Can I Toast Whole Wheat in That?
March 18, 2016 2:16 PM Subscribe
From July 2007 to April 2013, Arstechnica writer Jeremy Reimer wrote a series of articles covering the History of the Amiga.
Now almost 3 years later, part 9 has been released. It covers the game changing (pun not intended but this is the Amiga) Video Toaster.
I wish I could say how much I liked this in giant 3D-extruded rotating shiny-mirrored-gold letters, but this will have to do.
posted by RogerB at 2:54 PM on March 18, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by RogerB at 2:54 PM on March 18, 2016 [9 favorites]
Thank you for posting this! I'm constantly showing my age when I make Video Toaster jokes when I see particularly bad graphics these days, but I didn't know all the history. This is great.
posted by bibliogrrl at 2:56 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by bibliogrrl at 2:56 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]
Our last best hope for peace.
posted by Artw at 3:00 PM on March 18, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Artw at 3:00 PM on March 18, 2016 [7 favorites]
That Video Toaster 4000 video is spectacular.
posted by zamboni at 3:01 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by zamboni at 3:01 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
No discussion of the Video Toaster is complete without Kiki Stockhammer, of Kiki Wipe fame!
posted by higginba at 3:08 PM on March 18, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by higginba at 3:08 PM on March 18, 2016 [6 favorites]
The Todd Rundgren video gave me questionable flashbacks. It's perfectly dated!
(Had Doctor Who made it into the 90s, I bet the Video Toaster would have seen excessive usage on that show, with undoubtedly cheesier effects than what TR-i came up with here.)
posted by stannate at 3:10 PM on March 18, 2016
(Had Doctor Who made it into the 90s, I bet the Video Toaster would have seen excessive usage on that show, with undoubtedly cheesier effects than what TR-i came up with here.)
posted by stannate at 3:10 PM on March 18, 2016
Oh man, those demos are so 1990 that they come with a free backward baseball cap
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:27 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
Wasn't Babylon 5 special effects done on amigas?
posted by AGameOfMoans at 3:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by AGameOfMoans at 3:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
I lived in Topeka, Kansas for a minute in the early 90s. My employer at the time (National Electronic Type, if anyone remembers that place besides me) did a lot of work for NuTech. It was fun to see the fancy Italian sports cars the NuTech guys drove around town. One day when I came to work, there was a yellow Ferrari (I think) in the parking lot. I parked my rusty old Trans Am right next to it.
Whenever I'm tempted to miss the 90s, all I have to do is picture that job and the unendurable hellscape Topeka was at that time (the Westboro Baptist Church was strictly a local headache back then), and the nostalgia dissipates right away.
posted by S'Tella Fabula at 3:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]
Whenever I'm tempted to miss the 90s, all I have to do is picture that job and the unendurable hellscape Topeka was at that time (the Westboro Baptist Church was strictly a local headache back then), and the nostalgia dissipates right away.
posted by S'Tella Fabula at 3:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]
...it failed.
/spectacular spacefight in which all the Amigas are destroyed by Solaris workstations, PC Clones and maybe the odd Atari ST to twist the knife in.
posted by Artw at 3:34 PM on March 18, 2016
/spectacular spacefight in which all the Amigas are destroyed by Solaris workstations, PC Clones and maybe the odd Atari ST to twist the knife in.
posted by Artw at 3:34 PM on March 18, 2016
My memories of the Video Toaster are summed up by arguing with an irritating asshole that was dead sure the VT was for a Macintosh because Apples are for creatives.
That said, it was perhaps one of the largest step forwards in terms of cheap professional video editing. I recall hearing once, maybe in 1991 or 1992 a videographer talking on one of those popular tech tv shows on how they could cut a lot of the costs while ramping up quality if "a device for the Amiga was available in Europe". I had to watch a few marriage, baptism, etc videos (when I was working on converting VHS to DVD), and the production values were... uh... terrible. The image quality in some was beyond what a regular hobbyist camera could accomplish (a few were about live TV quality), but the intro was very regularly a black screen with white text on Camcorder font. Maybe a dissolve wipe here and there, but all very basic.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:36 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
That said, it was perhaps one of the largest step forwards in terms of cheap professional video editing. I recall hearing once, maybe in 1991 or 1992 a videographer talking on one of those popular tech tv shows on how they could cut a lot of the costs while ramping up quality if "a device for the Amiga was available in Europe". I had to watch a few marriage, baptism, etc videos (when I was working on converting VHS to DVD), and the production values were... uh... terrible. The image quality in some was beyond what a regular hobbyist camera could accomplish (a few were about live TV quality), but the intro was very regularly a black screen with white text on Camcorder font. Maybe a dissolve wipe here and there, but all very basic.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:36 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
It could have been an Atari, but Commodore moved in and took it all away...
posted by marienbad at 3:40 PM on March 18, 2016
posted by marienbad at 3:40 PM on March 18, 2016
Wasn't Babylon 5 special effects done on amigas?
Babylon 5 used Lightwave 3D (which began life as the 3D component of the Video Toaster software suite). The effects for the pilot* and first season were done on Amigas, then they switched to the standalone Lightwave 3D (on Windows) for season 2. If you watch the show, there's a noticeable improvement in rendering quality between seasons 1 and 2 -- IIRC it's because they started using bump/normal mapping.
No, I don't have a citation for any of this, aside from being a huge B5 nerd in the 90s. (The "effects" section of the Lurker's Guide has some info.)
* The pilot got the George Lucas treatment in the late 90s, so good luck finding a copy of the original version. The "special edition" edit uses stock effects shots from the rest of the series, so it's not as interesting as a historical VFX artifact.
posted by neckro23 at 3:49 PM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]
Babylon 5 used Lightwave 3D (which began life as the 3D component of the Video Toaster software suite). The effects for the pilot* and first season were done on Amigas, then they switched to the standalone Lightwave 3D (on Windows) for season 2. If you watch the show, there's a noticeable improvement in rendering quality between seasons 1 and 2 -- IIRC it's because they started using bump/normal mapping.
No, I don't have a citation for any of this, aside from being a huge B5 nerd in the 90s. (The "effects" section of the Lurker's Guide has some info.)
* The pilot got the George Lucas treatment in the late 90s, so good luck finding a copy of the original version. The "special edition" edit uses stock effects shots from the rest of the series, so it's not as interesting as a historical VFX artifact.
posted by neckro23 at 3:49 PM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]
"Very with-it guys, with good high-tech brains." A quote from the first Ken Nordine-produced VT demo video. My also-video-geek best friend and I still use "non-linear fog" as an in-joke.
What no one remembers is that you had to be a good video engineer to get the Toaster to output television that looked like network output, but you could know almost nothing and get video that met the technical broadcast standards. This is why low-cost commercials in the 90s always had a weird color cast or slight color trail effect.
I love that NewTek released the Toaster 4000 source code. It's probably nearly all Amiga-specific assembly with weird ASIC calls.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:56 PM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]
What no one remembers is that you had to be a good video engineer to get the Toaster to output television that looked like network output, but you could know almost nothing and get video that met the technical broadcast standards. This is why low-cost commercials in the 90s always had a weird color cast or slight color trail effect.
I love that NewTek released the Toaster 4000 source code. It's probably nearly all Amiga-specific assembly with weird ASIC calls.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:56 PM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]
weird ASIC calls
To Denise, Paula & Agnes?
posted by scalefree at 4:32 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
To Denise, Paula & Agnes?
posted by scalefree at 4:32 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
To Denise, Paula & Agnes?
Lisa, Paula and Alice. In the realms of early graphics architectures, Lisa and Alice were like Tori from Saved by the Bell's final season.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:44 PM on March 18, 2016
Lisa, Paula and Alice. In the realms of early graphics architectures, Lisa and Alice were like Tori from Saved by the Bell's final season.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:44 PM on March 18, 2016
An uncle of mine, a former engineer with Boeing, bought a Video Toaster in the early 90s and did video production stuff with it. I had already transitioned from Apple (][e) to Zenith Z-150 and was having none of that; only later did I realize the missed opportunity to play with a really cool machine.
posted by grimjeer at 4:47 PM on March 18, 2016
posted by grimjeer at 4:47 PM on March 18, 2016
Wasn't Babylon 5 special effects done on amigas?
I think they went to Silicon Graphics for season 2.
The video guy at a buddy's place was amazed to to find out that the Toaster's [Amiga + m] keys gave him access to a computer. ;)
And I still miss D Paint for bitmapping. And Fat Agnes rocked (at least when running MODs)
posted by ridgerunner at 4:47 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]
I think they went to Silicon Graphics for season 2.
The video guy at a buddy's place was amazed to to find out that the Toaster's [Amiga + m] keys gave him access to a computer. ;)
And I still miss D Paint for bitmapping. And Fat Agnes rocked (at least when running MODs)
posted by ridgerunner at 4:47 PM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]
One interesting legacy of the Toaster is that it made Tim Jenison rich enough to pursue an obsession about the artist Vermeer.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:06 PM on March 18, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:06 PM on March 18, 2016 [7 favorites]
I think they went to Silicon Graphics for season 2.
On review I was wrong about Windows above. On the very page I linked they mention using DEC Alphas for the rendering. Apparently there was an IRIX version of Lightwave not mentioned on the Wikipedia article.
posted by neckro23 at 5:18 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
On review I was wrong about Windows above. On the very page I linked they mention using DEC Alphas for the rendering. Apparently there was an IRIX version of Lightwave not mentioned on the Wikipedia article.
posted by neckro23 at 5:18 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
Oh, DPaint! Those cycling palette brushes!
I couldn't afford Video Toaster - a 512k RAM upgrade and an external floppy pretty much wiped me out - but I did get a genlock video input box for my A500. I had had to decide what upgrade to make from my 8 bit systems, and when I looked at the bang/buck options then the PC/ST/Amiga question resolved itself.
The Amiga was just so far ahead of the pack. It wasn't just the graphics and sound - the bouncing ball demo, the rotating Earth - that seemed impossibly sophisticated for the price, it was the way AmigaDOS did all the things you knew computers could do but somehow never did. Multiple resizable windows running their own tasks? Disk formatting and copying in the background with no perceptible performance impact? And live video input?
This was all affordable, and just five years after the ZX Spectrum. The rate of change was astonishing back then, and I'd picked the clear winner. The future was going to be unimaginable...
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
posted by Devonian at 5:20 PM on March 18, 2016 [9 favorites]
I couldn't afford Video Toaster - a 512k RAM upgrade and an external floppy pretty much wiped me out - but I did get a genlock video input box for my A500. I had had to decide what upgrade to make from my 8 bit systems, and when I looked at the bang/buck options then the PC/ST/Amiga question resolved itself.
The Amiga was just so far ahead of the pack. It wasn't just the graphics and sound - the bouncing ball demo, the rotating Earth - that seemed impossibly sophisticated for the price, it was the way AmigaDOS did all the things you knew computers could do but somehow never did. Multiple resizable windows running their own tasks? Disk formatting and copying in the background with no perceptible performance impact? And live video input?
This was all affordable, and just five years after the ZX Spectrum. The rate of change was astonishing back then, and I'd picked the clear winner. The future was going to be unimaginable...
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
posted by Devonian at 5:20 PM on March 18, 2016 [9 favorites]
We used Video Toaster for my high school's TV studio in the late 90s, and I remember being amazed that these ancient (to me) computers could be used to cut and edit video. Like, really well. Amazing what they could wring out of those machines.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:30 PM on March 18, 2016
posted by leotrotsky at 5:30 PM on March 18, 2016
The article mentions that Brad Carvey is Dana's brother, and apparently a good chunk of Garth's voice and mannerisms are taken directly from Brad. I can't remember where I saw it, perhaps an interview, but he quotes his whizkid brother saying "I fixed the dryer with a butter knife...it'll never break again". Given what he later accomplished, this may well have been true.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:39 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:39 PM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]
This was all affordable, and just five years after the ZX Spectrum. The rate of change was astonishing back then, and I'd picked the clear winner. The future was going to be unimaginable...
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
Well, to be honest, I think in terms of tech development I think we're in a pretty good era. You can film, edit, compose a score and publish a video with the same machine, and that machine might almost as small as an Amiga Mouse, for a fraction of the cost (an iPhone/iPad goes for $700; an Amiga 2000 on release was $3,120 adjusted while a 3000 was $6,130)
The thing is that modern tech kind of turned into the banality of the fantastic.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:48 PM on March 18, 2016 [11 favorites]
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
Well, to be honest, I think in terms of tech development I think we're in a pretty good era. You can film, edit, compose a score and publish a video with the same machine, and that machine might almost as small as an Amiga Mouse, for a fraction of the cost (an iPhone/iPad goes for $700; an Amiga 2000 on release was $3,120 adjusted while a 3000 was $6,130)
The thing is that modern tech kind of turned into the banality of the fantastic.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:48 PM on March 18, 2016 [11 favorites]
I was at a comedy club in L.A. the night Dana Carvey was a "special guest" after the scheduled comics were finished. It was before he joined the cast of SNL, and he was showcasing and essentially auditioning for a couple of NBC execs sitting in the back. So he was emphasizing his characters and did a bit where his whizkid brother gave an electric shock to a dead frog and apparently brought it back to life "...and it'll never die again". Then he broke character to ask "does that sound too much like Jimmy Stewart" and riff about how his brother WAS Jimmy Stewart. He also did some "Church Lady" bits, and from what I heard later, that was what sold the NBC suits in attendance on him. Yes, that was a derail, or you could say it just shows how Everything Is Related.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:01 PM on March 18, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:01 PM on March 18, 2016 [6 favorites]
No discussion of the Video Toaster is complete without Kiki Stockhammer, of Kiki Wipe fame!
I'm uh, pretty sure I've seen her Star Trek themed band play. I did not at the time know who she was, what the band was, or what Video Toaster was.
posted by atoxyl at 6:07 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm uh, pretty sure I've seen her Star Trek themed band play. I did not at the time know who she was, what the band was, or what Video Toaster was.
posted by atoxyl at 6:07 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
neckro23
Yeah, the DECs were B5 and my buddy picked up a pair pretty purple SGs for his render farm.
The future was going to be unimaginable...
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
Yep, no way a FrankenOS like Linux could beat out the neat and tidy AOS, plus you could toss a card with a Mac ROM on it and another with a x86 in any 2000 or 3000 and run everything off the same hard drive. That was a fun machine.
posted by ridgerunner at 7:03 PM on March 18, 2016
Yeah, the DECs were B5 and my buddy picked up a pair pretty purple SGs for his render farm.
The future was going to be unimaginable...
Damn you, reality. You let me down again.
Yep, no way a FrankenOS like Linux could beat out the neat and tidy AOS, plus you could toss a card with a Mac ROM on it and another with a x86 in any 2000 or 3000 and run everything off the same hard drive. That was a fun machine.
posted by ridgerunner at 7:03 PM on March 18, 2016
"On review I was wrong about Windows above. On the very page I linked they mention using DEC Alphas for the rendering."
Well, but there was a special 64-bit version of NT native to the Alpha almost from its introduction. I don't know if that's relevant.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, but there was a special 64-bit version of NT native to the Alpha almost from its introduction. I don't know if that's relevant.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]
The wave of nostalgia this post has brought on just prompted me to look at what second hand Amigas go for these days.
Holy crap! Apparently my dad and I got rid of a fortune of gear in the late 90's, we certainly didn't get a fortune for it.
posted by deadwax at 8:37 PM on March 18, 2016
Holy crap! Apparently my dad and I got rid of a fortune of gear in the late 90's, we certainly didn't get a fortune for it.
posted by deadwax at 8:37 PM on March 18, 2016
The woman singing the "whoah, whoah, whoooaahhohh" song sounds a lot like the singer of Lords of Acid!
I'm a little too young to have been interacting with this level of tech when it came out, but only a little, so those effects were actually pretty incredible to see even today in 2016.
posted by zinful at 10:21 PM on March 18, 2016
I'm a little too young to have been interacting with this level of tech when it came out, but only a little, so those effects were actually pretty incredible to see even today in 2016.
posted by zinful at 10:21 PM on March 18, 2016
zinful, it's a remix of the LoA song "Rough Sex" from Lust.
posted by infinitewindow at 1:48 AM on March 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by infinitewindow at 1:48 AM on March 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
"Do you even know what a video toaster is?"
posted by crazy_yeti at 6:54 AM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by crazy_yeti at 6:54 AM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]
What was really amazing about the Video Toaster was how it made broadcasting significantly cheaper. In some ways, it was largely behind the ability of the wave of low power TV stations that swept the country in the 90s. They were largely shoestring budget affairs that would never have been able to afford to go on the air with traditional edit suites. Somehow I suspect if Fox had been limited to major media markets it would not have been long for this world.
My local affiliate managed to bang out a nightly newscast with all the trimmings thanks to their (OG) Video Toaster. It also made a lot of the (cheap, cheesy) commercials that kept them on the air in a market of less than 70,000 people possible.
These days, most stations like that are owned by one of the highly leveraged conglomerates that bought up most of the small market LPTV stations in the early 2000s, who have centralized everything in one or two master studios and ship the signals out across the country over satellite links. No local engineers, newscasters, or anything aside from maybe an ad sales person. Hell, these days they don't even have to run their own broadcast equipment, since they just lease a subchannel on a major network affiliate's ATSC transmitter or have just gone cable-exclusive.
posted by wierdo at 10:03 AM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]
My local affiliate managed to bang out a nightly newscast with all the trimmings thanks to their (OG) Video Toaster. It also made a lot of the (cheap, cheesy) commercials that kept them on the air in a market of less than 70,000 people possible.
These days, most stations like that are owned by one of the highly leveraged conglomerates that bought up most of the small market LPTV stations in the early 2000s, who have centralized everything in one or two master studios and ship the signals out across the country over satellite links. No local engineers, newscasters, or anything aside from maybe an ad sales person. Hell, these days they don't even have to run their own broadcast equipment, since they just lease a subchannel on a major network affiliate's ATSC transmitter or have just gone cable-exclusive.
posted by wierdo at 10:03 AM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]
I will resist the urge to make a combination Harris Wittels/Wil Wheaton joke.
posted by anarch at 1:32 PM on March 19, 2016
posted by anarch at 1:32 PM on March 19, 2016
Yep, no way a FrankenOS like Linux could beat out the neat and tidy AOS
But on the processor side, I'm grateful that the chip from the Acorn Archimedes is the one that's powering all these 6 ounce handheld Video Toasters that we're running Linux or BSD on. Without the ARM, I'm not sure we'd have got this far this quickly.
posted by ambrosen at 3:50 PM on March 19, 2016 [6 favorites]
But on the processor side, I'm grateful that the chip from the Acorn Archimedes is the one that's powering all these 6 ounce handheld Video Toasters that we're running Linux or BSD on. Without the ARM, I'm not sure we'd have got this far this quickly.
posted by ambrosen at 3:50 PM on March 19, 2016 [6 favorites]
→ if "a device for the Amiga was available in Europe".
Yeah, the NTSC-only Toaster was a pain for Europe. There were high quality video boards (I remember the ACS Harlequin very well) but they didn't have the integration of the VT.
posted by scruss at 6:38 PM on March 19, 2016
Yeah, the NTSC-only Toaster was a pain for Europe. There were high quality video boards (I remember the ACS Harlequin very well) but they didn't have the integration of the VT.
posted by scruss at 6:38 PM on March 19, 2016
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