A new company, Catalyst Developments Ltd, was formed in September to distribute a number of inf-ormation presentation products designed to integrate video, animation, text and audio for MS-DOS micros; Catalyst Developments will be operating as a subsidiary of Systems Reliability Holdings Plc, whose South East Computers division is providing most of Catalyst’s 16 staff, and is aiming its products and a series of complementary services mainly at the mass, corporate presentation market. The key product is possibly the low-priced Animator software product developed by US firm Autodesk, the market leader in Computer Aided Design products for MS-DOS; Animator gives good quality, real-time animation on a personal computer equiped with a VGA board and mouse, working with up to 256 colours from a palette of a quarter of a million, and can be used stand-alone, or, as Catalyst Developments intends, with the other tools in its range. Images created by Animator can be put onto video tape by using Jovian Logic’s VIN box, a VGA to video converter now available in the UK; conversely, with the PAL version of Jovian’s Video Input Adaptor, personal computer users can capture real-time images from any PAL, S-VHS or RGB source in VGA or super-VGA formats at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. Sylvia is a cheaper version of the same adaptor that does not operate in real-time but supports a larger palette. Catalyst Developments is also marketing RGB Technology’s top-end Videolink 600 autosync scan converter that translates images generated by MS-DOS computer, PS/2, Mac II into television format in real-time and with a range of 16m colours to choose from; VGA, EGA and Mac II output is supported. UK company VideoLogic’s DVA-4000 range, which enables full motion video images to be viewed on a personal computer, is now available through Catalyst; one feature of this product is the ability to display video images from number of sources simultaneously by using a windowing system such as Presentation Manager – the main advantage of displaying such images on a personal computer being greatly improved picture quality compared with traditional television pictures.

Leasing

Finally, Catalyst will also be making available Meridian’s CD Net system, which enables CD ROM-based information to be shared across a Local Area Network, and the Folio Corporation’s Folio Views text management software package, which gives multiple views on text stored in free form databases and provides compressed storage and a number of search facilities. The Catalyst Development product range will be supported by a number of services available to customers, such as the leasing of the high-cost Videolink 600, a video production group to assist in corporate presentations, and bespoke software and hardware tools for specific applications. Apart from the obvious cost factor and Catalyst claims its combined products and services can offer significant reductions by allowing firms to produce in-house video-graphics presentations – the question of applications is crucial: the technology opens up a vast number of potential applications, the work now for Catalyst Developments and its 25 dealers is to demonstrate that a concrete business advantage can be achieved by adopting them in such areas as business presentations, point of sale advertising, security systems and image enhancement in public areas. All products are available now through dealers: the Animator is priced at UKP200, Jovian’s Video Input Adaptor, Sylvia and VIN converter come in at UKP700, UKP400 and UKP500 respectively; the VideoLink 600 costs UKP13,000 to buy or can be leased; VideoLogic’s DVA-4000 costs UKP2,000 for PS/2, PC/XT and AT versions; CD Net is UKP4,150 on a 12MHz 80286 machine, UKP4,760 on a 20MHz 80386 box; and the full version of Folio Views is UKP400, with server and workstation licences of UKP800 and UKP250 respectively for the network version. – Katy Ring.