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I have a Rainbow dongle for my copy of Lightwave. AutoCAD in the single user version (not networked) also comes with a dongle.

Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek actually developed a product called DigiView to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.

Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!! :-)

Maybe you should give Newtek's Aura2 a try... Although it's not DP, it's pretty cool and got a little bit of the amiga-app-feel...

Me think's it's pretty kool.

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone

The old Amiga program TVPaint by NewTek has been ported to Windows a few years ago. It has a nice DeluxePaint-like look and feel, but also powerful features such as support for pressure-sensitive tablets, alpha-blended layers, animations etc. Newtek later changed the name of the program to Aura.

They have versions for NT, IRIX and Mac, and with a completely custom interface, porting would NOT be a problem. No "which GUI shall we use" type problems, since Lightware does all it's own UI.

I encourage everyone who loves Lightwave to take this opportunity to write to NewTek and politely request a port. If you're in a buying position, point this out. They've always ignored such requests in the past, but they can't hold out forever.

They have versions for NT, IRIX and Mac, and with a completely custom interface, porting would NOT be a problem. No "which GUI shall we use" type problems, since Lightware does all it's own UI.

I encourage everyone who loves Lightwave to take this opportunity to write to NewTek and politely request a port. If you're in a buying position, point this out. They've always ignored such requests in the past, but they can't hold out forever.

I'd say the Video toaster and Lightwave were killer applications. No matter how much CBM screwed up marketing, they still sold amigas simply because inside every video toaster was an amiga 2000 (and later 3000, 4000, until Newtek finally (as in, in the past year) managed a custom PC hardware solution sans amiga (earlier "PC" and "mac" video toasters actually had an entire amiga in them...)

What sank commodre was incompetent managment, and a bungled entry into the IBM-compatible PC market. Believe it or not, their Amiga division was still making profit right until the end (especially the european division - the amiga was incredibly popular all over europe) - It was just all bled off into the black hole of the rest of the company.

Actually, the Amiga was clever about scrolling - the scanlines didn't have to be contiguous in memory, every line (in fact, every group of 8 or 16 horizontal pixels) could come from a different memory location. That's because it had a 3-instruction (MOVE, WAIT, SKIP) beam-synchronised co-processor called the Copper.

Thus, to implement scrolling, rather than copying memory, you just said "change the bitplane pointers to display one line further down at this display coordinate (in fact AGA amigas also had 1/4 pixel positioning for sub-pixel super smooth scrolling.)

It's a quite different programming paradigm, and it's why the Amiga versions of all those old 2D games like Sensible soccer, lemmings, etc, all scroll much better on a 7MHz A500 than a 200Mhz Pentium, and it's why the Amiga, rebadged as the NewTek Video Toaster was king of the mid-range video and animation world for years.

At one stage , a company called Phase 5 produced a Vaporware plan to produce an Amiga successor, in which every pixel could come from an arbitrary memory location.

As an aside, the amiga also had another custom subsystem, the blitter (Block Image Transfer) which shovelled rectangular areas around memory, somewhat like the 2D-acceleration that PC cards came up with some time later, and it did hw-accelerated line drawing and flood fill operations too.

The intersting thing was that the Copper, Blitter and CPU could all trigger CPU interrupts, the Copper could trigger the Blitter, the Blitter and CPU could operate on memory that stored CPU and Copper programs (the Amiga had a unified memory architecture). Thus, you could make really insane self-modifying programs, once you stepped outside the bounds of the operating system - which is why Amiga Demo coders came up with such wierd effects (well, that and the acid.)

If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film.

An Amiga equipped to do desktop video with a Video Toaster can do full broadcast-quality resolution (784x492 or whatever) in 24bit color. Lightwave on the Amiga can also render to that resolution or better.

If one were to purchase a Video Toaster-equipped Amiga in this modern world, he would want it to be an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster 4000. Any _new_ VT/Amiga system is exactly that. The Amiga 4000 has the updated AGA graphics chipset which can do higher resolutions at more colors (compared to the OCS/ECS chipset in earlier Amiga models such as the A500, A2000, and A3000). The VT4000 takes advantage of the AGA chipset, so it can do some neat things the old original Toaster can't.

There's also the Video Toaster Flyer, which has a spider-like 6-way (?) SCSI controller on-board. It does high-speed on-disk video editing. Remember that the old Video Toaster and VT4000 are not for editing video clips stored on disk, they switch between video sources and fade and grab video and genlock and change colors and render text and apply 3D graphics and all sorts of other neat things -- and it's all done in hardware, so it's blazing fast.

I have never seen the Video Toaster Flyer in action, but I hear it is neat. Seems that it can do almost all the things that its big-name competitors have implemented, while perhaps requiring more creativity. That is to be expected, though, since it is a product on the Amiga, the choice for creative professionals. ;)

And yes, accelerators are still available, both used and new, for all Amiga models. A few places to check would be Software Hut and Compuquick Media Center. They seem to be two of the leading Amiga dealerships these days.

Check out Newtek's website, they have had a number of deals lately on their Video Toaster line.

The only problem with getting into Amiga production these days is researching all the software available. A lot of it still sits on shelves at the older Amiga dealerships, waiting to be bought and used. When combined well, the old software packages all mingle to form one really powerful system (again, when used creatively). Remember that the Amiga was years ahead of its time, so though a program may have a (C) date of 1993, it could still be very useful and productive. Also, most decent Amiga applications can talk to each other (and the Toaster / Switcher) through ARexx scripting. Combining the Toaster with the kick-ass ImageFX package and a modeller like Pixel3D can really melt an audience's mind.

I have previously used Newtek's Video Toaster Products, so when I started into this I naturally thought of them. I was surprised not to see any mention of their newer VideoToaster NT.

While the original Toaster and the Toaster Flyer are not suited to NLE (non linear editing) the newer Toaster NT is well suited to it.

The system comes with outstanding software, Speedrazor VT and Lightwave VT are the biggies.

There are options that allow you to handle IEEE 1394 in/out.

The big advantage of using a Video Toaster is that your video is handled UNCOMPRESSED. That means, given a digital source, that you will have no quality loss no matter how many generations or layers you use in your projects. You have to step up to very expensive AVID systems to get better quality.

This does come at a price though. You will need a LARGE and FAST disk subsystem capable of handling a sustained transfer rate of 23.4MB/s. You can also plan on about 1.3 GB per minute of video. Medea offers some excellent systems that can meet these needs. I suggest their VideoRaidrt series, which are actually based on IDE DMA drives that'll plug into the external connector of your fast SCSI controller. This makes the drive arrays very affordable. I think you could build a similiar HD array using Linux and an IDE RAID controller, but I don't know how to get it to act as a drive and communicate across the SCSI channel like an ordinary SCSI device. That approach would no doubt save you a pretty penny though.

You will need a fast system, I think a system with two Pentium 3 600 Coppermines is a good start. Look for 256MB RAM or more. You also need a high qualtiy PCI sound card. I am still looking onto those, but you can always start with Soundblaster. I am using a GeForce 256 DDR video card. You could probably use an older card, but I'd urge you to get as nice a video card as you can.

The Toaster itself is about $3000 US dollars, and you can expect to spend about $5,000 US on a system and drives.

You didn't mention camera's. I am using a Canon XL1 for most of my work. The camera has interchangeable lenses and with a converter can use any EF series photographic lens. An XL1 will run you about $3800 US. If I had the budget I'd look at the JVC GY-DV500 which has larger CCD's and uses standard professional video lenses. It also has better low light performance and a more professional look and feel. This means that if you have to hire a cameraman, they'll probably be reasonably familiar with teh camera. It runs about $5,000 US. The lenses are harder to find and more expensive than EF lenses. I plan on using a Canon GL1 as a second unit camera, when my budget allows me to acquire one. ( Of course if my budget allows I'll probably go after the JVC and using the XL1 as a second unit.) All these cameras use MiniDV cassettes and have IEEE 1394 in/out.

That said, I have to forewarn you to remember that you will need to budget for lighting equipment, professional microphones, particularly if you are going to shoot outside on windy days tripods and LAN-C or Control L controllers that will allow you to operate the camera while it is on a tripod. If you are going to try to move the camera I reccomend a steadicam. Also for the XL1 I reccomend using a shoulder mount that will counterbalance the camera as it is "front heavy" with most of its lenses.

http://www.newtek.com/ -- write them and let them know you'd BUY a copy!

... and the lightwave logo.

Not to mention the Lightwave logo.

Well the Lightwave Logo anyway. I wonder if anyone will come under fire for it..... Newtek

If you're serious about building an inexpensive but high quality studio around a PC, NewTek are the folks to talk to. Unfortunately, there's been no indication from them about their Linux plans. Those in a purchasing position, let NewTek know there's a market!

Friends of mine who do a lot of Lightwave work get wet over the idea of farming their rendering out to a cheap cluster. What NewTek need to realize is for every NT licence that's not needed, their client can buy an extra copy of LW.

...for Linux Pagestream has long been my favourite DTP program, and Lightwave has long been my favourite 3D animation program. Take the hint, guys!