As technology continues its exponential curve into cyberspace, keeping abreast of developments can be a nightmare. Rest easy as Mixed Media takes you by the hand and tiptoes through the tulip field of sound and vision that is Multimedia

Polychromatic peregrinations

Computer formats are seldom judged on their merits. Usually, it has more to do with market penetration and advertising budgets.

Owing to Atari's usual flippant attitude, the Falcon rather slid out of the same back door as the STe. Consequently, it never really fulfilled its potential as a multi-media machine, in spite of being very capable of doing so. Apex Media is one program that finally exploits the Falcon's graphics and video capabilities, as well as its unrivalled processing speed.

Although Apex is much more than just a basic art package, there are all the regular drawing functions, including freehand draw, fill, lines (straight and curved), various polygons and airbrush (What, so you can do Whitesnake album covers? — Ed). Boxes can be drawn with wireframes, or filled in a variety of ways; flat coloured, shaded (using the two furthermost points in the selected palette range as the colours), or interpolative.

Interpolation, which also works with line draw, circles and triangles, samples the background colour at each of the points, and blends the colours together. Aside from producing some very colourful effects, interpolation is useful for retouching, and eliminating noise from digitised images.

The program operates in several screen resolutions, including true colour, in sizes up to 320 x 400 (or larger still, using a 'virtual screen'), 256 colour, and 256 grey scale modes. The latter two colour modes take up less storage space than true colour, and have a higher resolution of 640x400 (although this too can be greater).

For hacking pictures to bits, Apex Media has an extensive range of cut and paste tools. It performs all these block manipulations in realtime too, so there is no rummaging around with a blank screen and preview box, guessing what the outcome may be. The whole thing is usually pretty fast; the only exception is when using virtual screens in high resolution with large blocks, where things tend to slow down a bit.

Pushing the Esc key turns the cursor into a hairpin, allowing you to make precise cuttings. There is also an automatic cut function, which crops the picture content, and a 'Stanley knife'-type implement that you can use to slice an irregular piece from the picture. Block effects include normal pasting (both underlaid and overlaid, with options to mask certain colours), perspective, X and Y-axis flipping, 360° rotation (about all three axes), and rescaling.

In 256 colour modes, pasting between frames causes the incoming picture to change colours to adapt to the frame that it is being plastered onto, and most of the time this looks quite ghastly. The way around this is to select the match palette option before pasting; this samples the incoming palette and adjusts it to harmonise with the existing colour range.

Apex uses Calamus vector fonts (CFN files) for its text tool, which certainly gives a better quality output than Atari's own bitmapped GDOS text format. It also means that you have access to absolutely hundreds of different font types from the Public Domain. Although CFN fonts are of the vector variety, the output is sometimes jagged; often this is because of the resolution (true colour mode seems to suffer the most), but also when the font is enlarged or shrunk beyond its usual physical sizes. The smoothing font option seems to fix this most of the time, but using quality fonts helps too. Only one font is ever held in RAM (saving memory for more important drawing functions), so creating a picture with more than one type (for example, a CD sleeve) can be a bit frustrating.

One of the program's most impressive functions is the morphing and distortion effects. This takes a user-definable amount of points on a picture, transposes them on to another, and then proceeds to smoothly (or sometimes erratically) merge the two pictures together, over a definable number of frames. With pictures that are completely dissimilar, or when the points are moved around too much, some extraordinarily bizarre distortions can occur.

But Apex is not limited to just morphing animation; in theory at least, up to 4,000 true colour images can be combined into an FLC film on a 14Mb Falcon. It achieves this by using a compression algorithm known as Delta (or DLT) compression, which is the same format as the Cyber series on the ST. This format saves the changes between the frames rather than the actual content itself, and so long animations with very few movements will take up the same disk space as a short, jumpy film. These films can either be played back within Apex (using the transport controls), or using the FLC TTP player utility supplied.

In addition to the FLC player, Apex is packaged with viewers for TGA and JPEG picture files, and two CPX files for the control panel. The first is a JPEG utility for compressing TGA and GIF pictures into JPEG files and vice-versa, whilst the second is used for configuring memory allocation when using Apex with multi-tasking software like Multi-TOS, Geneva, or MagiC.

The sheer breadth of Apex Media is somewhat overwhelming; it takes a good while to explore (more time than this review can give), but the endeavours are more than worthwhile. The program costs £119.95, whilst a forthcoming package including Expose, a real-time video capture card is likely to cost around £400.

More from: Titan Designs, (Contact Details).

The biogen beehive

Following on from last year's successes (which included the V-Topia exhibition), the Film and Video Umbrella have another season of animated utopianism to bask in. The Digital Underground is an exhibition of films, all of which utilise the new technology available for creativity. The season of 'virtual' performances started in January with the launch of a WWW site (WaxWeb), and the accompanying film presentation 'Discovery of Television Among The Bees'. The internet site features a wealth of information about the film, JPEG stills and video excerpts to download, plus details on how to acquire a copy of it for yourself.

Fuzzy logic, the next programme along, features a kaleidoscope of 'cyber' animations and films, including a Butler Brothers' film entitled 'The City Is No Longer Safe', starring more of their anarchic raytraced rabbits. Much like their appearance at V-Topia last year, the bunnies are viciously funny, but well observed and philosophical. Also featured is a twenty minute video profile of Brian Eno, by Jerome Jefdup and Lari Lucien Flash, aptly titled 'One Eno', as well as others.

Another forthcoming programme is Computer World 2; the sequel to the 1994 showcase, further exploring the amalgamation of art and technology with an hour of short animations. Although the films all have this common element, they vary considerably in narrative. While Eric Darnell's long-nosed creations investigate an air-filled plant in 'Gas Planet' (with flatulent toilet humour on a par with Rik Mayall), films like 'Biogenesis' (William Latham), 'Bilderbuch fur Ernst Will' (Peter Collas), and 'Stripe Box' (Kazuma Morino), all betray a more cerebral approach to life.

Amongst the other films are Karl Sims' award-winning metamorphosing fluid animations in 'Liquid Shelves' (with a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel); the breathtakingly rendered images of 'The Story of Franz K', which depicts the frustrations of an artist with comic genius; and 'The Garden' by Tama Waliczky, with its bizarre, distorted perspectives of a baby rummaging around the foliage.

Fuzzy Logic takes place at the National Film Theatre, South bank, Waterloo, London, SE1 on Tuesday, 7th March at 8.30pm. Telephone the NFT on (Contact Details) for more details. Computer World 2 shows at The Watershed Media Centre, (Contact Details) on March 22nd. Telephone (Contact Details) for more details.

The Wax Web can be accessed via the World Wide Web at: http://bug.village.virginia.edu