Welcome to the SIGGRAPH 96 Visual Proceedings CD-ROM!
This CD-ROM set contains the electronic version of the SIGGRAPH 96 Visual Proceedings.
"Inline" video clips and WWW links complement this hypermedia version of the print proceedings. The disks are organised as follows: Disk 1 includes the sections for the Computer Animation Festival/Electronic Theatre (CAF-ET), Applications (APPS) and the Technical, Artist and Animator Sketches (SKETCHES). Disk 2 contains The Bridge (BRIDGE) and the Digital Bayou (BAYOU).
To the first-time user it may not be clear how to exploit all of the features of the
Acrobat documents, so we include here a few straightforward instructions and explanations.
1. Directories, files, chapters and sections
Each directory (folder) on the disk reflects a section of the Visual Proceedings
devoted to one of the creative programs: the Bridge, the Digital Bayou, the
Computer Animation Festival, Applications and Sketches.
In each directory you will find a file named "TOC.PDF",
which contains the table of contents for that section. The Table of Contents
is fully linked to all the pieces listed therein; clicking on an entry will open the
appropriate file at the appropriate page. Alternately, each file contains a listing, or
set of "bookmarks", which link to the individual pages in that file. The bookmarks
can be displayed by selecting the bookmark icon in the Acrobat Reader title bar.
2. Hyperlinks
Every email address and URL (World Wide Web address) in the documents is an active
link to that URL. These links are not so indicated with any border or other cue.
You must configure your copy of Acrobat to know which WWW browser
to use. You can do so in the Edit->Preferences->Weblink menu.
3. Inline Movies and External Viewers
Windows and Macintosh platforms
If you are reading these CD-ROM documents on Windows or a Mac, then you can view all the
provided movies both inline (using the Acrobat movie plug-in feature) or by launching an
external viewer. Whenever a movie is included in a page two movie projector buttons
are visible: one labeled "Inline" and the other labeled "Unix/External". The inline
button causes the movie to appear, play once and then stop. You may stop it before
it finishes either by clicking anywhere on the control bar or by hitting the ESC key.
The external button will launch your particular movie player as an external application,
and you will have to control it yourself.
UNIX platforms
UNIX does not provide support for inline movie playing. However, you can still view
the movie while you are reading the page by launching the external viewer xanim
provided with this CD-ROM set. (Check the installation and configuration instructions
on setting up xanim and your MIME types in the file PDFQTHLP.TXT). If you are on
a UNIX machine, and indeed if you are on any machine which understands the mapping
of MIME types to applications, you launch the external movie viewer by clicking on the
"Unix/External" projector button.
Notes on Performance
Although we have made every effort to optimise these movies for double-speed
CD-ROMs, you may notice some jerkiness in playing them back from the CD-ROM,
especially if audio is included. This is often more noticeable when using the inline
Acrobat feature. For some reason, this can often be corrected by letting the movie
play for a few seconds, and then dragging the position holder on the control bar back
to the start. This seems to fix any initial problems Acrobat has with playing the movie.
Other things you can do are to allocate Acrobat and your movie player more memory, or
to copy the section's entire directory/folder to your hard drive. This latter option will
drastically improve performance.
Movie Types
Movies are provided in two formats: Cinepak-compressed QuickTime, which are the
versions linked into the documents themselves, and MPEG. Where available, the MPEG
versions are supplied simply as data files and must be viewed separately with an
external viewer.
4. Supplemental Files
Where supplemental files of relevance to the particular venue have been provided
they have been installed in a subdirectory of the program directory called
SUPPLMNT. A notable example is the time-limited VRML browser in the
Digital Bayou section.
We hope you enjoy these electronic documents and welcome your comments and suggestions.
Lyn Bartram
Visual Proceedings Production Editor
SIGGRAPH 96 Online Publications and Promotions Chair
