Video Pain
Dec. 23rd, 2004 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaMuwahahaha! Stacey and I went to the japantown mall in San Francisco yesterday to look for a christmas present for my brother and some things I wanted to get Stacey for Christmas that I hadn't had the opportunity to purchase yet.
In the video store, I found a box of 'please for God's sake, help us get rid of this crap!' stuff. Heaven!
I got, "The Mind's Eye", "Beyond the Mind's Eye", "The Gate", "Planetary Voyager", "Computer Visualizations", "American Pop", and "Amiga Animation Volume 2" for a grand total of $20.
Yes, that's right, a Bakshi film was the best thing I purchased. >:D
No. I take that back. The 'Amiga Animation' video is the best thing I purchased. But not because it's good. Quite the contrary. It's the best because I can made Amiga zealots watch it. Looking at this animation, I think it's important that we finally tell the truth. The Amiga was a pretty neat toy, but it was only a toy. The type and quality of animation it could produce was very limited. On the entire hour and a half long tape, there were maybe 3 pieces that were even like bottom-rung Flash animations on the net. Most of them were painfully slow and horribly timed with lots of field flicker, all kinds of color bleed and very fuzzy output. (Granted, some of the fuzziness is because I am watching a 15 year old VHS)
Seriously though. I'd wondered about people talking about Eric Schwartz being this great Amiga animator and thought that was just furries hyping up one of their idols. (and one of his shorts was on this video) In all honesty though, he was one of the best of the Amiga animations on this tape.
It may seem shallow but I now feel really good about some of my really old computer animations. At about the same time this tape was produced, I was doing comparable work to a lot of the stuff on this tape and most of the time I was using draw commands in Pascal to create sprites and then XORing them to the screen in succession.
Of course, back then, I desperately wanted an Amiga. I think that obsession lasted until probably 1995. Looking back now though, I'm glad I never spent the money.
In the video store, I found a box of 'please for God's sake, help us get rid of this crap!' stuff. Heaven!
I got, "The Mind's Eye", "Beyond the Mind's Eye", "The Gate", "Planetary Voyager", "Computer Visualizations", "American Pop", and "Amiga Animation Volume 2" for a grand total of $20.
Yes, that's right, a Bakshi film was the best thing I purchased. >:D
No. I take that back. The 'Amiga Animation' video is the best thing I purchased. But not because it's good. Quite the contrary. It's the best because I can made Amiga zealots watch it. Looking at this animation, I think it's important that we finally tell the truth. The Amiga was a pretty neat toy, but it was only a toy. The type and quality of animation it could produce was very limited. On the entire hour and a half long tape, there were maybe 3 pieces that were even like bottom-rung Flash animations on the net. Most of them were painfully slow and horribly timed with lots of field flicker, all kinds of color bleed and very fuzzy output. (Granted, some of the fuzziness is because I am watching a 15 year old VHS)
Seriously though. I'd wondered about people talking about Eric Schwartz being this great Amiga animator and thought that was just furries hyping up one of their idols. (and one of his shorts was on this video) In all honesty though, he was one of the best of the Amiga animations on this tape.
It may seem shallow but I now feel really good about some of my really old computer animations. At about the same time this tape was produced, I was doing comparable work to a lot of the stuff on this tape and most of the time I was using draw commands in Pascal to create sprites and then XORing them to the screen in succession.
Of course, back then, I desperately wanted an Amiga. I think that obsession lasted until probably 1995. Looking back now though, I'm glad I never spent the money.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-24 07:14 am (UTC)Yeah, it was a neat computer. And you could actually do some high quality animation with it if you had the patience and a video toaster. But at that point it wasn't the cost-effective panacea that most Amiga fans touted the machine as.
Trouble was, at about the time those were done, the companies writing serious animation software were working on PCs and Macs. Ah well. :)