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The 1990s Amiga with Video Toaster has a VFX cool factor that endures today

204 points by snvzz 3y ago

nacho2sweet 3y ago
Got in trouble using this in grade 9 for doing sexy lady swipes while filming people walking the school hallway and writing nicknames under them while the feed went into every classroom.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'd love to know a lot more about the history & use of Lightwave. Someone got a copy at my school in 1998 or so & shared access & it became quite a little thing for a bunch of folks. Seemed pretty easy to use. I don't really recognize the interface as shown in these videos. The Amiga connection and the hardware board were long gone by the time we all saw this software. But I think the connection was real, wouldove to know more about how this developed over time.
Zardoz84 3y ago
> And then there’s Babylon 5. Those effects looked a little crude, then really crude, and now… kind of weirdly cool and artistic and ahead of their time. (The show’s approach to real-physics spacecraft maneuvers and modeling came to influence later TV like the 2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which also used LightWave 3D. There is even a Babylon 5 station model tucked into an early scene in the escaping fleet.) There is one of the original 3d artists of Babylon 5 that re-rendered some of the original assets and scenes at high res... Simply looks awesome TODAY. The 3d art of Babylon 5 was limited by the output medium.
- harrid 3y ago
  Not sure if I would agree on the awesome, but here's the link for everyone to judge: https://youtu.be/rf0ka2xJF94 https://youtu.be/rf0ka2xJF94
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Reminds me of an old book I had about 3d modelling, that was showing some pictures of various things like an underwater scene, a space satellite or rocket and more. I think the author of the book I have in mind was using form·Z Tried to find the book online, but I don’t have the book here so it’s difficult to remember exactly. Here are some books with similar level of detail in their cover art to the detail of that video and to the book I am thinking of. It’s neat in its own way. https://www.amazon.com/Into-3D-form-Z-Lachmi-Khemlani/dp/0070349339 https://www.amazon.com/Into-3D-form-Z-Lachmi-Khemlani/dp/007... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Form-Z-Eden-Muir/dp/1566901898 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Form-Z-Eden-Muir/dp/15669018... http://ftp.formz.com/support/books/Kenth_Agurell_4_0.html http://ftp.formz.com/support/books/Kenth_Agurell_4_0.html
  - twic 3y ago
    It's the textures that really let it down, i think. The solar panel (?) texture in the very first shot is a perfect example. Looked fine at SDTV resolution, but in high-res, you can see it's just flat blocks of colour, and it loses all realism. Most of the geometry is pretty good. A bit too regular and pristine, could use some tiny variation and some light greebling.
- jahnu 3y ago
  I recently tried to re-watch B5. I was a huge fan when it came out. I managed to get to early season 2 before I couldn't take the cringe any more. Sometimes it's best to leave things in the past. That being said, a complete re-boot like they did for BG could work.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    "Babluon 5: The Road Home" just premiered at San Diego Comic Con. Trailer shows off the animation and style pretty well: https://youtu.be/Z54XNJivHOs https://youtu.be/Z54XNJivHOs
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    Zero-content dig at a great show, thanks. I do remember the graphics being poor until they fixed the lighting in S2, however.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I've rewatched it twice, and season two is where it seriously picks up. You do need to be able to look past very dated effects and decor and some dated storytelling devices, but to me that adds to the charm. Incidentally some of that dated story telling is what makes season 1 slow - there's a lot of set-up going on, both in terms of setting and characters while they'd have benefit from just jumping straight in and filling those bits in along the way. In terms of telling a coherent story throughout multiple seasons, it was remarkable at the time, and so compared with most series of the era it stands up far better despite the dated effects. If they do a reboot, I hope they really does it justice and changes the stories enough that it can stand on its own. A straight remake would be a waste.
    - yardie 3y ago
      To me, The Expanse was the equivalent of a reboot of B5. Interstellar politics, realistic physics, and multi-season plot arches made it a really dramatic, yet geeky show in the same vein as B5. If there is to be a reboot of B5 I feel it would take off from where The Expanse finished rather than where B5 ended over 25 years ago.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
It's a shame the first youtube link is so overcompressed because it's clearly been from very clean VHS, and absolutely destroyed when it was encoded.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  There is no such thing as clean VHS. VHS is roughly youtube's 240p quality. Also the first video has 1440p options on youtube so why do you think it's compression giving bad quality? This is about as good as VHS gets. I think most people don't remember how bad it was on tiny CRTs.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    That video is compressed to hell, it looks like a QuickTime or something from the 90s. That someone upconverted it to 1440p on YouTube is inconsequential. You can see the square MPEG blobs ferchrisakes! Here is a dirty VHS with dropouts which looks WAY better: https://youtu.be/ZlsS_a4qdI4 https://youtu.be/ZlsS_a4qdI4
  - warmcompress 3y ago
    Degradation of analog data stored on magnetic tape is a lie—teach the controversy! For real though, can't one just... not post about stuff you don't know about?
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      If one wants to give one real information one should feel free to link one of one's sources. Try this one. https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/whats-the-difference-between-a-vcr-and-vhs/#VHS_Resolution https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/whats-the-difference-betwe...
      - Gordonjcp 3y ago
        The thing you have linked to is correct, but you're reading it wrong. VHS has 240 *horizontal* lines of resolution, meaning that a grid comprising 240 alternating *vertical* black and white stripes ought to be resolvable as a bare minimum. This corresponds (roughly) to 2.5MHz of luminance bandwidth. This is also confusingly named, but there you go. Youtube's 240p resolution is lower quality than VideoCD, and far *far* lower quality than even fairly manky VHS.
khazhoux 3y ago
> So, a very brief history of the Video Toaster. NewTek founder Tim Jenison loved Vermeer and designed the first edition, with Brad Carvey (who also worked on Men In Black VFX) building the prototype. You might also be familiar with Brad Carvey's younger brother, Dana.
- code_duck 3y ago
  Brad Carvey taught a course on 3d animation at the community college in Albuquerque in the 90s. My gf was in one of his classes. Very down-to-earth, knowledgeable and friendly guy. We went to a party at his house for the class one time and I mainly remember that he had a framed photo of Wayne and Garth with Al Bundy, which was quite a 90s amalgam.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Ed O'Neill, who played Al Bundy, also appeared in the Wayne's World movies as the creepy donut shop manager. So there's an in-Wayneverse reason for him to be there. Brad was, of course, the template for Garth. Dana first did the Garth voice as an impression of his brother.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > NewTek founder Tim Jenison That's it! I was struggling to remember his name. Just around the time of the Video Toaster, I was working at a small company in CT called Colorware. Tim Jenison wrote a Mac Paint clone for the Tandy/RS Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We bought the rights to it and paid him royalties on each sale. He made bank, IIRC! Soon after that, he created the Video Toaster and the rest is history. I remember my co-worker saying that with the success of the Video Toaster, Tim had moved on from collecting cars to collecting airplanes.
- omershapira 3y ago
  Brad was one of the first users of a program I was working on, which he used for his work at Sandia National Labs. He would send me frequent, detailed feedback - respectful and kind, inquiring about possible solutions he'd thought of. He even invited me to Sandia to give a talk together about these efforts [1]. I've never had a kinder customer. [1] https://www.sandia.gov/xr/4th-annual-xr-conference/agenda/ https://www.sandia.gov/xr/4th-annual-xr-conference/agenda/
xattt 3y ago
I still don’t understand why the Video Toaster succeeded on the Amiga and why the software and add on cards didn’t make a successful jump onto PCs and Macs. Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?
- fredoralive 3y ago
  The Amiga video system had genlock capabilities so it could lock onto an external master clock to keep it in sync with other equipment in an editing suite. This was fairly unusal for consumer equipment. I believe this was originally intended to sync with a laserdisc player if the chipset was used in an arcade machine, but it came in useful giving the Amiga a niche in the lower end of broadcast video as well. Video Toaster did get ported to Windows when the Amiga died, and NewTek are still around doing various broadcasting related stuff. I guess it's just less prominent when it's just another company doing pro video stuff behind the scenes rather than a company Amiga fans can point to and brag about as one of their few "wins".
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > ... one of their few "wins". That's fighting talk round my way. Yes, the Amiga ended up declining, but it was ahead of its time with a multi-tasking OS, advanced sound capabilities and great graphics for its time (4096 colours!).
    - pjc50 3y ago
      The Amiga is a classic example of "technological tour de force, commercial failure". Did it ever sell well in the US?
      - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        Well, I'm in the UK where it was moderately popular, but according to Wikipedia it sold less than a million units in the US as it was sold in toy stores and seen as a toy compared with PCs which were more expensive.
drcongo 3y ago
Back in the 1990s I was at film school at the point they were transitioning from Amigas / Toasters to an Avid suite, so I bought an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster off them on the slightly-cheap. I got fairly proficient in Lightwave but all I ever used it for was making short 16mm film loops for projecting on huge screens at raves from a bank of Elf projectors nailed to a plank. Edit: Tangentially related, it's well worth seeking out the film Tim's Vermeer about NewTek founder Tim Jenison trying to recreate Vermeer's style. It's fantastic.
- micv 3y ago
  If you still have that A4000 it's worth real money now to the retro crowd.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    Sadly it went into a skip in around 1999 by which time I was on Macs.
    - micv 3y ago
      Yeah, that's what happened to most of them. Between that and leaky caps I don't think there's many working examples left now.
  - azinman2 3y ago
    I still do with video toaster branding. How much are we talking?
    - micv 3y ago
      I've seen them listed anywhere between one and several thousand depending on condition, spec, accessories, etc.
      - azinman2 3y ago
        Where do they get listed? eBay?
api 3y ago
Commodore could have been Apple with better leadership. The Amiga was ahead of almost any other PC for its time and like Apple had a cult following. The Commodore 64 before it was way ahead in graphics and sound for its era, especially for the price. PC compatibles didn’t even catch up to that 8-bit machine until EGA and Adlib and Sound Blaster cards came around.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I felt that the Amiga needed someone with a sense of design directing the computer's UI. Despite its more advanced capabilities it still always looked like a kit-car to the Apple's Lotus Elan offerings in the 90's.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Amiga OS 1.x was definitely rather amateurish looking (blue and orange color scheme.) The 2.x series and above looked much more professional (gray scale, more of a beveled 3D look, etc.)
    - retrac 3y ago
      The reason for that is interesting, IMO. The Amiga was intended as a home computer. And in 1985, a home computer might have a TV for display, or a very fuzzy low-quality colour monitor. For some reason, yellow/orange/red/white on blue is particularly legible on poor-quality monitors and TVs. (Many DOS applications of the era were white or yellow on blue, for the same reason. And early Windows had similarly horrible schemes.) By the late 1980s, colour monitors were nearly as good as a B&W one for showing crisp text and lines, and so grey/black on white.
      - nradov 3y ago
        The way that the Amiga engineers used interlaced video modes to support CRT displays with low refresh rates was also not a good look. In the early models that was the only way to get VGA equivalent screen resolution, but the flickering was so bad that some people literally wore sunglasses and configured the desktop with low-contrast colors in order to reduce eye strain. It was one of several design decisions that probably seemed like a good idea at the time but made the product look shoddy and held it back from mainstream adoption.
krunck 3y ago
Lets not forget the first Newtek demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzwUQIvhHzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzwUQIvhHzw Such a classic. I remember playing this as a kid over and over just because I loved the music. I had no idea that it was "Paranoimia" by Art of Noise.
- stuff4ben 3y ago
  God I watched all these too as a kid. Had some of the videos on tape and I remembered watching them all the time. Kiki Stockhammer!!! My first grownup crush (I was a teen).
  - krunck 3y ago
    Good, so I'm not the only one.
- dean2432 3y ago
  awesome, i remember some of those HAM images. oh, when i read paranoimia this is the tune i think of XD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwgZ7wGus0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwgZ7wGus0
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mrandish 3y ago
  Just to expand, that's called NewTek Demo Reel #1 created to promote NewTek's pre-Toaster products Digi-View and Digi-Paint for the Amiga. It fit entirely on two Amiga floppy disks and would play back in real-time and loop at the end. It was sent out for free to Amiga dealers in color packaging and became the demo many dealers would just leave running on their floor model. The decompression and simultaneous playback of multiple motion video clips and synced audio toward the end of the demo was extraordinary for the time (~1986). It was all custom coded demo-ware in 68k assembly language pushing the Amiga custom chips right down to the metal as there were no authoring tools to create this sort of thing. I remember being shocked when I first saw it playback on an Amiga in real-time. Initially I thought there must be a VCR hidden under the table. Because it was distributed by Commodore Europe to all European dealers, Demo Reel #1 clearly influenced the evolution of the still-nascent DemoScene and it's been called "The mother of all demoscene demos." NewTek was figuring out amazing stuff right on the bleeding edge of possibility.
excalibur 3y ago
I wonder how many of these effects my phone could produce if its software didn't suck. My guess is most of them.
dagmx 3y ago
As an oddly adjacent topic, here’s a documentary about the founder of Newtek (the creators of Video Toaster) as he tries to figure out whether Vermeer used optical devices to aid his painting. https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ
aresant 3y ago
If you enjoyed this article The Retro Hour podcast has an awesome business / creative interview with Tim Jenison that was founder / CEO of NewTek that brought this product to market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS8ARFeZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS8ARFeZc
dylan604 3y ago
The Video Toaster is what gave me clarity on what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was "programming" on C64 by typing in programs from the back of magazines. In high school, I was doing Pascal and AutoCAD. I had also been part of the AV group for the local church my mom drug me to each week. The church replaced 90% of the equipment with the Video Toaster at the end of my junior year in school. I was mesmerized and knew that somehow computer based video would be my career path. That summer, I spent every day learning everything I could. By the end of the summer, I was switching for 3 cameras, running 1 playback deck, 1 record deck, punching lower 3rds all by my lonesome. By the time I graduated, I could have run the 10 o'clock news for a small TV station. Right place, right time, sheer luck gave me an opportunity that I was not going to pass up. I'm glad I didn't, and the Toaster will always have a special place in my heart.
esafak 3y ago
That Youtube video reminded me that television shows about technology used to be a thing.
- Thorham 3y ago
  And now youtube videos about technology are a thing.
  - esafak 3y ago
    The difference is that the TV shows came from a place of technological optimism and the YouTube shows from commercial apathy. Society isn't optimistic any more, especially about technology.
iancmceachern 3y ago
I remember being totally enamored by this at the time. It was the first time I can remember when people could do professional level work "at home" on "home computers"
Swannie 3y ago
Oh man, I loved that show "Bad Influence" - I'm amazed looking back at the level of discourse vs. what is now generally the state of tech reporting/shows... got to go to a YouTuber for anything close.
- rasz 3y ago
  You might enjoy comedy retrospective look at the show by someone with voice and jokes reminding me of Robert Webb (from Mitchell and Webb sketch series) 4 seasons of 'Breaking Bad Influence' https://www.youtube.com/@RoseTintedSpectrum/playlists?view=50&sort=dd&shelf_id=3 https://www.youtube.com/@RoseTintedSpectrum/playlists?view=5... Son of a gun did such a good job Violet Berlin crashed his birthday https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGDTjXnyGM5flG6Xk6fiMAg/community?lb=UgkxhAmrYiscMKGSi1eBZwmkVeG2RkGNfsX1 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGDTjXnyGM5flG6Xk6fiMAg/com...
wazoox 3y ago
The conclusion is a bit weird: > But these easy switching, transition, and titling tools – even if the aesthetic is dated now – could sure come in handy in 2020s software. But NewTek still exist and their current line is a direct evolution from the Video Toaster of yore. The current TriCaster still has an interface that reminds of the original product from 30 years ago, that's pretty easy to verify!
sillywalk 3y ago
The article didn't seem to mention the 2nd gen Toaster Flyer / Here's a bit more history [0]. (as a kid my neighbour had an amiga, I remember playing Falcon, and the say? text to speech thingy. "In 1993 NewTek released the Video Toaster 4000, an updated version that made use of the new AGA graphics hardware available with the Amiga 4000. In addition, the company released the Video Toaster Flyer, an add-on product that turned the Toaster into a full non-linear editing system similar to the Avid Media Composer that was taking the professional editing world by storm." [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-9-the-video-toaster/2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

204 points by snvzz 3y ago

Got in trouble using this in grade 9 for doing sexy lady swipes while filming people walking the school hallway and writing nicknames under them while the feed went into every classroom.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I'd love to know a lot more about the history & use of Lightwave. Someone got a copy at my school in 1998 or so & shared access & it became quite a little thing for a bunch of folks. Seemed pretty easy to use. I don't really recognize the interface as shown in these videos. The Amiga connection and the hardware board were long gone by the time we all saw this software. But I think the connection was real, wouldove to know more about how this developed over time.

Zardoz84 3y ago

> And then there’s Babylon 5. Those effects looked a little crude, then really crude, and now… kind of weirdly cool and artistic and ahead of their time. (The show’s approach to real-physics spacecraft maneuvers and modeling came to influence later TV like the 2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which also used LightWave 3D. There is even a Babylon 5 station model tucked into an early scene in the escaping fleet.) There is one of the original 3d artists of Babylon 5 that re-rendered some of the original assets and scenes at high res... Simply looks awesome TODAY. The 3d art of Babylon 5 was limited by the output medium.

harrid 3y ago
Not sure if I would agree on the awesome, but here's the link for everyone to judge: https://youtu.be/rf0ka2xJF94 https://youtu.be/rf0ka2xJF94
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Reminds me of an old book I had about 3d modelling, that was showing some pictures of various things like an underwater scene, a space satellite or rocket and more. I think the author of the book I have in mind was using form·Z Tried to find the book online, but I don’t have the book here so it’s difficult to remember exactly. Here are some books with similar level of detail in their cover art to the detail of that video and to the book I am thinking of. It’s neat in its own way. https://www.amazon.com/Into-3D-form-Z-Lachmi-Khemlani/dp/0070349339 https://www.amazon.com/Into-3D-form-Z-Lachmi-Khemlani/dp/007... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Form-Z-Eden-Muir/dp/1566901898 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Form-Z-Eden-Muir/dp/15669018... http://ftp.formz.com/support/books/Kenth_Agurell_4_0.html http://ftp.formz.com/support/books/Kenth_Agurell_4_0.html
- twic 3y ago
  It's the textures that really let it down, i think. The solar panel (?) texture in the very first shot is a perfect example. Looked fine at SDTV resolution, but in high-res, you can see it's just flat blocks of colour, and it loses all realism. Most of the geometry is pretty good. A bit too regular and pristine, could use some tiny variation and some light greebling.
jahnu 3y ago
I recently tried to re-watch B5. I was a huge fan when it came out. I managed to get to early season 2 before I couldn't take the cringe any more. Sometimes it's best to leave things in the past. That being said, a complete re-boot like they did for BG could work.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  "Babluon 5: The Road Home" just premiered at San Diego Comic Con. Trailer shows off the animation and style pretty well: https://youtu.be/Z54XNJivHOs https://youtu.be/Z54XNJivHOs
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Zero-content dig at a great show, thanks. I do remember the graphics being poor until they fixed the lighting in S2, however.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I've rewatched it twice, and season two is where it seriously picks up. You do need to be able to look past very dated effects and decor and some dated storytelling devices, but to me that adds to the charm. Incidentally some of that dated story telling is what makes season 1 slow - there's a lot of set-up going on, both in terms of setting and characters while they'd have benefit from just jumping straight in and filling those bits in along the way. In terms of telling a coherent story throughout multiple seasons, it was remarkable at the time, and so compared with most series of the era it stands up far better despite the dated effects. If they do a reboot, I hope they really does it justice and changes the stories enough that it can stand on its own. A straight remake would be a waste.
  - yardie 3y ago
    To me, The Expanse was the equivalent of a reboot of B5. Interstellar politics, realistic physics, and multi-season plot arches made it a really dramatic, yet geeky show in the same vein as B5. If there is to be a reboot of B5 I feel it would take off from where The Expanse finished rather than where B5 ended over 25 years ago.

Gordonjcp 3y ago

It's a shame the first youtube link is so overcompressed because it's clearly been from very clean VHS, and absolutely destroyed when it was encoded.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
There is no such thing as clean VHS. VHS is roughly youtube's 240p quality. Also the first video has 1440p options on youtube so why do you think it's compression giving bad quality? This is about as good as VHS gets. I think most people don't remember how bad it was on tiny CRTs.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  That video is compressed to hell, it looks like a QuickTime or something from the 90s. That someone upconverted it to 1440p on YouTube is inconsequential. You can see the square MPEG blobs ferchrisakes! Here is a dirty VHS with dropouts which looks WAY better: https://youtu.be/ZlsS_a4qdI4 https://youtu.be/ZlsS_a4qdI4
- warmcompress 3y ago
  Degradation of analog data stored on magnetic tape is a lie—teach the controversy! For real though, can't one just... not post about stuff you don't know about?
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    If one wants to give one real information one should feel free to link one of one's sources. Try this one. https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/whats-the-difference-between-a-vcr-and-vhs/#VHS_Resolution https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/whats-the-difference-betwe...
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      The thing you have linked to is correct, but you're reading it wrong. VHS has 240 *horizontal* lines of resolution, meaning that a grid comprising 240 alternating *vertical* black and white stripes ought to be resolvable as a bare minimum. This corresponds (roughly) to 2.5MHz of luminance bandwidth. This is also confusingly named, but there you go. Youtube's 240p resolution is lower quality than VideoCD, and far *far* lower quality than even fairly manky VHS.

khazhoux 3y ago

> So, a very brief history of the Video Toaster. NewTek founder Tim Jenison loved Vermeer and designed the first edition, with Brad Carvey (who also worked on Men In Black VFX) building the prototype. You might also be familiar with Brad Carvey's younger brother, Dana.

code_duck 3y ago
Brad Carvey taught a course on 3d animation at the community college in Albuquerque in the 90s. My gf was in one of his classes. Very down-to-earth, knowledgeable and friendly guy. We went to a party at his house for the class one time and I mainly remember that he had a framed photo of Wayne and Garth with Al Bundy, which was quite a 90s amalgam.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Ed O'Neill, who played Al Bundy, also appeared in the Wayne's World movies as the creepy donut shop manager. So there's an in-Wayneverse reason for him to be there. Brad was, of course, the template for Garth. Dana first did the Garth voice as an impression of his brother.
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> NewTek founder Tim Jenison That's it! I was struggling to remember his name. Just around the time of the Video Toaster, I was working at a small company in CT called Colorware. Tim Jenison wrote a Mac Paint clone for the Tandy/RS Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We bought the rights to it and paid him royalties on each sale. He made bank, IIRC! Soon after that, he created the Video Toaster and the rest is history. I remember my co-worker saying that with the success of the Video Toaster, Tim had moved on from collecting cars to collecting airplanes.
omershapira 3y ago
Brad was one of the first users of a program I was working on, which he used for his work at Sandia National Labs. He would send me frequent, detailed feedback - respectful and kind, inquiring about possible solutions he'd thought of. He even invited me to Sandia to give a talk together about these efforts [1]. I've never had a kinder customer. [1] https://www.sandia.gov/xr/4th-annual-xr-conference/agenda/ https://www.sandia.gov/xr/4th-annual-xr-conference/agenda/

xattt 3y ago

I still don’t understand why the Video Toaster succeeded on the Amiga and why the software and add on cards didn’t make a successful jump onto PCs and Macs. Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?

fredoralive 3y ago
The Amiga video system had genlock capabilities so it could lock onto an external master clock to keep it in sync with other equipment in an editing suite. This was fairly unusal for consumer equipment. I believe this was originally intended to sync with a laserdisc player if the chipset was used in an arcade machine, but it came in useful giving the Amiga a niche in the lower end of broadcast video as well. Video Toaster did get ported to Windows when the Amiga died, and NewTek are still around doing various broadcasting related stuff. I guess it's just less prominent when it's just another company doing pro video stuff behind the scenes rather than a company Amiga fans can point to and brag about as one of their few "wins".
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > ... one of their few "wins". That's fighting talk round my way. Yes, the Amiga ended up declining, but it was ahead of its time with a multi-tasking OS, advanced sound capabilities and great graphics for its time (4096 colours!).
  - pjc50 3y ago
    The Amiga is a classic example of "technological tour de force, commercial failure". Did it ever sell well in the US?
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      Well, I'm in the UK where it was moderately popular, but according to Wikipedia it sold less than a million units in the US as it was sold in toy stores and seen as a toy compared with PCs which were more expensive.

drcongo 3y ago

Back in the 1990s I was at film school at the point they were transitioning from Amigas / Toasters to an Avid suite, so I bought an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster off them on the slightly-cheap. I got fairly proficient in Lightwave but all I ever used it for was making short 16mm film loops for projecting on huge screens at raves from a bank of Elf projectors nailed to a plank. Edit: Tangentially related, it's well worth seeking out the film Tim's Vermeer about NewTek founder Tim Jenison trying to recreate Vermeer's style. It's fantastic.

micv 3y ago
If you still have that A4000 it's worth real money now to the retro crowd.
- drcongo 3y ago
  Sadly it went into a skip in around 1999 by which time I was on Macs.
  - micv 3y ago
    Yeah, that's what happened to most of them. Between that and leaky caps I don't think there's many working examples left now.
- azinman2 3y ago
  I still do with video toaster branding. How much are we talking?
  - micv 3y ago
    I've seen them listed anywhere between one and several thousand depending on condition, spec, accessories, etc.
    - azinman2 3y ago
      Where do they get listed? eBay?

api 3y ago

Commodore could have been Apple with better leadership. The Amiga was ahead of almost any other PC for its time and like Apple had a cult following. The Commodore 64 before it was way ahead in graphics and sound for its era, especially for the price. PC compatibles didn’t even catch up to that 8-bit machine until EGA and Adlib and Sound Blaster cards came around.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
I felt that the Amiga needed someone with a sense of design directing the computer's UI. Despite its more advanced capabilities it still always looked like a kit-car to the Apple's Lotus Elan offerings in the 90's.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Amiga OS 1.x was definitely rather amateurish looking (blue and orange color scheme.) The 2.x series and above looked much more professional (gray scale, more of a beveled 3D look, etc.)
  - retrac 3y ago
    The reason for that is interesting, IMO. The Amiga was intended as a home computer. And in 1985, a home computer might have a TV for display, or a very fuzzy low-quality colour monitor. For some reason, yellow/orange/red/white on blue is particularly legible on poor-quality monitors and TVs. (Many DOS applications of the era were white or yellow on blue, for the same reason. And early Windows had similarly horrible schemes.) By the late 1980s, colour monitors were nearly as good as a B&W one for showing crisp text and lines, and so grey/black on white.
    - nradov 3y ago
      The way that the Amiga engineers used interlaced video modes to support CRT displays with low refresh rates was also not a good look. In the early models that was the only way to get VGA equivalent screen resolution, but the flickering was so bad that some people literally wore sunglasses and configured the desktop with low-contrast colors in order to reduce eye strain. It was one of several design decisions that probably seemed like a good idea at the time but made the product look shoddy and held it back from mainstream adoption.

krunck 3y ago

Lets not forget the first Newtek demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzwUQIvhHzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzwUQIvhHzw Such a classic. I remember playing this as a kid over and over just because I loved the music. I had no idea that it was "Paranoimia" by Art of Noise.

stuff4ben 3y ago
God I watched all these too as a kid. Had some of the videos on tape and I remembered watching them all the time. Kiki Stockhammer!!! My first grownup crush (I was a teen).
- krunck 3y ago
  Good, so I'm not the only one.
dean2432 3y ago
awesome, i remember some of those HAM images. oh, when i read paranoimia this is the tune i think of XD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwgZ7wGus0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwgZ7wGus0
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mrandish 3y ago
Just to expand, that's called NewTek Demo Reel #1 created to promote NewTek's pre-Toaster products Digi-View and Digi-Paint for the Amiga. It fit entirely on two Amiga floppy disks and would play back in real-time and loop at the end. It was sent out for free to Amiga dealers in color packaging and became the demo many dealers would just leave running on their floor model. The decompression and simultaneous playback of multiple motion video clips and synced audio toward the end of the demo was extraordinary for the time (~1986). It was all custom coded demo-ware in 68k assembly language pushing the Amiga custom chips right down to the metal as there were no authoring tools to create this sort of thing. I remember being shocked when I first saw it playback on an Amiga in real-time. Initially I thought there must be a VCR hidden under the table. Because it was distributed by Commodore Europe to all European dealers, Demo Reel #1 clearly influenced the evolution of the still-nascent DemoScene and it's been called "The mother of all demoscene demos." NewTek was figuring out amazing stuff right on the bleeding edge of possibility.

excalibur 3y ago

I wonder how many of these effects my phone could produce if its software didn't suck. My guess is most of them.

dagmx 3y ago

As an oddly adjacent topic, here’s a documentary about the founder of Newtek (the creators of Video Toaster) as he tries to figure out whether Vermeer used optical devices to aid his painting. https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ

aresant 3y ago

If you enjoyed this article The Retro Hour podcast has an awesome business / creative interview with Tim Jenison that was founder / CEO of NewTek that brought this product to market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS8ARFeZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS8ARFeZc

dylan604 3y ago

The Video Toaster is what gave me clarity on what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was "programming" on C64 by typing in programs from the back of magazines. In high school, I was doing Pascal and AutoCAD. I had also been part of the AV group for the local church my mom drug me to each week. The church replaced 90% of the equipment with the Video Toaster at the end of my junior year in school. I was mesmerized and knew that somehow computer based video would be my career path. That summer, I spent every day learning everything I could. By the end of the summer, I was switching for 3 cameras, running 1 playback deck, 1 record deck, punching lower 3rds all by my lonesome. By the time I graduated, I could have run the 10 o'clock news for a small TV station. Right place, right time, sheer luck gave me an opportunity that I was not going to pass up. I'm glad I didn't, and the Toaster will always have a special place in my heart.

esafak 3y ago

That Youtube video reminded me that television shows about technology used to be a thing.

Thorham 3y ago
And now youtube videos about technology are a thing.
- esafak 3y ago
  The difference is that the TV shows came from a place of technological optimism and the YouTube shows from commercial apathy. Society isn't optimistic any more, especially about technology.

iancmceachern 3y ago

I remember being totally enamored by this at the time. It was the first time I can remember when people could do professional level work "at home" on "home computers"

Swannie 3y ago

Oh man, I loved that show "Bad Influence" - I'm amazed looking back at the level of discourse vs. what is now generally the state of tech reporting/shows... got to go to a YouTuber for anything close.

rasz 3y ago
You might enjoy comedy retrospective look at the show by someone with voice and jokes reminding me of Robert Webb (from Mitchell and Webb sketch series) 4 seasons of 'Breaking Bad Influence' https://www.youtube.com/@RoseTintedSpectrum/playlists?view=50&sort=dd&shelf_id=3 https://www.youtube.com/@RoseTintedSpectrum/playlists?view=5... Son of a gun did such a good job Violet Berlin crashed his birthday https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGDTjXnyGM5flG6Xk6fiMAg/community?lb=UgkxhAmrYiscMKGSi1eBZwmkVeG2RkGNfsX1 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGDTjXnyGM5flG6Xk6fiMAg/com...

wazoox 3y ago

The conclusion is a bit weird: > But these easy switching, transition, and titling tools – even if the aesthetic is dated now – could sure come in handy in 2020s software. But NewTek still exist and their current line is a direct evolution from the Video Toaster of yore. The current TriCaster still has an interface that reminds of the original product from 30 years ago, that's pretty easy to verify!

sillywalk 3y ago

The article didn't seem to mention the 2nd gen Toaster Flyer / Here's a bit more history [0]. (as a kid my neighbour had an amiga, I remember playing Falcon, and the say? text to speech thingy. "In 1993 NewTek released the Video Toaster 4000, an updated version that made use of the new AGA graphics hardware available with the Amiga 4000. In addition, the company released the Video Toaster Flyer, an add-on product that turned the Toaster into a full non-linear editing system similar to the Avid Media Composer that was taking the professional editing world by storm." [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-9-the-video-toaster/2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-ami...