            Documentation for Movie.Viewer
                     v 0.5

****** WARNING THIS IS A BETA VERSION!!! *******


Well hello all!  This is my first venture into a true GS application.  It is a viewer for quickly (well fastly...OK successively) cycling through SHR pictures.  The idea is if these screens can be displayed fast enough a movie is developed.

The current state of GS animation is to create a $c2 "SHOW" file.  This is basically the same idea but the files must be compressed into the special $c2 file and thus it does not facilitate easy editting.  Also, most $c2 viewers load the movie into RAM, thus neccesitating a large ammount of free memory.

MOVIE.VIEWER views standard, uncompressed, $c1 files. MOVIE.VIEWER also loads files directly from your hard drive. This slows preformance noticeably, but good frame rates are still acheivable.  Tests are to be completed on systems with a RamFast controller and accelerator card too see if performance is improved.  Advantages of using hard drive reads are that files need not take up large ammounts of free RAM space.

How do I use MOVIE.VIEWER?

I. Create a movie.

     You may create a movie in a variety of ways.  The 'frames' of the movie should be similar enough so that when cycled through the create the illusion of smooth movement. These files should be stored all in the same subdirectory with sequential file names.  Some lattitude is given on the names.  The key is to have a counter somewhere within the names of the files.  For instance valid frame names might be...

          STAR.TR.1        F1.GS         MOVIE1.PHOEBE
          STAR.TR.2   or   F2.GS    or   MOVIE2.PHOEBE
          STAR.TR.3        F3.GS         MOVIE3.PHOEBE

                            etc.

As you can see all have the sequence 1,2,3,...in them somewhere.  These would be referred to by MOVIE.VIEWER as...

Movie Name          Suffix
----------------------------
STAR.TR.
F                    .GS
MOVIE                .PHOEBE

If the movies are in a subdirectory you may use an absolute pathname as the movie name.

Once again please note this is the very first BETA release of the program.  Very little error checking is done.  A much more developed package will be released soon.

SHAREWARE NOTICE:

You are free to copy, and distribute this program, so long as no fee is charged and the original documentation is distrubuted with it.  However if you decide to use this program after 10 days you may do so legally only under the following terms.

1) You must send me a letter saying, "Hey this works great!
    Keep writing stuff for the GS.  etc."

2) Give me ideas for updating MOVIE.VIEWER.  I would like
   this to become an animation development tool.

Have fun!

Fred Wilson
AOL:          FredWGS
CIS:          70721,557
Internet:     fwilson@whitney.eng.ohio-state.edu

