A totally new concept for Amiga CD-ROM. With Video Creator anyone can make their own exciting, mind-bending videos to accompany any of your standard music CDs. It's simple - just put in any music CD and use the awesome 32 bit graphics power and easy to use editor to create professional quality music videos with any number of excellent effects, stretch, melt, flip, roll, squeeze, cross fade, psycho cycle, - the list goes on.
There are over 50 effects that can be combined with colourful images, 2D and 3D animations and our special "Quad" animations that can be played in 8 different video-wall style modes. Video Creator also contains Random Raves: put in your music CD, switch to random raves and let the CD32 do all the work and generate a realtime visual backdrop to accompany the music of your choice.
Video Creator was the first Amiga CD-ROM to support MPEG, and can combine effects with Video CD Full Motion Video. [Although the complexity of effects is limited due to the way the CD32 FMV module was badly designed - the DMA is shafted and you can't rely on how much CPU time you have at any given point, depending on the MPEG encoding. It's a hardware limitation, it's a pain in the butt, and there's no way round it, unfortunately. Nobody else had ever tried multitasking FMV and Amiga tasks before when VC was under development and it looks like doing so was never a design consideration when the module was being designed]
Although Video Creator was designed for CD32, it will also run on any AGA-equipped Amiga with at least a 68020 CPU, 2M of CHIP RAM and a CD-ROM drive with CD32 emulation software. (The Power Computing and Zappo PCMCIA-based drives for the A1200 work well). Of course, without the storage limitations of the CD32, on an Amiga you can save your video datafiles to disk and incorporate your own imagery. We also released a couple of support utilities - a VecAnim editor and a QuadAnim convertor, to open up the options even further.
Video Creator is being used professionally, as well - the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used it in for work on a documentary on the artist Salvadore Dali (somehow it seems apt, no?), and more recently, VC is doing the rounds for AV work in some key London venues. (Anybody out there get to Club UK's Three Mill Island rave at New Year? Guess who was doing AV on stage for room 3, 'longside some of the best rave/trance DJs about? Yep, us ;->)
So what do the reviewers make of Video Creator? Amiga Report covered the program in issue 2.22 (click here to see the US online version) and said many nice things. But read for yourself, don't just believe us ;-)
And the printed press?
Amiga Shopper Aug '94 89%
"This is a great implementation of an excellent idea for a good price."
AUI Aug '94 92%
"Video Creator is a very special program because it takes the CD32 into a new realm."