10-11
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ChromaStudio-24 Product specification fact-sheet.
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
with many of the features of an image processing studio,
morphing package and more besides.
Capabilities:
* Animation package:
Animating films in 256 cols / true colour
* Art package:
Painting + drawing to one or more 'frames'
* Image processing software:
Touch-up and post-processing of pictures and animations.
* Field Distortion software:
Warping and bending of images in 256col/TC to create short
films or single pictures.
* Field Morphing software:
Mergeing two distinct images to create a third or more new
frames.
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
compressed digital videotape, rather than separate windows.
This allows animations to be dealt with like real film.
Internal compression averages at around 6:1 on most animations,
but can vary a lot.
* Up to 4000 frames or images may be held in memory at once,
depending on available memory.
* On-line help describes functions below the mouse pointer and
also displays the keyboard shortcut for that tool.
* Chroma works in both true colour and 256 colours, with mode
and resolution being configurable from inside the program.
* True colour is handled like 256-colours, except when you change
the palette, the screen stays the same. We came to the conclusion
quite early on that colour-wheels and suchlike are a waste of
useful screen area, and are therefore not included...
* Canvas size is independant 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.
* The screen acts on the canvas like a parallax-adjustable zoom
lens. There is no 'zoom studio', just different levels of
magnification. All tools and studios function at any zoom level
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 can also be 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.
* Brushes can be flipped, scaled, rotated, perspected, pasted above
and below the canvas in realtime, 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 overay, underlay, preceed,
append, insert or patch from disk directly onto those already
held in memory. Palettes may be re-mapped during these operations.
* Fill types include solid, Gourad, texture, contour, tri-grad and
quad-grad, all possible in 256-colours as well as TC.
* 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 specification:
* Simple, custom-written WIMP environment, based loosely on a
mixture of interfaces including GEM, Windows and NeXTstep.
Window redraws are instantaneous, and only begin to show
signs of drag in 640*400 true-colour upwards.
* Written in 100% 68030 Assembly language, Chroma utilises
the improved instruction set and dual-cacheing capabilies of
the new chip wherever possible, offering speed improvements
over GEM-based software at least comparible 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. (developers take note)
* 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 intensive operations 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.
* Virtual memory drivers such as OUTSIDE are fully supported
offering users anything between 4 and about 500 megs 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 for your animations.
* Chroma is not hard-disk hungry. Executable size + externals
totals up to around 200kb.
* Chroma is almost completely crash-proof, and any bugs we have
missed will be short-lived. 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+ST tests were performed using our own software,
the PC timings being extrapolated from a small image rendered
in 'Morph for Windows' and the SGI timings were taken directly
from SIGGRAPH Proceedings 1992.
Douglas Little of the Black Scorpion development team '93