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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
> 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!
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)
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahnu|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] khazhoux|2 years ago|reply
You might also be familiar with Brad Carvey's younger brother, Dana.
[+] [-] omershapira|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.sandia.gov/xr/4th-annual-xr-conference/agenda/
[+] [-] code_duck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dangerboysteve|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nradov|2 years ago|reply
By contrast the Apple Macintosh hardware architecture was much more limited. But it was also easier to extend without redesigning everything from scratch.
[+] [-] rasz|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LocalH|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krunck|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrandish|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stuff4ben|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dean2432|2 years ago|reply
oh, when i read paranoimia this is the tune i think of XD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSwgZ7wGus0
[+] [-] dagmx|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ
[+] [-] drcongo|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lizknope|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|2 years ago|reply
I could imagine just pointing a 16mm camera at the Amiga screen as the most basic transfer option :)
[+] [-] jauntywundrkind|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sillywalk|2 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] aresant|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDS8ARFeZc
[+] [-] wazoox|2 years ago|reply
> 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!
[+] [-] excalibur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swannie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] xattt|2 years ago|reply
Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?
[+] [-] fredoralive|2 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] morio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] usrusr|2 years ago|reply
As I said, it's all speculation, but there are just so many things that can go wrong in a transition like that.
[+] [-] bitwize|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nacho2sweet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancmceachern|2 years ago|reply
It was the first time I can remember when people could do professional level work "at home" on "home computers"
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|2 years ago|reply
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.