“This game is an embarrassment.”
-Zade playing the original Legend of Zelda on an NES emulator.

Watching a movie on my new 30″ Apple HD Cinema Display got me thinking about something. What if someone was able to design a camera that creates motion sequences (video) in vector art in real time? For a quick, generic primer on vector art, click here.

For example, instead of capturing 30 frames of raster data per second, this VectorCam would capture numeric data at 30 fps that would recreate the scene perfectly when played back on a capable device.

Raster data generally takes up much more space than vector data. We are already capable of holding this much information on the media we currently use. As an example, the following gives you an idea of how much vector data a MiniDV tape could hold.

Software is currently available for ordinary home computers which allows users to record any sort of computer data on MiniDV cassettes using common DV decks or camcorders. A 60-minute MiniDV tape will hold approximately 13 Gigabytes of data in this form of usage as the DV video format has a constant data rate of 3.6 Megabytes per second (3.6 MB/s × 60 seconds × 60 minutes = 12,960 MB per hour, divided by 1024 = 12.66 GB per hour). Source

So the only issue is the front end, which is a big issue. Is it possible to create a chipset that can calculate vector data from a CCD that quickly?

If you’re still not sure it is even possible to create photorealistic images with vectors, here’s something you should see. I stumbled across some incredible art that lends credibility to the idea. Granted, it took people a long time to draw these by hand with Illustrator, but it used to take artists a long time to paint portraits. By looking at most of these images you’d never guess they were vector representations. Click an image for a closer look.

In progress

Oh my God. Shoes.

Picture perfect.

This one is truly incredible.

The advantage to this, aside from perhaps saving space and thus resulting in more recording time per MiniDV cassette / hard disk / DVD / etc., is that the resulting media would be infinitely scalable, like a Flash animation. This way, users would get crystal clear, pristine video quality on anything from the smallest screens all the way to the largest. I’m talking IMAX–and beyond.

Engineers: make it happen.

It is possible.

I loaded Sony Vegas 7 on my MacBook Pro this week.

Screen shot (click for larger)

Here is a link to a much larger file.

This file is so much bigger because it’s a screen grab from my incredibly excessive and unnecessarily large 2560 x 1600 pixel monitor: I bought Apple’s 30″ display yesterday. It’s even more awesome than it looks in the store. Most windows show up small, so for example, you could have two normal-sized Safari browsers open side-by-side. However, the real treat is opening Final Cut Pro, which fills the entire screen. It’s glorious.

I digress. Back to running Vegas on my Mac.

This has been talked about a lot. To me, Vegas is a very useful editing platform because it’s so flexible. It doesn’t care what you put on the timeline, and it offers realtime effects previews, HD support, reads and writes numerous file types, the list goes on. People assumed it could run on Intel Macs via Boot Camp and Wine, etc., but I had yet to see proof (though I’m sure there are screen shots out there).

My experiment had Vegas running through Parallels, which is really just a name-brand version of Wine. I did the complete install and put a Quicktime movie on the timeline. I rendered an MPEG2 from that, which I then moved back to my Mac’s desktop via the Windows explorer. It played fine on both systems.

There you have it.