Making an animation is a bigger task than it looks.
I called it "The Night Of The Buzillion Pixels."
We we attempting a 15fps movie at 720x480 with LightWorks in ArchiCAD and getting frame rates around 20 minutes each going thru the kitchen and dining room that presented slick reflective surfaces and many pixels in fixtures and entourage. I had spent a lot of time building the scnes, materials and lighting. A superior set of stills, however.
My contract was to flythrough the apartment for two minutes. I had both machines working for days and finally compromised at 360x240 just to make deadline. I could have used fifty times the computng power, not double or triple.
Cinema is faster, but not double in speed. Therefore, you need to hire out the rendering to a commercial service like Render King where it only takes minutes instead of days.
http://www.renderking.com/
It is a matter of getting quality images in reasonable time. One machine can't do much more than a joke animation - small and 10 fps.... say for streaming video or CD, not to create a large DVD on a plasma screen.
In future, I will encourage clients to go for the half-second per frame cross-fade slideshow that progresses through the scenes, having extreme light and material quality and captions as needed. A very elegant and high quality response to personal computing limitations.
I have the Apple Cinema display 30" since November. From my posting frequency you can tell that I am in front of it a lot. I have yet to find a happy arrangement for ArchiCAD windows and neurotically shift them around all the time depending on the shape of the plan I'm working on - it can vary considerably.
While the PC Mag review observes that it is not a wide angle display - it does color shift when you get way off center, it is flawless otherwise. Well, not quite. When playing a video and the screen goes to sleep, you get funny lime green tracer lines when it wakes up . A quick on/off fixes it. Wierd.
I crave another one, but that is silly because with my eyesight, this is all that I can look at. More is just greedy. I would like another smaller one - a 20" say off to the side... but I can cope. The budget is blown.
My advice to ArchiCAD members seeking a larger screen is to cut cardboard rectangles to size and figure out how they will look at it all without ruining their necks. This becomes critical as you age - not that our younger punk colleagues will appreciate this observation. "What the hell is he talking about?"
Wait and see, sonny. Pass my cane.
The most economic way to maximise pixels right now seems to be 2-23" displays. That is a sweet solution. You avoid the extra graphics card that way. Of course, full screen DVD isn't quite as good on the 23".
Now that the 17" Powerbook can drive the 30" display, it will be a popular option.
Dwight Atkinson
