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Text File | 1992-02-01 | 20KB | 508 lines

WELCOME TO INFOCHANNEL 3.1! =========================== We at Digital Vision are proud to present version 3.1 of InfoChannel. With this version, we put emphasis on adding some useful features for video use. Also, we enhanced the overall speed and versatility of some of the existing features, to make InfoChannel the ideal choice for both video titling, multimedia and presentations. The 3.1 upgrade a disk-only based upgrade to 3.0. Therefore, all new features and enhancements are documented in this readme file. The next update of the software will have all these - and the forthcoming features - documented in the manual. Make sure your registration card is mailed in, this is the only way we can notify you of the continous development of InfoChannel. We intend to keep our reputation of the fastest multimedia development for the Amiga, so look out for more amazing features in the time to come! A short overview of new features in the 3.1 version: ---------------------------------------------------- * Scheduling functions to set in and out times and dates * Clock, date and pagenumber with any style on pages * RealTime antialiasing of text, brushes and colorfonts * Continous credit scrolling transition * Arexx support * Canon Stillvideo control * ANIM RealTime buffering * Colorfont support * Full support for outline fonts under WB 2.1 * Automatic remapping of brushes and colorfonts * SuperImpose transition * A-Z transition * Show layout boxes function * Full deadkey-support * New controls for remapping, underline air and underline position * The loading speed on the A3000 has been optimized, and is now about 5 times faster * Automatic popularity buffering for interactive applications * New function keys How do you use these additions - and how do they work? ------------------------------------------------------ We suggest you read the manual and learn to use InfoChannel before reading this section. Clock, date and pagenumber functions ------------------------------------ Using the ! mark with a following command, you can tell InfoChannel to get the time, date or page number automatically at runtime. These ! commands are available: !TIME - The time right now !DATE - Today's date !PAGE - The number of this page !MAXPAGE - The number of pages in this sequence !WEEKDAY !DAY !MONTH !YEAR !HOUR !MINUTE !FILE "ram:test"! - reads a text line from a file The advantage of these commands is that they can be written into any sentence, such as: "Today, !WEEKDAY is the day number !DAY of !MONTH". This sentence will read: "Today, wednesday is the day number 14 of June." A sentence like "This is page !PAGE of total !MAXPAGE." will read: "This is page 13 of total 34." Note that the ! commands can be given in both upper or lower case. The Scheduling functions ------------------------ In InfoChannel's main menu you will note a new column all the way to the right. Clicking on it will give you the new plan menu, where you can set in and out times, dates and weekdays of every page in the sequence. Thereby, pages can automatically disappear when they are outdated, or be shown only when they are of interest. All settings can be combined, to provide for a page to be shown from May 3rd to July 23rd, but only from 12:00 to 16:00 on wednesdays and thursdays. Using the "To last" button you can apply the same time settings to a whole script. RealTime antialiasing --------------------- Anti-aliasing is a technique to simulate higher resolution on the screen. By adding pixels of a softer color around the edges of a letter, the "jaggies" will disappear. Other anti-aliasing schemes for the Amiga are based on converting your fonts into a separate format. The disadvantages of this method is that you need special fonts, you can't get antialiasing on brushes or outline fonts, and it takes up over double space on your harddrive. Therefore, we invented the RealTime Antialiasing scheme, which antialiases as you type. To use the Antialiasing feature, simply go to the layout menu and set your Antialias level. Levels 0 through 3 are available, 0 being no antialiasing, and the other levels indicate how many colors it will use to soften the edges. Therefore, 3 will be the best choice, but it requres more colors "in between." The Antialias level can also be set using the F8 key, it switches through the levels in a 0-3-2-1 fashion. The color choice is very important when it comes to antialiasing. The default palette for blank backgrounds have been changed as a result of this. It is important that the intermediate colors are available in the palette, otherwise InfoChannel can't do the antialiasing. When antialiasing a white text, to a black background, for instance, InfoChannel will need 3 grey colors in order to do a level 3 antialiasing on it. In InfoChannel 3.1, you can also set what color you want to antialiase to. As a default, InfoChannel uses the color 0 for this, but you may want to alter this. On the palette menu, there is a separate color button for this. You can freely change this color to any of the 4096 available, or you can copy one down from the palette strip. Then, make sure you have intermediate colors available between this "antialiase to" color and your front or outline colors. Note you will need colors in between the front of the text and the outline, as well as from the outline and to the "antialiase to" color. The "Antialiase to" button on the palette menu will generate a spread for you from the selected color and further on in the palette. Click on a color you will use for the front, click "antialiase to", and then on a color two or three colors down the palette row. You will see that this functions very much like the normal "spread" function, but it spreads to the "antialiase to" color instead. InfoChannel antialiases the text lines when you play your scripts. If you want to improve the speed of this, you can save your background page as an IFF picture and then include this in your script. The "Save IFF" button has been moved to the "Save" menu instead, to make this more convenient. Continous credit scrolling transition ------------------------------------- In video production, credit scrolling is a common task. We decided to add this feature as a standard transition in InfoChannel, to make it easy to use. Simply select this transition, which shows an A, a B and an arrow on it's icon, to get contious scrolling titles - either upwards or downwards. You may also want to experiment with the speeds, as this also can be set from page to page. Continous scrolling takes so much out of the Amiga, however, that only speed 1 is available for a plain, nonaccelerated A500 or A2000. For maximum performance, we recommend accelerator boards from GVP or other vendors, or the Amiga 3000. Arexx support ------------- This is documented further in the ARexx directory on this disk. In short, any of the VISUAL commands can now be called from an ARexx script. This gives the ARexx programmer a host of powerful functions, such as ANIM, PICTURE, TEXT and so on. Even BUTTONs can be programmed from ARexx. Note that you can use InfoChannel to create the "look" of the presentation, and then work on it as an ARexx script. Colorfont support ----------------- InfoChannel now supports colorfonts, such as the Kara fonts. You can decide on what colors it should use, either the first colors in the range or to use the colors in the palette that are closest to the original range. This is set on the layout menu, with the "Remap" option. 1 is default and gives you a "best match" of colors. Full support for outline fonts ------------------------------ With Workbench 2.1 outline fonts may be added to your system and called from normal Amiga programs. The operating system will then generate any desired size for you on the fly. To support this fully, we added a control for setting the exact point size of any outline font. Incidentally, this also works with normal bitmap fonts, but probably not with the same pleasing results. Bitmap fonts tend to get "jaggies" when scaled. Canon Stillvideo control ------------------------ With stillvideo cameras, images are being recorded to disks rather than on film. The output from these devices are in video, which makes stillvideo a good companion for an Amiga system with a genlock. The Canon stillvideo system consists of a small camera, called ION in Europe and Xapshot in the US. This camera can't be controlled from a computer, so you need a playback unit, called RV-321 (RV-311 for NTSC). This unit can be controlled from the Amiga's serial port through a serial interface. Utilitizing this, InfoChannel can call up the correct picture at the right time and use any photo as a background page. Over this, you may genlock graphics and text to create unequalled presentations. To setup the Canon ION system, add this to the s:InfoChannel.config: EXTERNAL Stillvideo TYPE ion END After the next time you save the config file from InfoChannel's system menu, additional options will automatically be added to the file, like what serial device to use etc. In use, you just click on the "New page" button, and you will see a "Stillvideo" button in the file requester. After having decided what screen format you want to use - and maybe a background page - a "remote control" appears for you to select any of the 50 pictures that can be fitted onto one stillvideo disk. Then you can add text to this like to any InfoChannel background. For further information about Canon Stillvideo Systems, contact your country's Canon office. SuperImpose transition ---------------------- The SuperImpose transition takes two pictures and blends them together much like a video mixer does in a fade transition between two video sources. This technique gives a very impressive effect when used with intro titles etc. On the Amiga, this technique does have some limitations, since it requires a lot of colors available. Therefore, this effect can only be applyed to two pictures of a lower number of colors. Each picture's number of colors multiplyed by each other should not be greater than the maximum number of colors available in that resolution. For instance, in hi-res or med-res, the maximum combinations are 4 color to 4 color, or 2 color to 8 color. In lo-res or interlace, you can use 8 color to 4 color pictures. If your pictures have too many colors, InfoChannel will simply do a cut. A-Z transition -------------- This transition simply gives you all the different InfoChannel transitions one after another, from number one to seventy-some, and provides a quick way of making a script to show all InfoChannel's possibilities in this regard. Show layout boxes function -------------------------- A problem with the 3.0 version was often that all the "empty" lines around the page were invisible, and could be quite confusing. By turning on the "layout boxes" on the layout menu, boxes will be drawn around each line, empty or not. These boxes can be clicked in to automatically position the cursor to the preset justification, or moved around. To delete a box, simply click in it and press the backspace key. The "layout boxes" can also be turned on or off using the F9 key. Full deadkey-support -------------------- A "deadkey" is a key you press to get an "umlaut" or accent on the following letter. There are two "deadkeys" on the Amiga keyboard, one for ä and ê type letters, and one for é and è accents. With these keys, any foreign letter can be reached from any other keymap. New underline controls in layout menu -------------------------------------- The underline size is still accessible from the layout menu, but we added two extra controls for underlining. This is "Underline air" and "Underline position". Underline Air decides how much room there should be around "g"s, "j"s and other characters that go through the underline, while "Underline position" decides on how far down to put the underline. With this control you can also acheive "strike-through" by positioning the underline in the middle of the line. The loading speed and ANIM RealTime buffering: ---------------------------------------------- If you're using an A3000, you may notice quite a speed enhancement in loading of pictures and animations. It should now be about 5 times faster than in version 3.0. For all users, the buffering of the next page has become faster, since preparation of the next page now starts as soon as the transtion to the previous page has started (this was created to acheive continous credit scrolling). Also, the next picture or animation will be loaded and made ready while playing back another animation. This makes REALTIME video playback a snap - simply create a series of ANIMs in a size small enough to keep both this ANIM and the next in memory at the same time - which roughly will say the ANIMs should be one-third the size of your memory size. InfoChannel will then "link" these animations together at runtime. Automatic popularity buffering ------------------------------ While keeping pages in the memory buffer for quick access, InfoChannel now looks at the number of times this picture has been shown before deciding on what pictures to throw out of memory. Sine the most frequently used pages automatically will be thrown out of the buffer last, in a point-of-sale or information boot system the users will actually decide on what pages should come up the fastest by popular demand. New function keys ----------------- In version 3.0, you could go to next page in your presentation while being in the text menu by pressing F2, F1 to go back one page. F3 saves your current page and clears it, ready for you to make another page. In 3.1, we added Shift-F1 which goes to the first page in the script, and Shift-F2, which goes to the last. In addition, we added F4, which makes a copy of the page you're working on. With F8, you can turn the Antialias level from 0 to 3-2-1, and with F9, you can turn the layout boxes on and off, to show all the lines on a page, empty or not. The F10 key redraws the page at any time. The "After the manual was printed..." remarks for version 3.0: -------------------------------------------------------------- Some added features: -------------------- - To jump to any other page in your script while running, you may enter the number of page you want to go to on the keyboard followed by enter or return. ex: To go to page 19, simply press 19 and <enter>. - We decided to put a small dot in place of the @ letter in all the fonts, to make it easier to set up "text bullets", like these: * Point number one * Point number two * Point number three - 6 new page transitions and 9 new text transitions were added, all using the "ease in" technique. - On the first font disk, we added a sample script which shows all the different fonts available in InfoChannel. Also, we added a number of "pictograms"; small symbols with trains, food and so forth. Finally, we added 2 types of arrows in 8 different directions, and 35 different palettes which all work with all the InfoChannel Backgrounds. Some known quirks: ------------------ - Trying to use damaged IFF files (BAD FORM) will currently cause a system crash. If you have problems with a particular file, try loading and saving it again in your favourite paint package. - While starting InfoChannel from the CLI, you must be in the InfoChannel directory - or InfoChannel will not be able to find it's dear and necessary companion, InfoPlayer. Use the CD command for this. - The 12 point GoudyB mentioned in the manual (and used in our sample font script) did unfortunately not make it to the master disk. - Users of WB 2.0: Use Kickstart 37.129 or later to get the best performance. Earlier version gave more jerky transitions etc. - Memory requirements: InfoChannel needs 1MB of chip memory for working with hi-res 16 colors, like the InfoChannel background library. If you only have 512K chip, you should work with lower resolutions and fewer colors. Problems with Workbench 1.2/1.3: -------------------------------- - Under Kickstart 1.3 the lower 1/5th of your picture may disappear, especially on overscan pictures and animations. This is a bug in the operating system - install the program "PatchMrg" in your startup-sequence. The "PatchMrg" program resides in the C directory on the InfoChannel Program Disk. - When pressing the RUN! button, the pointer tends to get stuck on the screen, and the DEL button won't turn it off. This is due to a bug in the operating system (fixed in 2.0). We have included a program that should fix this most of the time called FixMouse, which also is located in the C: directory on this disk. Include this program in your startup-sequence, but if this gives no effect on your system, you should press the DEL key, move the pointer up to the middle of the screen and press DEL again. Then, the pointer should be gone. - If you have problems with the machine booting in NTSC mode, install the program PALonly (in the C directory of the InfoChannel Program Disk) as the first command of your startup-sequence. Harddisk installation problems: ------------------------------- - Working with a Commodore 2090 hard drive, you may not have enough room on your system partition to install the InfoChannel fonts. Follow these steps for a solution to this problem: 1) Open a CLI or Shell. Type: "makedir work:fonts" 2) Type "ED boot:s/startup-sequence" 3) Change the line with "assign fonts: sys:fonts" to "assign fonts: work:fonts" 4) Press ESCape, "X" and then <Return> 5) Reboot the machine (Control-Amiga-Amiga) 6) Run InfoInstall again. The "After the manual was printed..." remarks: ---------------------------------------------- Some added features: -------------------- - To jump to any other page in your script while running, you may enter the number of page you want to go to on the keyboard followed by enter or return. ex: To go to page 19, simply press 19 and <enter>. - We decided to put a small dot in place of the @ letter, to make it easier to set up "text bullets". - 6 new page transitions and 9 new text transitions were added, all using the "ease in" technique. - On the first font disk, we added a sample script which shows all the different fonts available in InfoChannel. Also, we added a number of "pictograms"; small symbols with trains, food and so forth. Finally, we added 2 types of arrows in 8 different directions, and 35 different palettes which all work with all the InfoChannel Backgrounds. Some known quirks: ------------------ - Using a different front color on a symbol than 1 (white) will make the symbol disappear while using a fly-on wipe. There are some solutions to this inconvenience: a)Use color 1 for the symbol if you want to use a fly-on effect b)Use a wipe effect instead c)Save it in DPaint as a regular multi-color brush. - Trying to use damaged IFF files (BAD FORM) will currently cause a system crash. If you have problems with a particular file, try loading and saving it again in your favourite paint package. - While starting InfoChannel from the CLI, you must be in the InfoChannel directory - or InfoChannel will not be able to find it's necessary companion, InfoPlayer. Use the CD command for this. - The 12 point GoudyB mentioned in the manual (and used in our sample font script) did unfortunately not make it to the master disk. - Using interactive buttons under WB 2.0 will not behave properly, due to a bug in Kickstart 2.0. You will have to click below the buttons in order to hit them. We hope Commodore will fix this before the release of the final 2.0 version.