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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 We were lucky enough to have a Rank film lab nearby who would give us out of date stock, and occasionally stock that was out of date and used but undeveloped - so every now and then we had loops of double exposures of the Amiga screen and some random home movies.

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