From initial sketching and storyboards through final industrial or broadcast quality video or theatrical film, The Animation Stand™ provides a complete, professional, computer assisted animation and optical special effects production system, on a Macintosh®! Now even further enhanced with its new QuickTime™ features, The Animation Stand 2.0 can generate, edit, and play QuickTime movies, see created animations in real-time, and include QuickTime stills, and movies in animations.
To give your QuickTime movies a polished, professional look, only The Animation Stand allows you to add full multi-plane camera and optical special effects features to your QuickTime movies including real dissolves, fades, true sub-pixel antialiasing, alpha channel compositing, black and white transparencies, and sub-pixel and spine-based motion.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to produce a full-screen, multi-monitor QuickTime production? You can with The Animation Stand! The Animation Stand gives you the ability to read and write animation files (QuickTime movies, PICS files, and full-speed run files) which can be shown on one or multiple Macintosh monitors at any size, color depth, and framing rate. The Animation Stand also has the ability to use any third-party compression/ decompression hardware and/or software which is also QuickTime compatible.
For those creating animations destined for tape, video disk, or film, The Animation Stand's new QuickTime features allow the animator to do real-time testing of animations, in addition to all-frame testing, before shooting, saving considerable production time, money, and effort!
Do you wish your favorite application was QuickTime literate? With The Animation Stand, it's no problem! In addition to output forms such as video tape, film, and QuickTime movies, The Animation Stand produces special, QuickTime encoded PICS files which allow even non-QuickTime literate programs to take advantage of QuickTime's animation compression!
With The Animation Stand, entire QuickTime movies, pieces of any QuickTime movie, or QuickTime still art can be used as layers in video, video disk, and film animations, as well as used in other QuickTime movies.
Compressing your still art, cels, or movies using QuickTime through The Animation Stand can also save you up to 95% of the hard-disk space normally required by pictures!
Background
The Animation Stand is a complete, industrial, broadcast and film quality desktop, computer assisted animation production system. Whether you are planning to create a full, professional animation feature or add animation effects to a business presentation, The Animation Stand offers all the sophisticated tools and special effects of high-end animation systems at a price affordable to even smaller animation houses and independent animators.
The Animation Stand features multi-plane camera control with trucks, pans, zooms, rotation, squash & stretch, virtual camera control, slow-in/slow-out, spline-based and sub-pixel motion control, and motion 'tweens, an optical and special effects system with mattes, faders, gels, glows, drop shadows, and transparencies (including white, black, and alpha compositing), an inking and painting suite, and complete transport control to film, tape, video disk, and various disk formats including QuickTime movies. Other features include an unlimited number of frames, layers, and opticals, directional wipes, real fades and dissolves, several selections of antialiasing including sub-pixel, real-time playback from memory at up to 60 FPS, SMPTE control, and production cost reporting.
Animations are laid out to tape, video disk and film automatically and unattended. Changes can be quickly edited into existing tapes, with or without sound synchronization. Users report a typical cost savings of 50% over traditional equipment. File types used are Film, Flim, PICT, MooV, PICS, WaveFront, TEXT, and spreadsheet clipboard.
The Animation Stand 2.0 will be available December 1991, $2,000. For more information, contact Linker Systems, Inc., 13612 Onkayha Circle, Irvine, CA 92720, 714-552-1904, Fax 714-552-6985.
INSTRUCTIONS
There are several items in this folder. First, is a 16-bit QuickTime movie showing a 30 second example of a piece of animation produced with The Animation Stand. (We were not able to provide a 32-bit example due to space considerations).
To play the move, double-click the movie icon. The Animation Stand program will play it for you. You can also run this move, or play it with other QuickTime programs. Please follow the instructions for running QuickTime movies for the respective program.
Second, is a demonstration copy of The Animation Stand. With this copy, you can try out the ink and paint system, the multi-plane camera, and the optical special effects features. Unfortunately, though you can see the interface for the transport control system, you cannot save your work or run it out to tape or film with this demo version. Have fun with it.
The copy of the demo on the CD is set to run in 2 meg. You can copy it to your hard disk and run in in 750K or more. As with all graphics and animation programs, the more memory you give it, the better performance you will get. Also, it runs better under System 7 than under System 6, better in 32 bit addressing than in 24, and better in 32 bit color than at other depths. If you hold down the command key while opening the program, it will take less memory, but the user interface will not look as nice.
Please take note that at the time this CD was made, The Animation Stand version 2.0 was in its Alpha Test phase, and some minor known bugs existed. Version 2.0 is expected to be released in December,1991. Version 1.3 is available at the date of this document, and has been in release since early 1991.
The last item in this folder is an instructional HyperCard stack showing all the features of The Animation Stand. To run it, double-click the stack icon. It will explain all of the features of The Animation Stand, and show you how to use them.
SPECIFICATIONS
The Animation Stand™
Professional Broadcast and Film Quality
Computer Assisted Animation and Special Effects System for the Macintosh®, Version 2.0
The Animation Stand is a true broadcast quality video and theatrical film quality animation, 2D/3D paint, special effects optical, and transport control system. It is perfect for business, professional, and personal productions. The new 2.0 version adds many new features and enhancements that truly make The Animation Stand the best and most complete computer assisted animation system available on a desktop.
USER INTERFACE
• 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32-bit color levels available . Documents can be multiple color depths
• Pop-up, tear-off, and user configurable tool-boxes
• Uses traditional exposure sheet and/or graphic/iconic interface
• Graphical editing toolbox for current frame manipulations
• Hot-linking of all windows
• Customizable interfaces
• Preferences can be saved on a per-user, and per-document basis
• Six forms of document selection options through marque and lasso, expand or shrink selection, fill with selection, select with polygon
• Partial undo
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
• Apple Macintosh™ II, Quadra™, SE/30, or PowerBook™ 170
• System 6.0.7 or System 7
• Mouse or tablet
• One megabyte of memory, minimum
• 1 to 32-bit display
• One to five screens
LEARNING CURVE
• Online HyperCard™ manual
• Pop-up balloon help
• Step-by-step tutorial
• Telephone support
FORMATS SUPPORTED
• PICT (picture files)
• Pani (animation preferences)
• PXCR (transparency data)
• PICS (standard animation)
• Film (exposure sheet)
• rla (Wavefront format)
• TEXT (text files)
• Flim (animation movie format)
• Styl (text style)
• MooV (QuickTime™ format)
The Animation Stand and Linker Systems logo are trademarks of Linker Systems, Inc. Macintosh, HyperCard, Quadra, QuickDraw, QuickTime, and TrueType are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
