ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2020
Entry 19th September 2020: Post 2: Amiga HAM - A moving picture.
Amiga HAM - A moving picture.
It is really amazing the great strides those guys at Commodore
made to develop the Amiga in the early nineties. Specifically in
the realm of image displays and colours on screen. The later AGA
machines with the use of HAM transformed the colour rendering
of images and the near real recording of photographic content.
First though, let me reflect for a moment on a moving picture.
This image has made an amazing journey to appear on this page
today so let me explain.
First the model in the picture is the very lovely Clara Veiga
a Brazilian model who travelled to London to walk the catwalk
in 2004 for John Richmond. The show was recorded by Fashion TV
a company owned by Michel Adam and transmitted from Paris via
orbiting satellite to the UK and received by SKY dish. The image
was first recorded to VHS and then later to DVD. Remember, one
show and one transmission. Next it was conveyed to a DVD player
and conveyed to a VidiAmiga video capture device plugged into
an Amiga 1200 via composite cable. The video was then edited
using DPaint in LowRes animation black and white and saved to
Iomega ZIP disk. The disk was then taken to another Amiga 1200
and played on a Microvitec monitor where it was photographed
using a Lumix digital camera. The image was edited using Adobe
Photoshop and presented on this web page.
The still picture was taken of a 'MOVING' DPaint animation. And
yet when you blow the image up and study its content you can see
the microcosm of HAM pixels dithering and dothering around to
give the effect of way more colours. They may be greyscale but
if you understand how HAM works it is truly incredible what this
image represents. For me it is not only moving it is very MOVING.
It also features Clara Veiga the face of Commodore Amiga Retro
and that is always worth a mention.
HAM as described in DPAINT IV
The Hold and Modify display mode (HAM) uses only 16 color
registers, but manages to display all 4,096 colors on the screen
at the same time. A HAM color is formed by taking the RGB value
of the preceding pixel on the screen, and substituting a new
value for one of the RGB components.
Amiga HAM - A moving picture.
The very lovely Clara Veiga.
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