Morph 2.5, Sierra

[Dante]

It's an old program, anyone remember it? Commonly used in schools, apparantly.

Well see, I bought it a long time ago and I recently thought it would be good to get it back, so I dusted off the CD case and reinstalled it. It works well enough on XP, getting bitmaps and setting the little green dots and all that, it even saves the half-made movie things as documents. Very handy. The problem arises when I try to turn the document into an actual movie. It will do so, but unless I edit the compression (which I always used to do) then it makes bad movies.

Problem being, even attempting to open the compression settings box causes the entire program to crash. Not so helpful. It doesn't even display an error message first.

Now I'm sure I can remember there being a similar problem before. I rigged up a method that would work, provided I followed certain guidelines. But this was years ago, and I can't remember what I did to make it work. I'm rather hoping that someone will have had experience with the program and will be able to give me some suggestions. The official website seems to no longer exist, and my attempts to search the internet for a help sheet of some kind have mostly turned up instructions on how to make morphs, which I am already quite proficient in.

The only hint I got was that there may need to be an extra compression tool (though I certainly don't remember installing anything seperately before).

I'm also getting this weird feeling of deja vu, like I asked this question here before; but I did a search for Morph and I couldn't find anything.

Any help, or directions to help, would be appreciated.

I'll shut up now.

[Dante]

Ok, it's an old program, I guess it's understandable that not many people would be familiar with it. So lets try another approach. I'm pretty sure that the problem lies with the compression software, or possible lack of same. The 'help' file reads as follows:

Compression Dialog

This dialog appears after selecting File...Compression from the Morph menu.

The Compressor combo box will display available compressors installed on your system that are registered with Microsoft. 

Click inside the "Video for Windows" radio button to display all compressors installed on your system.  If the "QuickTime for Windows" radio button is selected, Morph will display compressors known to be compatible with the QuickTime for Windows movie file format. Currently, the only compressor that ships with Video for Windows runtime that is compatible with QuickTime for Windows is the Cinepak Compressor by Supermatch.  If you have installed other compressors in addition to those installed with the Video for Windows runtime that are known to be compatible with QuickTime for Windows, you will need to update the file GRYMORPH.INI located in your Morph directory. 

Simply add the driver entry in the Windows SYSTEM.INI file under the [drivers] section to the [QTW Drivers] section in the

GRYMORPH.INI file.  If you will be saving your Morph sequence as a QuickTime for Windows movies, you must select only those

compressors that are displayed when the QuickTime for Windows radio button is selected.

The Compress Quality scroll bar allows you to set the relative quality of the compressed images.  The higher the quality rate, the lower the compression of the resulting images.

The Frames Per Second (frame rate) will determine how many frames Morph will generate for each second of the movie.

Right, so I had a look in SYSTEM.INI and there were a few things that I could move into GRYMORPH.INI, but it made not a darn bit of difference. So I'm thinking, maybe there isn't a proper compressor included in windows or quicktime or whatever anymore? I last used this program in Windows 98, XP might not be fully compatible. And running it in compatibility mode won't help (it didn't) because there are things missing from the system.

So that's a bit more specific. Surely someone knows something about decent compression software and why this problem might be arising?

Had another look at the websites in the help file. Not a single mention of the product. Sigh.

[erjin999]

Not a clue about the actual program or the gist of the problem, but perhaps installing more compression codecs might help ?

k-lite mega codec pack thing might be good. It has video codecs that support compression, I believe.

If thats no good just scream at me, I am shooting in the dark here !

[Dante]

I'm not familiar with exactly how these things work, so would I have to do anything with these codecs following installation? I installed 'em already, no difference as yet.

Thanks anyway though.

[erjin999]

No, they just install and register themselves, and are then available by any program that can use them for encoding and decoding.

Oh well, you can always uninstall them if they didn't work :-.

(they may have required a restart, I dont know. Just ought to mention it)