EMPIRE


The Acorn Replay Movie Editor

Empire is an application for editing and creating ARMovie files. It was launched at the Acorn User Spring Show in 1993 to accompany the Acorn Replay DIY kit from Irlam Instruments Ltd. It offered easy to use facilities at an affordable price for schools and individuals wishing to edit their own Acorn Replay Movies. It can edit video, video+audio or audio only movies. It can also export frames and sound tracks in various formats.

It can import files including.

It can edit any frame rate and size video, any sample rate audio.

EMPIRE Version 2 now offers many more import and export options and much greater flexibility of use. It can now load any Acorn Replay movie, decompressing frames on the fly if necessary as well as handling any size or frame rate of movie.

EMPIRE is fully Risc PC compatible and the player application that was originally developed for use with EMPIRE is now bundled by Acorn with every Risc PC sold.

EMPIRE can import most sound sample and still image file formats and whilst EMPIRE is primarily an Acorn Replay Movie Editor the fact that sound and video may be edited seperately means that EMPIRE can also be used as an audio only editor with its capacity only being limited by disk space rather than memory.

The number of applications that can create and import Acorn Replay files is growing all the time.

As well as the original Replay DIY kit you can now capture video with the Wild Vision Eagle M2 card or the new Irlam 24i16. Movie files can also be created with packages such as RePhorm, Morpheus and Architech amongst others.

Movies created and edited with EMPIRE may be imported into multimedia authoring packages such as Genesis, Magpie and Key Author, presentation packages such as Cable News as well as databases e.g. Datapower and S-Base.

EMPIRE will run happily on any RISC OS machine with a hard disc and 4MB RAM It really comes into its own however when used on a Risc PC where displays such as 1024 by 768 pixels in 32 thousand colours are available.

EMPIRE utilises a unique film strip display to allow the preview and editing of Acorn Replay movies and sound tracks, allowing very fast access to any portion of a clip along with a configurable cacheing system to give fast screen redraws whilst using the minimum of memory.

Tracks can be viewed at any scale with the highest allowing every sample of a sound track to be seen or the lowest giving an overview of an entire 5 minute video clip across one screen.

For ease of operation EMPIRE features three main windows.

Clip bank

Movie clips and sound samples are loaded into the Clip Bank for titling and easy reference. The display may be configured to show the full information about a clip or simply its title frame.

Preview window

The preview window allows clips to be viewed and can also be used to set Edit points. Drawfiles may be overlaid onto the Output track using the annotation features built in to Version 2.

Timeline

Clips are displayed on the Timeline as a series of frames in the style of a film strip along with a waveform display of the sound track.

Clips are edited by placing Cue markers at the required point on the timeline to define a start and end point for both audio and video tracks. The portion to be edited is indicated in green above the track.

The selected sequence is then transferred to the Output track by using the Edit button and a new sequence is built up with subsequent edits of audio or video material using any of the three edit modes i.e Insert, Replace and Delete.

The edited sequence may be previewed at any time and when completed it may be used as is or compressed using an Acorn Replay compressor (available separately in the Replay Starter Kit).

EMPIRE FEATURES

Video Editing

Sound Editing

Timeline Display

Preview window

Clip window

Input File types

Output file types

Capacities

SPECIFICATIONS

To run EMPIRE you need

Network support

It is NOT recommended that EMPIRE be run over a network using shared hard disc facilities, but it may be installed on a network file server if local hard disc facilities are available on the client machine.

Additional recommended equipment

Supplied Utilities

Splitter
Takes completed Acorn Replay Mmvies and splits them across a number of floppies.
Re-joiner
Re-joins movies that have been split up onto seperate floppies using Splitter back onto a single file on hard disc.

Other useful software not included

EmConvert
Compiles movies from collections of sprites, clear files or other bitmap formats.
Available from Uniqueway.
CDSampler
creates sound-only movies direct from a CD player.
Available from Uniqueway.
Replay Starter Kit
Includes

The OLESupport module is © Computer Concepts, 1993 and is used under licence.

The 'rink' system used to implement plug-in audio effects is © Ben Summers, 1994 and is used under licence.

Ordering


© Copyright 1995 Uniqueway Ltd.
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