Yo, Barney!
Attached is an old MetaCard "animation" email message that was routed
around a while ago by Scott Raney of MetaCard fame. I don't know how much
of it is relevant now. Apparently there is/was some shareware/freeware
called Xanim that you can/could get via ftp.
I did a number of animations last year with Metacard but they were the
kinds explained in the MetaCard online documentation and used in the demo
stack.
The only thing I would recommend, for sure, is to stay away from anything
associated with R.A.D. They were totally incompetent to send me the right
software or help after three attempts from three different folks. Then
they completely ignored all my phone calls and email.
Sincerely,
Clark Parsons
Learning Products
Hewlett Packard
clarkp@fc.hp.com
Forwarded message:
>
> We are beginning work on numerous projects requiring quite a bit of
> graphic animations and am hoping to use MetaCard for all of them.
>
> I understand that MetaCard's animation capability is rather limited,
> depending rather on an external animation programs. If anyone else has
> done any extensive animation work with MetaCard (especially animation
> on a timeline basis), I would appreciate hearing what external product
> you may have used, how well it interfaced with MetaCard, and your general
> opinions of the best ways you may have found to use MetaCard with such
> animation packages.
>
Sender: metacard-list@grot.starconn.com
From: Scott Raney <raney@metacard.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <metacard-list@grot.starconn.com>
Subject: Re: Q: Enlarging fli video
>
> Hi,
>
> I am looking for a possibility to enlarge the size of fli video.
>
> We have the possibility to create fli files on a PC and want to show them
> on a SUN. The problem is the size of the video window. Due to the different
> sizes of the pixels on PC and SUN the PC screenfilling video is like a
> stamp on the SUN.
>
> Is there any PD or Shareware program (PC or SUN) out there which allows to
> quadrupel the pixels within a fli file?
XAnim will do this. And as we'll be including parts of XAnim into the
MetaCard engine for 1.4 (at beta 3), MetaCard will support this too.
For now, you can get the current relase of XAnim (xanim2683.tar.Z)
from ftp.x.org:/contrib/applications. I would encourage anyone who
wants to display movies in MetaCard to take XAnim for a spin to check
out compatibility. I've attached the relevant parts of the README.
Regards,
Scott
> Thanks in advance
>
> Michael Hoenen
>
> +---+---+-+-+-+-+-------------------------------------------------------+
> | | +-+-+-+-+ | Dipl.-Inform. Michael Hoenen |
> +---+---+-+-+-+-+ | Fraunhofer Institut fuer |
> | | +-+-+-+-+ | Materialfluss und Logistik (FhG-IML) |
> +---+---+-+-+-+-+ | Abt: Modellierungsmethoden |
> | | ### # # # | Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Str. 2 - 4 |
> | /~~~ / /~~| # ### # | 44227 Dortmund, Germany |
> | /-- /__ / - | # # # # | Tel: +231-9743-448 Fax: +231-9743-234 |
> |/ / / /__/ | ### # # ### | email: hoenen@iml.fhg.de |
> +---------------+--------------+----------------------------------------+
Once compiled, xanim can display the following:
1) FLI anims.
2) FLC anims.
3) IFF animations. The following features are supported:
-> Compressions 3,5,7,J(movies) and l(small L not 1).
-> Color Cycling during single images and animations.
-> Display Modes normal depth 1-8, EHB, HAM and HAM8.
4) GIF87a and GIF89a files.
-> single and multiple images supported.
-> GIF89a animation extensions supported.
5) a kludgy text file listing gifs and what order to show them in.
6) DL animations.
7) Amiga PFX(PageFlipper Plus F/X) animations.
8) Amiga MovieSetter animations(For those Eric Schwartz fans).
NOTE: some of these are a must see.
9) Utah Raster Toolkit RLE images and anims.
10) AVI animations. Currently supported is
-> Microsoft Video 1 (CRAM) depth 8 and 16.
-> SuperMac Cinepak (CVID) depth 24.
-> Uncompressed (RGB ) depth 8
-> Run length encoded (RLE8) depth 8.
11) Quicktime animations. The following features are supported:
-> Uncompressed (RAW ) depth 8.
-> Apple Graphics (RLE ) depth 1,8,16 and 24.
-> Apple Animation (SMC ) depth 8.
-> Apple Video (RPZA) depth 16.
-> SuperMac Cinepak (CVID) depth 24.
-> Supports multiple video trak's.
-> Supports animations with multiple codecs.
-> Supports flattened anims AND
-> Supports separate .rsrc and .data forks.
12) any combination of the above on the same command line.
Other features:
1) On the fly scaling of animations.
2) Option to use default cmap.
3) Merge the cmaps of several anims to prevent color flickering.
4) no buffer, buffer and pixmap options for speed/memory tradeoffs.
5) option to read animation from file instead of loading to memory.
6) looping and ping-pong options.
7) User selectable X11 Visual supported for Multi Visual Servers.
8) Timing options for benchmarking purposes.
9) Forwards/Backwards/single stepping from keyboard and mouse.
10) variable speed playback from keyboard.
11) Gamma adjustment to colormaps.
Current Known Bugs:
2) Scaling support isn't complete for Visuals with depths 4
and 2 that pack more than one pixel per byte.
TODO: (none of this is guaranteed)
1) Sound support for AVI/QT anims.(as 27Jun94 it's working on Sparcs)
2) X11 Resource input.
3) remote control.
4) more anim formats and codecs.