P3D Re: Computer set-up for graphics

[Larry Berlin <lberlin@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998
>From: Jim Crowell writes:
>
>At 12:54 AM -0800 3/19/98, Marvin Jones wrote:
>>
>>That budget should get the job done. Two areas you must be very generous to
>>yourself are RAM and disk storage. Graphics take up tons o' space! I'd
>>recommend at least 64k of RAM and as much disk space as possible within
>>your budget. Prices are coming down, and 9 gig should be easily within your
>>reach.
>
>Removable media are coming way down in price, too.  Tend to be slower, but
>can be extended indefinitely.  I recently saw a 2.1-G system advertized @
>about $200 for the drive & (I think) $30/cartridge...
>

*****  Removable media is very important and the best is a recordable CD.
However, steer clear of HP's device. It is not compatible with other CD
readers. They've recently come up with a fix, but I'm not very convinced
it's doing all it should. Maybe in 3 months or so they will have changed
their base technology to be compatible. It's a big hassle to send CD stuff
to folk and find they can't read the information. I'm told the best quality
these days is the Ricoh CD-R, but I don't know anything about that brand.

CD's are important because for such a low cost (about $3.50 per 600 MB) you
can store very large amounts of data that's very easy and fast to read. A
system with 6 to 8 GIG HD (partitioned to < 2 Gig) should be sufficient for
a long time IF you have a CD-R to externalize most of your storage. 

I use a ZIP drive too, but several things about it are less attractive as a
primary external storage device. It's much slower than a CD-ROM and each 100
MB disk costs around $15. Then, magnetic media is not as long lasting as
optical media. Zips are good for short term storage and for shuffling
smaller quantities of data around. 

Size your RAM according to the most you can afford. I'm using 64MB RAM but
it is just barely satisfactory for most of my stereo work. It's not quite
enough for high resolution stereo imaging. That's especially true if you
plan to use PhotoShop. It's a monster and needs a maximum amount of room for
itself, before there is an image to worry about. I'd suggest that 128 MB RAM
is a better plan. One recent project of mine that did use 128 MB RAM was for
a large 2D to 3D conversion project.  The rented computer worked well up to
the final stages of combining various layers of images. Then each new small
step would take 20 minutes or more to process. It took hours to put the
already created layers together and do a few touch-ups. The final file was
over 50MB! 

Then you need at least a 4 MB video card. If you're doing stereo, you want a
good LCS system which is easy to get these days. NuVision has software to
drive page flipping stereo (best quality) with any good video card. See
their website for details.

Larry Berlin

Email: lberlin@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.sonic.net/~lberlin/
http://3dzine.simplenet.com/


------------------------------