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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

I very badly wanted an Amiga as a kid, primarily for the Video Toaster which included Lightwave. It was out of reach financially, but also on its way out with the Commodore corporate problems. My parents drove me to B&H Photo in Manhattan to take a look at one, but they were pretty honest about it being near the end of the line for Amiga, sadly.

The closest I got was a subscription to Amiga World and a NewTek magazine if I recall correctly. I must have read and re-read the same articles on the visual effects for Babylon 5 about a thousand times.

Despite the cost, the Toaster plus Amiga was insanely inexpensive compared to the alternatives of the time.

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I worked for a production company that went from 100 grand worth of Grass Valley Switchers/Digital Picture Manipulation (DPM-700) down to one Video Toaster 4000 on an Amiga 4000. While I missed some of the cool stuff we could do with the expensive equipment, we were mostly doing local TV commercials and infomercials. So the Toaster ended up working just fine. I barely knew anything about the Amiga at the time other than the thing was rock solid until it crashed one day.

We had to load up the entire box of like 60 floppies of Toaster software, the Amiga itself and drive to some hole in the wall in St Augustine Florida to have one of the last remaining Amiga gurus to help us fix the machine. He put a new hard drive in it, but we got like 40 floppies into the Toaster software install and it failed. The dude HAD the software on site but told us it would be wrong for him to use his own floppies to do the install. We asked him if there was ANYTHING he could do. He eyed the twisted pair network card we had and said, "I could be persuaded for that". We weren't using it... as far as we knew, it was just another BNC on the back of the computer case. So, he lowered his "morals" and we got our box fixed. Great times.

It is pretty crazy to think that Babylon 5 had better special effects than TNG (in my opinion) and did it for cheap on the Amiga compared to Industrial Lights and Magic that TNG used.

It's a weird comparison. Babylon 5's special effects were very early CGI, but TNG has almost no computer graphics at all. (Nearly) everything was done practically, and with models. Personally I think TNG stands up better, and the fact that it was done practically and shot on film now allows a high-definition version to exist, which can never happen for B5.

B5 was done mostly in HD, they lost a few shots IIRC.

Their effects weren't, which is the point the parent was making I think.

You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make your mind up.

It is still impressive however that some of these amiga + lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.

But for the time it looked OK, especially on the typical bedroom 14" CRT.

He wasn't stating how it looked for the time, he was comparing it to star trek: the next generation, which used models and was shot on film while even high budget CG was still in its infancy.

Yeah I was basically just saying star trek spent a fortune, while B5 was done "on the cheap". I was wrong and forgot TNG still used models, but the overall comment still stands.

I rewatch B5 every few years. It still looks great with some exceptions (Vorlon planet killer looks like it didn't get much time).

Originally you made a comparison to Star Trek.

A couple of years ago, I watched the whole of Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, and then Bablyon 5 one after the other.

So I have to ask whether you're using a modern TV and perhaps what your media source for B5 is. Because, frankly, most aspects of B5 pretty objectively haven't aged well (the elevator scene is one exception), and the FX renders are especially bad, at least from the DVD box set.

I fully believe it looked incredible at the time on a standard def CRT. But TNG still looks OK and DS9 looks good.

Are you watching a digitally remastered Star Trek?

I've watched B5 on CRT and various LCD. The station monitors obviously aged poorly, but a lot of ships still looked pretty good. Minbari Sharlin, White star...etc.

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