Thoughts on Imagemaster RT

[fxgogo]

I am busy putting together my next article and I am looking at Imagemaster RT. It is something I bought back in the day as it was way more affordable than ADPro.

I loved it and wondered if anyone else here used it and what they thought of it? Did it lord it over ADPro and ImageFX or was it a last place Nellie?

[intric8]

Is that the same Imagemaster as published by Black Belt Systems?

[fxgogo]

Yes, it was just a later version. I suspect the RT stood for retargetable. I even moved to Winimages on the PC, although the interface was not as elegant.

[intric8]

I found a rather interesting comparison from 1993 between Imagemaster, ImageFX and Art Department Professional.

[fxgogo]

Interesting article. I had to laugh about the printing and scanning bits. I remember that always being a pain on the Amiga. Actually, the whole driver situation for those devices is so much better these days.

Amiga World has a couple of articles comparing those three as well. It is a very interesting time in the compositing world. Things were not quite digital and standards/techniques were not quite universal across applications.

[fastrobplus]

Imagemaster RT was free with the purchase of a HAM-E from Black Belt back in the day. I had it but didn't get much use out of it personally.

I am reasonably sure that it was used to some extent in the creation of the movie Jurassic Park. That's knowledge comes from my memories of the Black Belt System's BBS (BBS' BBS!) where there were SFX people discussing the use of a feature. At the time I hadn't known of the book Jurassic Park and for some reason guessed it was a political crime thriller.

[fxgogo]

I will definitely look that up. Won’t surprise me as ILM were and are serious innovators who use all sorts of tools to get the job done.

If anyone knows any of the devs, I would be interested to chat to them. Their names in the manual are:

Barry Chalmers
Tom Krehbiel
Pete Patterson
Hal Schwab
Ben Williams