Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?
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".
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!).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"In 2004 the Amiga version of the Video Toaster® went "Open Source", thanks to NewTek, DiscreetFX, Bill Evans, Aaron Ruchetta and a few others. "
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
As I said, it's all speculation, but there are just so many things that can go wrong in a transition like that.
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.