he Secret of NIMH, .An American Tail, The Rescuers Down Under, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He also worked on the original arcade games Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace and did all the animation for the Roger Rabbit Amiga game. He was Director of Animation on a portion of Hanna-Barbera’s recent projects at Universal Studios, Florida, and is currently working in Hollyivood at Baer Animation. Write to him c o Amiga World, 80 Elm St., Peterborough, NH 03458. AMIGA GRAPHICS: THE NEW WAVE-2 the Rainbow .Skies are true blue. New 24-bit imaging devices now offer Amiga graphics an astonishing 16.7 million colors! By Mitch Wells J3 17* iT mil recently, if your video-production house wanted to create graphics with more colors than the Amiga’s native 4096, you had to either rent time on a dedicated high-end animation system or buy one. Those days are over. With the advent of software that can create up to 16.7 million colors and hardware that handles it properly, the Amiga finally fulfills its destiny as the high-end graphics workstation it was always touted to be. A number of 24-bit and “near 24-bit” imaging devices have arrived on the market recently. Because their prices and functions differ so markedly, let's take a look at these various boards and boxes, with an eye toward the effects of these differences. (For details on how to contact the developers of products discussed in this article, see the “Manufacturers' Addresses” list on p. 108.) The First Frame Mimetics’ FrameBuffer ($ 549.95), the first 24-bit board available for the Amiga, occupies a standard 100-pin A2000 slot. It uses professional BNC connectors for composite video in and out. Sculpt-Animate 4D (Centaur Software), 3D Professional (Progressive Peripherals 8c Software), Mega Paint (Pseudo Vision), and Caligari Broadcast all provide FrameBuffer support. The board itself comes with software that not only captures a video frame and saves it to IFF or 24-bit RGB, but also converts IFF pictures (including HAM) to its own 24-bit format for display (don’t expect more colors than you started with, though). Unfortunately, FrameBuffer s video output quality is the worst of all the boards I tested. The colors are weak, the board gives off RF “ghosts” that record onto tape, and video capture is tediously slow. The Next Sequence A new generation of barrier-breaking hardware for the Amiga lets you attain or approach die standard of output quality established by Truevision’s Targa boards for IBM Pcs but at a lesser cost. (See the sidebar below for more on Targas.) This generation includes Impulse’s Firecracker 24 (S1600), which, tike the FrameBuffer, is a 24-bit video card that occupies a standard A2000 slot. While the FrameBuffer provides composite video in out only, however, Firecracker offers an RGB output with an RGB-through port, so the Amiga’s own display is overlaid on top of the Firecracker's output, and both are displayed on an Amiga monitor. The Firecracker’s output is the best of all the .Amiga devices certainly on a par with the Targa boards.