The attached LivePictureChatLog is a text capture file of an America Online special guest appearance by Kai Kruse. Yes ... that's Kai of Kai's Power Tools, president of HSC software. The discussion involves a new application and file format I believe destined to mean as much to computing as the advent of PostScript. It's cost prohibitive now ... retailing at $3,495, hardware dongled. The application, LivePicture, and its proprietary file format FITS and underlying technology I hope will be licensed to other software vendors like Adobe and Fractal Design. It would mean an entirely new era in image processing.
To quote a recent HSC LivePicture ad appearing in Micro Publishing News, August 1993, pg.40:
ANNOUNCING THE BIRTH OF A NEW ERA IN MACINTOSH IMAGING:
Live Picture ... 21st Century Productivity Tools
HSC Software and Fits Imaging Bring Workstation Performance to the Macintosh.
Begin your creative proces by opening, say, a 250 megabyte file. On an unaccelerated Quadra, this will take less than 2 seconds. Live picture handles ultra high resolution files easily. Resize the image. Any skew, rotate, or reposition operation takes 1 second ... and that's not working with a proxy.
Open another huge image just as quickly. It sits on its own virtual layer. There's not limit to the number of layers. Put it behind the first. Use brushstrokes to reveal portions of the image — in real time.
Select a soft distortion or other brush, at a size equivalent to 2000 x 2000 pixels. Brushes and tools are resolution independent and full 48-bit color, so you'll never have color banding. Making those brush strokes is no drag; the distortion happens in real time.
Zoom deep into a segment of the composited image and place a 300 megabyte image into it. The nature of LivePicture enables this to happens regardless of the image size, resolution or scale.
Lighten part of this image with a full 48-bit color brush instantly. Too light? Use the undo brush and selectively reverse the lightening process wherever you want. there are no single undo buffers; Live Picture's tools have infinite gradual undos in any area. Amazing!
Select the area you would like for your final image. Set a resolution for an 8x10 document at 288 pixels per inch. You can set any size or resolution you want! Now rasterize it. This stage does take time, but Live Picture saved it all for the last step. This is only a sampling of the power of Live Picture.
If you make a living producing images on a Macintosh,
Live Picture just made your time more valuable.
================END OF AD=======================
Sound too good to be true? And I believe the final rasterization stage is reported to zip along at 500K per second. If that's true, Live PIcture would rasterize a 100 megabyte file in 3.41 minutes! (102400Mb / 500K = 204.8 seconds / 60 seconds = 3.41 minutes)
Can you image that? Open a 100 megabyte file, color correct it, rotate it, skew it, lighten it, composite it with other images, all in under a reasonable 20-30 minutes?
