[rescue] ARGH

[joshua d boyd]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 11:49:07PM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> You really would like a FireWire interface for digital video.

Well, seeing as an SVHS vcr is much cheaper than a DV vcr, I'm thinking
that I'll hold on the firewire.  That said, there is a firewire card from
SGI for the O2.  Not sure how well it combines into the video subsystem
(the SVideo in can be streamed and used as a texture and output again in
realtime.  DV would require decompression, but DV uses MJpeg, and the ICE
chip does mjpeg, so maybe it could still be realtime).  Unfortunatly, that
DV card would mean giving up FDDI or the raid array, or whatever.

If I were to actually start making money with this gear, I would probably
then purchase either a Mac or an NT station for video IO and off the shelf
software.  However, making money anytime soon is extremely unlikely.  For
now, it is just a hobby, with a dream of someday doing visual effects for
a profession. 
 
> GL, I dunno; probably it is not quite perfect yet, but expect that to change
> once Maya shows up on the platform.

At the moment, I'm more interested in Combustion, and finding out how it
works.  I rather suspect that it uses GL for the video rendering, if not
for the rest of the UI.  But, I believe that combustion is only on OS9
currently.  I wish I could afford to get Combustion or flint (sorta
vaguely the SGI version of combustion from the looks of it).

I need to be more focussed.  I keep jumping all over the
place.  Yesterday, I spend a few hours working on the idea of a Poser
workalike for linux and other unixs.  I find poser to be fun.  I have
Poser 3 on my sister's computer.  I don't use it for animation, or use
anything but the base models that came with it.  I just use it to set up
poses like one might use those little wooden models, and then draw from
the poses.  One of these days I should scan in a picture I drew in drawing
1 using one of the real wooden dolls.  In drawing 1 we kept having to do
still lifes, and I hated it, so I bought those little wooden dolls and
composed tablos with them to draw.  One (the one I should compose) seems
to have been the only still life drawn in that class that offended some
people.  I built a little wooden cross, then hung the little wooden doll
from it.  I wonder if people would have still been upset had I just drawn
a catholic crucifix statue.  I don't see that much difference between the
two.

I then proceeded to fiddle with the guile graphical shell program I have
(opens a graphical window and lets me fiddle with using scheme to draw in
said window). I was trying to convert that shell (copied from somewhere,
with a few tweaks) to use GL and GTK (GL for drawing area, GTK for
rest) instead of raw X11.  I then another hour fiddling with vector
arithmatic in scheme using tail recursion.  This tail recursion thing is a
pain.  I wrote a for-loop function, but I'm trying to force myself to be
more comfterble with tail loops.  And I'm still getting the hang of
popping and pushing essentially for all array (list) operations.
 
> Think of an OS X box as the Indy that SGI should have built, and you you
> will feel better.

What does the OS X box have to do with Indys?  And why not compare to the
O2?  Sorta the same target market as the Indy (ie, low end and 2D users).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd