A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

yes big thanks to the amiga compo organiser for the flexibility. I'll TRY next year to be a little more on time =) (also just for my own sake).
It was also cool that you could select the stereo separation level for amiga entries.

the compos were really good this year. (despite the fact that a lot of sorta active groups didn't release anything) and it was nice to see separate 64k and 4k compos.

btw. do you know stingray's email? Is the scarab one still working? And if not, would you be so kind to mail it to me or tell Stingray that i want to get in touch.

z5: just got the mail from d0Dge that you were looking for my mail address, just use stingray_dsd(at)gmx.de and it should reach me. ;)

@Charlie:

Regarding the video-capture technique - has there ever been the approach of a genlock- recording ?
That's actually the way Dirtie is looking for (first attempt failed - genlock was broken ...darn!).
There has got to be a way to get this nasty RGB-illegal-PAL-1337-imma-kill-ya- signal w/o or minimum quality loss into a digital recording device.

Once this step is reached we could talk about crobbing the raw footage to non ancient aspect ratio. Unless it's a classic full screen release of course.
But most nowadays releases are somewhat 320x240 or 320x200 (or in my case 320x160 or even more Ben-Hur'ish).
Boy that would teach them PC folkz about how this stuff actually looks like on a proper monitor. Most of them just see the blurry pale coloured SVHS captures.

@d0DgE:

Actually, for this year we used a 24 bit internal scandoubler/flickerfixer (Indivision by J. Schoenfeld) to feed the scanconverter and the DV encoder. So no uberl33t-illegal signal this year. :) The bottleneck tho' is clearly the SVHS signal, so we're looking for other possibilities, but there are limiting factors here and there (incl. money). But it wasn't easy in the first place to get at least a somewhat-proper RGB/VGA signal out of the Amiga. :)

At least for the last three years (since i'm orga), we use some kind of RGB signal to record. Previously, the recordings happenned from a CVBS signal, as far as i know, so figures... I can only hope, people can still see a difference and advancements in quality each year. :)

About resizing the image to fit the whole bigscreen... Well, until now, every release was shown as-is, so as if an Amiga was connected directly to the beamer. Changing that involves discussing many POVs, including who will benefit, and who don't, and also it's quite a lot more work for an orga (and includes re-encoding as well, which is time, which you never have before the compo). So it would also mean the deadline would be carved in stone, which would be *VERY* bad news for some people... :P And also it's some kind of postprocessing, which we're not sure we should allow in a basically-realtime compo. It's quite unfair against other platforms, but i have to admit, it would look hell a lot better... :)

So, to sum it up, it's not *that* easy as it might look like, but we're thinking about it.

But the first thing is to fix is the SVHS crap for sure. Then comes the rest.

Agreed on the "shown as is" issue.

So to sum it up. A proper genlock capturing equipment should be the point to focus on. I hope Dirtie gets lucky in that direction (Ebay) for he's working on a DVD.

Where is Dirtie located because i have a rackmounted genlock that seems to accept most connections. Its has amiga rgb, svhs, video, and it seems to have component output also. But sadly i bought it without a amiga to genlock rgb cable. Had planes to make one myself but soldering is not one of my favorites things. So i put it in a closet and forgot about it. I am located in Sweden, Stockholm. If he wants he can buy it from me i never use it. email is cefa68000 [at] gmail [dot] com

Link to amiga hardware book about the genlock URL

@Cefa:

I've sent him an E-mail with a link to this thread.
He tried to solder a cable but doesn't know yet, if it actually works
(as written, the genlock-HW was apparently broken - one of these anyway)

Guys, I fail to see, how connecting such a genlock will help doing the actual recording to *digital* video, on a peeCee. But maybe it's just me. :) The scanconverter equipment we're currently using, also has RGB output, but we don't have any RGB -> DV (on Firewire) encoder for now, hence we use the SVideo/SVHS (whatever is the correct designation for that) output signal of the scanconverter to feed the DV encoder.

We don't use an SVHS tape, in case you wonder. :)

(Edit: And i also have a RocTec genlock and color keyer too, but again, that's no help IMO, or i miss something very fundamental. :)

Lightshaft was amazing!

But..I just watched the Xerxes, Romeo Knight and Bendik live in Concert
stream and that was just mindblowing. Amazing talent.

I assume this is the Romeo Knight that made some of the music
in the Red Sector MegaDemo?

And the drumsolo was fantastic too.

@charlie: I have a Avid-Mojo-Box which is able to capture yuv signals from 20:1 to uncompressed (with Avid Mediacomposer Software). The only tricky thing is the converting from amiga-rgb to true yuv. I tested a 50,- euro converter (rgb-scart to yuv). This piece worked great for monitors and beamers but its not possible to capture this signal. Sync is wrong and coulors suck. At the moment I use an old panasonic dvd-recorder just for passing the rgb signal thrugh and I capture the Y/C out. Looks ok, but its not the true full quality. The genlock cefa has, looks good. If it can put out a stable and legal yuv-signal it should be no problem to record it with Avid-Mojo-Box. Only bug is that we need a good amiga-genlock-cable. Cefa wrote he has no cable :(

cheers, d!RT!E/mdS

I assume that d!rt!e already has recorded at least one of our productions for the vimeo homepage with the technique he described.
The result is very good (for my perspective).
Take a look at the recording of "All City" at vimeo.com/moodsplateau and recognise the almost clear red characters in the credits at the beginning. Usually such a grey-redish colour scheme caused huge quality loss due recording.
Also the whole colour density is very close to the original.