Digital Art/Paint System Survey

. T he most fundamental question to be addressed in this survey is, What is a digital art/paint system? Secondly, thesurvey provides a basis for comparison among the different systems, designed to show where they are similar, where they vary, and prompt you to directly contact those manufacturers whose systems you wish to evaluate seriously . It is clear, now that the dust from last year's NAB show is beginning to settle, that we have seen, in the course of just the past year alone, the birth of a brand new type of image creation product-the digital art/paint system . Its predecessors pre-date it by several years, including the NEC Action Track/Digital Strobe Action unit that uses extensive digital processing and a digital framestore to generate often abstract images out of existing video pictures, and the Interand Telestrator which, for several years, has been being used to draw images directly onto a TV monitor using a unique blend of analog and digital processing . But there is nothing quite like the digital art/paint systems which appeared in such numbers at the NAB show, and the unlimited graphics possibilities they open up. By way of definition the systems outlined in this survey are all products available for purchase and installation in broadcast plants and teleproduction facilities . We're not talking about proprietary computer animation systems used by production companies which specialize in creating computer graphics for others (for these companies, see the stories on East and West Coast special effects houses elsewhere in this issue) . Nor are we talking about the kind of computer graphics systems which use large and small computers to simulate motion, or ROBERT RIVLIN