MacMovies
MacMovies
MOVIES MADE IN 1985 & 1986
Monday, April 30, 2012
In 1985, Phat Ho and I wrote a program called MacMovies published by Beck-Tech. It took MacPaint pictures and encoded them into movies which ran full screen on the 9” black-and-white display at up to 30 frames per second. This was long before the first postage-stamp size QuickTime movies. With MacMovies and MacroMedia’s VideoWorks, the Mac was on its way to Hollywood.
Olivia was my first shot at digitized video.
The frames were captured with a Koala MacVision digitizer from a still-framed Laserdisk. Then each one went into MacPaint for touch-up, and finally into MacMovies. Note that there is NO grey scale to this movie. As with all early Mac graphics, every pixel is either black or white. With clever dithering, however, it certainly looks like a grey scale image.
I could always tell when Olivia was playing at our MacWorld booth. People would slam to a halt so fast they’d wrinkle the carpet in the aisle, and stand and stare until the next movie came on.
VGER
THE FIRST MOVIE I MADE ON A MAC
1985
Using Mac3D, the first 3-D rendering program for the 128K Mac, along with MacPaint, I made a home version of NASA’s computer-generated flyby of the Voyager spacecraft approaching Saturn.
Moviemaking on Macintoshes has come a long way since 1985, but this was the proof-of-concept.
BIRD
DIGITIZED
1985
The big problem with movies on a Mac in 1984 was storage. You can’t fit much video on an 800K floppy. The only hard disk available was the very expensive Corvus 10MB drive which connected via the modem serial port. The lack of fast I/O crippled the Mac until the Mac Plus came out with a SCSI port.