Using Digital Multimedia created with the Flyer

Using Digital Multimedia
created with the Flyer

By Kelly Parke
Requirements: LightWave, NewTek Flyer

he Newtek Flyer is an excellent device for creating digital audio and video for the Amiga right? Well, it also makes a very good digitizer for PC’s and Mac’s as well!

The common denominator is LIGHTWAVE. By using LIGHTWAVE 5.0 (Intel) you can take those VTASC clips captured on the Amiga and convert them into Microsoft AVI video files. AVI is the key format because from AVI you can convert to almost any format you would want i.e. QUICKTIME, MPEG, AVS etc.

With the new software based audio converters ( AUDIO THUNDER and PROMIX) you can convert VTASC audio clips into virtually any audio format. There are several utility pieces of software available for the PC and Mac that can complete the job of customizing the digital video and audio to your target platform and delivery method (CD-ROM, Internet etc.).

The Process

Capture an audio/video clip with the Flyer. Process the clip to split the audio from the video and save both components. Transfer the video VTASC to a PC that has LIGHTWAVE (version 5.0) installed on it.

Within Lightwave on the PC load the Flyer clip into the images panel then select the Flyer clip as the background sequence in the effects panel. Change the camera resolution to low-resolution square pixels (320 x 240) and adjust the scene length to the duration of the Flyer clip. For example, if the Flyer clip is 1 minute,10 seconds and 13 frames the scene would be 2113 frames long.

Set the record animation format to be Newtek AVI files and when you start rendering, a requester will ask for the codec that you would like to use as well as the compression setting. If the target is an AVI file you can make the adjustments right at this stage; usually targeted to 240 kb/s for CD-ROM development.

If the final application is MPEG, save the frames as uncompressed video. Be forewarned though, uncompressed video, even at this small size of 320 x 240, will consume about 7megs of space per second of video.

The reason to keep the files uncompressed is to reduce the amount of different compressions that will be applied to any video file until the final output stage. Every level of compression will add its own artifacts to the file. This process of converting the video VTASC files to video AVI files takes approximately 3 seconds per frame on a 166mhz Pentium, so the process is not unmanageable.

With the Audio VTASC clip the process is much simpler. You just convert the files to wave files using AUDIO THUNDER from Asimware and transfer them to the PC. I found it very important to use the audio files that I had processed from the Flyer instead of trying to use captured audio files on the PC. Keeping the files in sync is the key to this whole thing working.

So now you have AVI video files and wave audio files on your PC. By using VIDEDIT from Intel you can combine them to create a audio/video AVI file or even recompress them to the desired compression and data rate. You can also take the uncompressed AVI video file and a wave audio file and create some stunning MPEG files using mpegmaker from VITEC or XING Technology’s latest software encoder. I have also successfully taken uncompressed AVI files and converted them into Quicktime for a Mac using some AVI to QUICKTIME utilities. QUICKTIME FOR WINDOWS files can easily be created through SMARTVID or TRMOOV. Both of these converters are readily available on the Net.

This technique may seem very labour intensive but the results are well worth it. My clients are amazed at the quality of the digital video that we have been able to produce. Frankly, before the Flyer, my production team was very discouraged at our attempts to use digital video on PC’s and Mac’s. But since we have been using these techniques our client base has outgrown our capacity to produce the material.

Kelly Parke is the Senior Multimedia Designer for the Instructional Technology Centre at York University in Toronto Canada.