🚀 go-pugleaf

   From: cain@silverblue.fac.cs.cmu.edu (Sebastian Nightingale Cain)
   Subject: NeXT vs Amiga
   Date: 17 Sep 92 20:50:59 GMT
   Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

   ...I was looking at the Amiga 2000 + Video Toaster the other
   day, and it was quite cool.  I was primarily interested in Lightwave
   and doing animation and then outputting that to some type of media. 
   I work with the NeXT's though, and was wondering if the same thing
   (that is creating rendered scenes and outputting them to other media)
   is possible on the NeXT (with a color board of course).

One way is to use the Sony VISCA interface.  The Vbox costs
a couple hundred bucks and is a serial-to-LANC/Control-S interface.
Essentially it is like MIDI for video gadgets, and allows you
to control video appliances, e.g., for editing.  I just wrote a
new VISCA driver for the NeXT (based on some earlier code from
Sony and Greg Cockroft).  Given a decent video deck (e.g., even
a Sony tr-101 HandyCam will do) it would be a snap to print out
frames to video tape.  It would also be a snap to, say, read input
frames, analyze, re-render, output, etc.  Given the support for
rendering in 3.0, this is indeed a sensible platform for research.

I can give you the driver if you want (nb., for 3.0).

Michael Hawley
MIT Media Laboratory
mike@media-lab.mit.edu