View PAR video files from HDF/IMG on PC/Mac?

[Starglider 2]

Hi guys, I've got a potentially very interesting (read: stunning) piece of kit here. An Amiga 4000-040 complete with PAR card that was on the set of Apollo 13 and Titanic. It was used to record test footage, getting the motion control of the camera crane correct, before shooting the final takes. Obviously using a reliable digital format was easier for the Directors to play back and analyze/freeze-frame, than video tape would've been.

I have been able to access some footage (which I'll be showing in a video very soon at my little channel), however what I'd really like to do is export the footage, and analyze another PVR drive, on a modern Mac. The reason for this is so I can easily show the raw footage rather than filming the Amiga screen, or even using video capture (which is still analogue; I'd love this to stay digital all the way as it's worth it when you see it.)

SO... is there any way I can browse the HDF on a Mac?
Same question for the second drive which required recovery and so is in IMG format (it won't mount as IMG drive files usually do for some reason.)

Before you ask, yup I have tried using an emulator, however the drives show as DH1:NDOS within Workbench. This is because the PAR graphics card is required to mount the proprietory format on Workbench, and the emulator can't emulate a PAR card.

If anyone can advise how I can find the actual "video files" on a Mac, with only the HDF or IMG images of the PVR drives, I'd be immensely grateful.

[Hewitson]

Hi Starglider 2, huge fan of your channel.

As these HDF/IMG have been created with an Amiga-specific filesystem, they are not mountable with macOS.

The Linux kernel supports Amiga FFS partitions, but it sounds like that won't be very helpful either.

[Starglider 2]

Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot Ok I think I'm just going to use video capture then.

[mark_k]

If you're able to upload some sample HD image files, I (and/or others) could take a look. Ideally you'll also have dumped the IDENTIFY DEVICE data from the IDE drives.

The Amiga PAR software looks like it has the ability to allow any other programs access to individual frames. You'd need to do that on the real Amiga with PAR card + drive.

Reading PAR.DOC on the v2.50 software disk, it mentions a "YUV" format which is lossless; presumably identical data to that stored on-disk by the PAR hardware.

So you could/should be able to, on real hardware, use a file-copy program to copy/extract individual image files from the PAR drive elsewhere. You could then use conversion software to assemble those into another animation format.

I wonder if the main PAR program could be altered/patched such that it would read data from a normal Amiga-accessible drive. That would allow animation frames to be extracted without needing real hardware (i.e. in WinUAE).

[Starglider 2]

Nice ideas! I was on a bit of a time crunch so I'm going the other route now but thank you. Stay tuned!

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

Hi guys, I've got a potentially very interesting (read: stunning) piece of kit here. An Amiga 4000-040 complete with PAR card that was on the set of Apollo 13 and Titanic. It was used to record test footage, getting the motion control of the camera crane correct, before shooting the final takes. Obviously using a reliable digital format was easier for the Directors to play back and analyze/freeze-frame, than video tape would've been.

I have been able to access some footage (which I'll be showing in a video very soon at my little channel), however what I'd really like to do is export the footage, and analyze another PVR drive, on a modern Mac. The reason for this is so I can easily show the raw footage rather than filming the Amiga screen, or even using video capture (which is still analogue; I'd love this to stay digital all the way as it's worth it when you see it.)

SO... is there any way I can browse the HDF on a Mac?
Same question for the second drive which required recovery and so is in IMG format (it won't mount as IMG drive files usually do for some reason.)

Before you ask, yup I have tried using an emulator, however the drives show as DH1:NDOS within Workbench. This is because the PAR graphics card is required to mount the proprietory format on Workbench, and the emulator can't emulate a PAR card.

If anyone can advise how I can find the actual "video files" on a Mac, with only the HDF or IMG images of the PVR drives, I'd be immensely grateful.

I mentioned it in another thread, but have you tried processing the hard disk image files you created in R Studio? (R Studio the data recovery tool, not R Studio the development environment for the R programming languages. The two programs have the same name causing much confusion. =P )

[Starglider 2]

Thanks but I've managed to grab the raw video today. Video coming soon