The 1990s Amiga with Video Toaster has a VFX cool factor that endures today | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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.

Not sure if I would agree on the awesome, but here's the link for everyone to judge: https://youtu.be/rf0ka2xJF94

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/007...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Form-Z-Eden-Muir/dp/15669018...

http://ftp.formz.com/support/books/Kenth_Agurell_4_0.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

I loved The Expanse, but the setting is very different, and I'd feel cheated if I was promised a B5 reboot and got The Expanse. So much of B5 comes down to the very alien conflicts and unfolding of the time loop.

In terms of continuation I might prefer a continuation of The Expanse over a continuation of B5 - because of the time loop, the B5 story is very closed and complete in a way that means I feel if you were to do anything else in that universe without it getting tedious you need to do something entirely different that'd pretty much need to be its own thing. But where The Expanse TV series ended they had pretty much just started a new story.

> realistic physics

It was a while ago, but a lot of the action tension in the first couple of seasons seemed to rely on things like, "We are leaving [jupiter moon], we are in a rush! Adrenaline is high!... We are arriving at [Mars Moon] 30 seconds later, nothing has changed!". And suspense of "Earth is launching missiles now, oh-no they are about to hit us so we must dodge them!".

It paid lip-service to being "Realistic" physics, but it was just a thin veneer. (Completely fine with "alien physics"/"drive physics" because that is in the story construction. It's everything else, that goes out the window instantly).

I'd love to see where you've seen examples of that, because the The Expanse books are very careful to keep their eye on distances and travel times. The show seemed to follow that as well.

Having written two (self published) novels so far that tries to get it right, I know I've made stupid mistakes, and it's really hard to get it right without seriously limiting the story, or just hard to get it right full stop. So frankly I'm impressed how well The Expanse TV series did, though they certainly took liberties. They at least seemed to mostly try even when it wasn't important from a plot point of view, but then also used it for better effect as part of the plot.

B5 was much more relaxed about that, with JMS explicitly saying in the context of B5 that ships "travel at the speed of plot" [1][2], and with ostensibly having the station rotate for perceived gravity but leaving C&C near the middle where it'd have near zero g, nor did they make the view out their window rotate (pet peeve: should have been a viewscreen, and C&C should be nowhere near the hull; those things are also very much plot driven).

For B5 I'd agree they paid lip service to it. For The Expanse I feel it goes at least a bit deeper. I feel like they come at it from different sides: B5 ignores realism beyond the very superficial (e.g. the station rotating) for the most part except when necessary for the plot, while The Expanse tries to remain realistic except when deviating was necessary for the plot. Note: Realistic not accurate, and I do think there's big gap between what is realistic to an average audience, even if asked to pick out holes, and what is accurate.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSp...

[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/57948595 "HOW FAST DO WHITE STARS TRAVEL? They travel at the speed of plot."

The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 has lots of bits from JMS who responded personally to a bunch of stuff on .. GE.NIE ? and USENET.. during B5 production.

http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/

Season 1 was closer to tradition SciFi TV of the time (think of the Star Trek Next Gen.) Each episode is fully self contained and there is little in last weeks episode that you need to know to understand this weeks. There is a tiny bit of story moving from episode to episode (basically the Sheridan/Minbari/Battle of the Line bits and pieces), but mostly it is 22 episide of setup.

Seasons 2-4 move away from that construction to a fully searial story. its 90's TV so there still need to be a definite episode arc in most of the stories, so you still have pointless digressions like Garibaldi getting stuck in Grey 17, but the Shadow/Vorlon war takes over the bulk of the story telling followed by the Earther war.

Season 5 seems more like they did well on the previous seasons so while it was intended to end with season 4, they kept going but without a larger story to propel it.

I think it was originally planned for five series, but then they thought that they were going to get cancelled after the fourth series so they squeezed the planned plot arc in to conclude the end of the fourth instead.

JMS called them 'wham episodes', there are only a few in Season one - a sky full of stars, Signs and Portents, and *Chrysalis, more in season 2..

I believe they weren't sure that Season 5 would happen, so the Shadow War/Earther war was ended earlier in Season 4.

JMS apologized for the 'Grey 17 is Missing' episode. :)

"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

Zero-content dig at a great show, thanks. I do remember the graphics being poor until they fixed the lighting in S2, however.

I mean, the story really only starts in season 2. Most everyone agrees that you’re better off skipping most of season 1 except for five or so pivotal episodes and a few others that are quite important wrt character development.

> 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.

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/

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.

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.

> 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.

Since you dropped Tim and Vermeer, I loved this film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer

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.

I had an Amiga and it was great at the time. But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped. There wasn't a clear path forward to take advantage of hardware advancements while maintaining software backward compatibility.

By contrast the Apple Macintosh hardware architecture was much more limited. But it was also easier to extend without redesigning everything from scratch.

I would argue that Classic Mac OS was not that much better off.

It still lacked protected memory and preemptive multitasking.

The Amiga OS still had far better multi tasking abilities than Classic Mac OS

> But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped.

That's interesting. If you have a moment could you expand on that? Thanks.

For instance, the video management that made it such a perfect fit for the broadcast video of the day made it difficult to later accommodate higher resolution computer displays.

I don't think the problems were particularly insurmountable; with the advantage they had, they could have redesigned everything twice over and still be competitive (which tbf they did, to an extent: the CD32 stuff they pushed towards the end was pretty cool).

It's just that Commodore leadership was fundamentally extractive, and saw personal computers more as consumer widgets than platforms. The financial side of things was a bit shambolic, and they trusted the wrong money.

It later revs of the OS (3.x), it did support graphics cards ("retargetable graphics.") These were only usable for applications that did not access the hardware directly, of course. And then you're obviously not taking advantage of any of the custom chips.

Commodore could never have been Apple. Very beginning of Commodore involved fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Acceptance_Corporatio... "one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/

"Commodore was one of the Atlantic subsidiaries directly implicated in this scheme, but the commission was unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Tramiel or Kapp despite heavy suspicion."

Commodore founder Tramiel didnt care one bit if he sold typewriters, calculators or cow hides as long as he could make money by screwing people over https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made... The moment C-64 was released whole* (except one person) design team was "let go" and subsequently founded Ensoniq. Tramiel replacements were even worse because on top of not knowing a first thing about product they also didnt know how to make money.

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.

I grew up with Windows (and to a lesser extent - at my dad's office, or in the school computer lab, Macs), but I remembered hearing about how incredible and ahead-of-its-time the Amiga was.

Given that reputation, when I finally got WinUAE setup, I couldn't believe how awful Workbench 1.0 looked. "Well", I told myself, "I guess it was from the mid-80s. You can only expect so much. It's not bad compared to Windows 1.0..."

So...you can imagine my dismay when Workbench 2.0 (1990) and 3.0 (1992) looked...it wasn't garish anymore; it was incredibly drab, but still awful. Compared to their contemporaries - Windows 3.0 and 3.1, respectively, to say nothing of MacOS at the time - there was no contest. If you were doing anything besides playing games or video work with the Toaster I couldn't imagine buying an Amiga at that point, given what else was on the market.

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.)

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.

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.

Nobody I know used interlace other than very occasionally for still images. VGA resolutions were not common at that time, so they were not what my circle compared against anyway.

When I visited one of my dads business associates who ran a software company, for example, the vast majority of PC's in their offices had monochrome text screens. A handful had EGA graphics cards and colour screens. I remember playing Zaxxon on one of them and finding it hysterical that the graphics and sound on their most expensive machines was worse even than on my C64.

The Amiga looked like sci-fi technology in comparison with what most people actually had in their offices or homes until several years in. Ironically if anything the significantly better graphics contributed to it being pigeonholed as a game machine despite the original Amiga looking like an office machine and being way too expensive for games.

The problem was not so much the original or enhanced graphics chips, which were groundbreaking in 85 and maybe even until ~'88 or so, but that AGA in 92 was way too little, several years too late as an upgrade to still justify the price premium on the Amiga. 7 years at that time was an eternity for the graphics capabilities to stand still.

Had AGA started a couple of years earlier, maybe Commodore would have lived long enough to complete their next two upgrade projects (AAA[1] and Hombre[2]), but with the chaos of Commodore at that time it's no surprise they didn't pull that off. I feel like Commodore was still in the 8-bit mindset of thinking they had time to milk their existing designs for much longer than they actually could.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

Yep, AGA was too little, too late. If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990) they might've had a chance. The Amiga 3000 was my favorite Amiga, but it brought nothing new: It was an integrated 2500 (which was just an A2000 with expansion cards.) You could've had all the pieces (68030 accelerator, flicker fixer, SCSI controller, etc.) years earlier. Things like the sound chip ("Paula") never changed for the entire life of the platform.

By 1992, the 486 had been out for a few years. 386's with SVGA and soundblaster cards were getting pretty cheap. The writing was on the wall...

I loved my A3000 (we got it for work...) but it took two expensive expansions (a Picasso graphics card, and an ethernet card - both way overpriced compared to PC expansion cards) to make it competitive at the time. With that, though, it was still nicer to use than our PC's in '95-'96. First with Windows '95 that Windows became usable enough even with graphics cards. We ran X11 on most of our 486 PC's, and that felt better than Windows at that time, but so much less polished (I ended up gradually spending more and more of my time with Linux, and it's been the year of the Linux Desktop for me every years since ~'97 or so)

Even then we hoped for a resurrection because it still seemed possible - I remember we tried pitching a software dev. project to Escom in '95, shortly after they'd bought the Amiga rights. I'd co-founded an ISP, and another Amiga fan among my co-founders and I were considering developing an alternative Amiga web browser back when it was still viable for tiny teams to do so. But of course Escom went bankrupt a year later, before we'd gotten anywhere with them.

> If they had put AGA in the A3000 (1990)

Yeah, I agree. The A3000+, in other words[1], only 2 years before AGA. Such a missed opportunity even in '91/'92 - it was faster than than the A4000 (better memory bus, SCSI instead of IDE), and had a DSP for 16-bit audio recording and playback or a modem.... And of course in being designed for the A3000 case it would've been oh-so-much prettier than the A4000 bulky PC style case. In classic Commodore style axed without a rational reason.

That two year difference would've at a minimum given them the reprieve to possibly get AAA out (plagued by problems paying for test runs through '93)...

What could have been... I still wish for the feeling of a modern "Amiga". I contributed code to AROS for a while, but it's "too Amiga" in the sense that it accurately reflects AmigaOS 4.x for the most part, but what I really want is something that matched a modernised version of my rose-tinted nostalgic view of Amiga, and I don't know if that's possible, but I occasionally wonder if a Linux-based AmigaOS-inspired desktop environment might get me there... (of course, finding time to do anything about that is another matter...)

[1] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/prototypes/a3000pl...

They never understood how to build a product line or a roadmap. To them, the Amiga was a on/off kind of thing, a product they acquired once and planned to sell for some years. They would have happily sold some new, completely incompatible home computer, afterwards.

The fascinating thing is that they were sort-of understanding they couldn't really do that anymore towards the end, but too late.

Hombre, their last attempt, was one one hand meant to provide a clean break by moving to a PA-RISC core (chosen to allow for Windows NT compatibility but in retrospect might just have deferred their death) in a dual-chip pair that'd combine the CPU, DMA, an upgraded blitter that was closer to a basic GPU (transforms, texture mapping, gouraud shading, z-buffering), a 64-bit RISC-like copper replacement, 16-bit sound, with a display controller on the other chip.

But to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, they also planned putting an entire AGA Amiga on a chip, and recompile AmigaOS, so they could end up with sort-of reverse of what we got with the PowerPC expansion boards or the older Janus Bridgeboards (putting an x86 CPU straddling both a Zorro and ISA buses, letting you run PC software at full speed in a window on the Amiga), of having the new CPU run the OS, and using the embedded 68k Amiga-on-a-chip to run legacy software.

A valiant attempt, but of course way too late - Commodore ran out of money before completing even the chipset before Hombre in their pipeline.

Hombre would've been a big break, though, with what looks like they had something resembling an actual plan for a very broad range of uses from the start instead of their usual haphazard Darwinist "survival of whatever nearly ready design still happens to please the right executives" Commodore usually practices.

It ranged from putting it on a high end graphics card, to set-top boxes, CD32 like entertainment systems, all the way up to high-end machines running AmigaOS and WindowsNT and based around a machine concept from David Haynie (Acutiator, going back to '91) that planned for exchangable modules for everything including the CPU, with the ability to even adapt the bus control account for different CPU requirements.

It's an agonisingly fascinating "what if" of alternative hardware, while at the same time in retrospect having some serious flaws (PA-RISC...) and probably being way too ambitious for Commodore even at its peak given the amount of discipline shepherding a project that ambitious over the line without some executive ego trip derailing it would've taken...

Side note: I feel like dark mode has taken hold in part because of really good LCD screens with great contrast. Dark mode would look horrible on CRTs or even first-generation LCDs.

Dark mode is fine on CRTs. They have excellent contrast; they are like OLED displays in that regard where the unlighted regions are truly not lit. CRTs have a harder time with black on white. The Mac's choice of black on white was unusual for the time, it was usually only seen on high end systems like workstations, with really good monitors with high refresh rates. (White on black was standard with computer displays thru the 70s into the 90s -- think of serial terminals and DOS PCs.)

It's funny, because the Amiga's heritage is far closer to Atari than Commodore, in both technical aspects and involved personnel. In another universe, it was Atari who could have been Apple.

Didn't Jobs and Woz intern at Atari or something...?

Jobs sold Atari an arcade board designed by Wozniak, then lied to Wozniak Atari paid him only half the money, as you do to your "best friend".

Jobs was a complete piece of work. The fact that our society empowers these psychological types is depressing.

Lets not forget the first Newtek demo: 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.

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.

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).

Good, so I'm not the only one.

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

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

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.

If you still have that A4000 it's worth real money now to the retro crowd.

Sadly it went into a skip in around 1999 by which time I was on Macs.

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.

I still do with video toaster branding. How much are we talking?

I've seen them listed anywhere between one and several thousand depending on condition, spec, accessories, etc.

Where do they get listed? eBay?

Yeah. That's where I've gone for all my Amiga nostalgia needs over the years.

I watched Tim's Vermeer about 8 years ago and really enjoyed it. As an engineer, photographer, and someone who enjoys art museums I always find the intersection between the two interesting. Whether it is new paint or printing techniques, lenses, etc.

How did you make the 16mm film prints? Video to film negative transfer wasn’t cheap, AFAIK.

I could imagine just pointing a 16mm camera at the Amiga screen as the most basic transfer option :)

That's exactly what I did! We had a couple of Bolex cameras and a beautiful, mouse-ears Arriflex - point any of them at a monitor in a dark room and the quality was good enough for visuals in a warehouse that's also lit up by strobes / lasers / flashing lights etc. We were lucky enough to have a Rank film lab nearby who would give us out of date stock, and occasionally stock that was out of date and used but undeveloped - so every now and then we had loops of double exposures of the Amiga screen and some random home movies.

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.

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-ami...

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

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!

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

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

And now youtube videos about technology are a thing.

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.

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.

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=5...

Son of a gun did such a good job Violet Berlin crashed his birthday https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGDTjXnyGM5flG6Xk6fiMAg/com...

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?

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".

> ... 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!).

The Amiga is a classic example of "technological tour de force, commercial failure". Did it ever sell well in the US?

Commodore torched its US dealer network during the C64 days by both not informing them about a drastic price cut (because it was by all by all means an impulsive rapid choice by Tramiel), and focusing on low-end retailers like Kmart, and so when the Amiga came and the Commodore US tried to push it as a business machine that needed a dealer network they were screwed.

Some of the reasons Commodore kept doing so much better in Europe (to the point that Commodore UK management attempted to get financing for a buyout of their parent after the bankruptcy) was a mix of allowing the regional companies a lot of latitude to do their own thing (UK and Scandinavia was very games focused, Germany pushed more business sales) in smaller markets, not screwing their dealers over in Europe, and many of the European subsidiaries going full in on games more so than the higher end machines.

As a long time Amiga user (and Commodore 64 before that) it was really sad to see the fall, but Commodore was so deeply dysfunctional that it was just a question of when not if they'd eventually fail irrespective of whatever technology might fall in their laps.

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.

The irony is that Commodore in the US pushed it a lot harder as a business / graphics workstation, but they'd ruined their dealer network a few years before and never really managed to build it up again, so they struggled to get it into professional dealers, while they failed to market well to the gamer market.

Meanwhile, Commodore UK achieved most of their success by making games bundles that the US was very reluctant to try to push.

E.g. the Commodore UK "Batman pack" in '89 was near legendary [1][2] in its ability to drive Amiga sales.

Commodore UK did well enough that they tried to assemble a consortium to buy Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt...

[1] https://www.generationamiga.com/2021/05/09/how-batman-change...

[2] https://www.pczone.co.uk/back-to-the-amiga-500-batman-pack-3...

It was quite strong over here, besides the PC, it was the Atari and Amiga that ruled the 16 bit days, in many European countries there were hardly anyone selling Apple devices, and Acorn were mostly an UK thing.

Growing up in Norway saw a grand total of one Apple machine in the 1980's and until maybe '93 or '94 or so: A lonely Mac sitting ignored in the corner of my local computer store.

They must have sold a few, but a whole wall was taken up by Commodore/Amiga machines, Atari ST's, and Spectrum. An Amstrad was located next to the Mac, and that got far more attention, but that too was rare.

I first saw more Mac's when briefly dealing with marketing/desktop publishing companies when I started working in the mid '90's, but only sporadically until the iMac.

Same in Holland.

I met a lot of European-born engineers at Apple that grew up with the Atari ST, ha ha.

Interestingly, the first time I got platformed shamed was by an Amiga kid. He found out I had a 286 at home and told me to "get a real computer, get an Amiga."

> 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.

Well eventually the PCs replaced the Amiga and the Unix workstations for all the video effects.

But back when the Amiga came out (1985), and then five years later Video Toaster (1990), PCs were still running... DOS. And Apple was still mostly selling monochrome Mac computers (I've got a Macintosh Classic at home which came out in late 1990 and it's still got a monochrome screen).

And 1990 is when it came out: developers had to start working on it before 1990. PCs were simply, back then, complete turds?

I was there and fully remember moving from my Amiga to a 386 PC. This fells like taking a step backwards of several years.

The Amiga was a machine way ahead of its time for its price.

I don't see how that'd have worked before Windows NT (1993) or Windows 95 (1995). As I remember it it's only half a decade later, around 1996, when 3DS Max came out, that people began to take the PC half-seriously for this kind of stuff.

> Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?

Not a coincidence, and there was also an additional hardware feature: the "genlock".

Normally when doing graphics generation your software keeps track of the "vertical blanking interrupt", which tells you when a new frame has started. Normally this is generated internally. The Amiga let you lock the output video generation to an input video signal, so you could draw over a TV signal without having to digitize the incoming signal or use some sort of external chromakey system.

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that most of the VideoToaster software and hardware were specifically designed for the Amiga hardware architecture and therefore did not easily port to other systems. The extension card was Zorro II and the performance critical software was written in 68k assembly. In some cases the assembly code is written in such a way that it depends on cycle exact sync with the video signal. Original source code is on github.com, search for OpenVideoToaster.

If I recall correctly the original video toaster, and I believe even the revised toaster 2000 and 4000 all occupied the video slot, a dedicated internal interface that provided direct access to analog RGB component signals as well as some other video timing and audio channels. There was no connection to the Zoro II or later Zorro III system buses. The Amiga 4000 video slot added digital rgb counterparts to these analog signals, and also some oddball 8 bit connections to,I believe the parallel port UART pins.

Awesome, I didn't know this!

"In 2004 the Amiga version of the Video Toaster® went "Open Source", thanks to NewTek, DiscreetFX, Bill Evans, Aaron Ruchetta and a few others. "

Its because Newtek cheated! Same reason there never was a PAL Toaster.

All those fancy effects they did would normally require decoding incoming analog composite Video signal into RGB, sampling 3 channels, storing those 3 channels in dedicated framebuffer, having very performant effects engine juggling this huge amount of data around, then on the way out again encoding RGB back to Analog Video resulting in loss of quality. What Newtek engineers (Carvey?) did was a brilliant hack - Toaster effects are performed on raw undecoded NTSC samples. Amiga has no access to the capture framebuffer, its only used for UI and as a fancy graphical titler (like Sony HB-G900P MSX2 with built-in genlock, but much better). PAL video wouldnt work because every second line has inverted phase, shuffling raw samples would result in artifacts. PC wouldnt work because you still need Genlock and precisely synchronized 59.94Hz video output meaning now you need to build and ship custom Video card to replace whole Amiga.

That very same technique got reused on PC in 1995 by Paul Montgomery (Newtek co-founder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Montgomery#Play_Inc.) in Snappy Video Snapshot LPT dongle. @TubeTimeUS on twitter did a Snappy deep dive, teardown and reverse engineering down to schematic and figuring out remarked "PLAY HD-1500" main chip is just a XC2064 FPGA. PLL + 30msps ADC + special 2Mbit video ram capable of holding whole field = this thing grabs whole one field of video all at once after perfectly synchronizing to 14.318MHz video clock. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1301990455182155776

Purely speculation on my part, but I'd imagine that they must have had enormous "room for failure" on the UI side of things: the full screen dashboard in those videos would have felt super outdated on a Mac, and even on a PC at the time multimedia picked up steam there. So they would be torn between catering to the habits of their Amiga audience and leveraging contemporary UI paradigms. Go full retro continuity? Even their old users might want prefer to try something new and shiny. Abandon everything? Chances are your new UI approach just doesn't work so well, this wasn't the era of quickly iterating through a number of exploratory working prototypes. Try a best of both worlds compromise? Old hands will likely find it almost but not quite close enough to what they need to continue well-entrenched habits, newcomers will be confused by paradigms they don't know.

As I said, it's all speculation, but there are just so many things that can go wrong in a transition like that.

The Amiga's hardware was designed with television output in mind -- not just the clock speed but the genlock. A "Toaster for PC" would've required additional hardware. Such systems did exist -- Matrox Studio being one -- but it was somewhat more expensive (and way less sexy) than the Toaster.

NewTek did make a Video Toaster for Macintosh. It came in a box that connected to the Mac's SCSI port and was largely controlled via a Switcher interface on the Mac. You may have figured out that the box was a complete Amiga 2000 system with the Video Toaster add-in cards installed.

As the Amiga declined, NewTek saw the writing on the wall and released a Video Toaster for Windows NT PCs. Today, a turnkey version of this system is available under the name TriCaster.

But again, the sexiness just isn't there now.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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

> There is no such thing as clean VHS. VHS is roughly youtube's 240p quality.

And yet if you IVTC a film telecined for reproduction on VHS using 3:2 pulldown you end up with the full 480 lines at a rate of 24fps.

Furthermore, if you consider the ~3MHz in luminance bandwidth, you get ~240TVL which works out to ~320 "pixels" per line at the NTSC DAR of 4/3.

Chrominance bandwidth and analog noise notwithstanding, I'd say that ~320x480 is a fair bit better than "240p".

And, for the record, VHS sucks. It just doesn't suck as much as you're claiming.

Finally, Laserdisc FTW.

VHS is about 240 lines horizontal resolution and 40-50 lines chroma resolution.

Even at 1440p the video has massive MPEG blocking, it's been heavily compressed after being captured off tape. VHS has not got MPEG-like compression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K8dUkeDZTM is an example of a badly-worn and therefore extremely "speckly" and dull VHS tape that I captured a while back. Youtube has a hard time with the chroma noise, but I didn't want to overcook it with denoising etc. so I just left it as it is.

Notice how much smoother everything is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmCygZIjio is a capture of a very damaged Sony 8mm analogue tape, again with a lot of dropouts. Notice how there's no MPEG blockyness?

These aren't even especially good captures, and were done off a not-properly-set-up "industrial" VHS machine which desperately needs realigned (and probably new heads), into a DV camcorder used as a DAC into a Firewire card.

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?

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-betwe...

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.

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