| It was the fall of 1989, and I was taking a computer animation class at UMass Amherst (I went to Hampshire College, another school in the Five Colleges consortium). We were using long-gone tools like Paracomp Swivel 3D to create a video about robots. This was well before After Effects, so we were using Macromind Director 1.0 as a very basic compositing application. We needed faster playback on our 20 MHz Macintosh IIcx to preview animation timing. I started experimenting with a utility called Director Accelerator, which composited together all layers of the Director project and compressed the final frames with Run-Length Encoding (RLE), a very early form of compression. I was amazed how the resulting files were smaller than the originals. And so I started playing around with optimizing for RLE, and forgot about animation and robots.
I got a D in the class, while the TAs and some other students went on to create Infini-D, a pioneering 3D app for desktop computers. Infini-D lives on as Carrara from DAZ. As for me, I didn’t do any animation after that, but darn if that compression stuff didn’t stay interesting. |
