Source of Amiga Video Toaster Software Released

bender writes "About a decade after the release of of the NewTek Video Toaster for the Amiga, OpenVideoToaster is now hosting the source code of the software! The Video Toaster ushered in the age of affordable desktop video in 1991 and was used in products such as Babylon 5 and Jurassic Park."

Comments

Nice code, some duplicates...

[tcopeland]

...in the report for Video Toaster CG as analyzed by CPD.

Re:Nice code, some duplicates...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why people think that a program that doesn't understand the English language or common semantics of different idioms is a good measure of code quality. Quit your karma whoring.

Re:Nice code, some duplicates...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. This guy posts the exactly same shit just about every time when something is open sourced or the (publicly available) sourcecode of some app is discussed.

Re:Nice code, some duplicates...

[tcopeland]

> common semantics of different idioms

I don't understand. How does a 66 line chunk of duplicate code constitute a "common semantic" or a "different idiom"?

Re:Nice code, some duplicates...

[tcopeland]

> This guy posts the exactly same

I do it because it's interesting. It's interesting to see this aspect of an open source codebase - what sorts of things are duplicated? What does the code look like surrounding the duplicate chunks? Often you'll see comments like "whew, gotta clean this up" in the vicinity - it's provides some insight into the program that you might not otherwise see.

If I got modded to Offtopic every time I posted these, I'd stop. But they usually get modded way up, and the links get clicked on a couple thousand times. That's because, I think, a lot of other folks find these reports interesting, too.

Note that I'm not selling PMD or CPD - they're open source, free, on Sourceforge, and are an ongoing project to which many folks have contributed.

Also, I don't post the the reports inline - I just post a link so you don't have to scroll through ten pages. So if you don't like them, you can just hit the down arrow once or twice and you'll be past it.

I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[egg troll]

Not to troll, but could someone tell me why I should use the Amiga as opposed to another platform, such as the Macintosh? It seems that Amiga hardware is pretty much dead in comparison to others. Is Amiga a dead-end or are there valid reasons for continuing to use it?

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[root:DavidOgg]

You shouldn't. We're pretty picky about who we let in. You're not invited :D

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Trurl's Machine]

Not to troll, but could someone tell me why I should use the Amiga as opposed to another platform, such as the Macintosh?

Well, if you'd ask the same question around 1990, the answer would be pretty straightforward. Amiga OS was a superb blend of CLI and GUI. In early 1990's, there were already many better solutions of both the GUI and the CLI, but the quality of the blend itself was unmatched until MacOS X. And even in MacOS X this blend is not always as good as in Amiga (for example, it was much easier to tweak the startup sequence of your system using purely GUI tools). Also, until the mid 1990's Amiga was a much better gaming platform than a Mac.

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention FAST!

My lovely old A3000 is still far more responsive than my Powerbook, FreeBSD and Windows while using a many times slower cpu.

Of course when it comes to raw processing power it falls behind, but for navigating the filesystem, opening programs, switching screens, switching programs - it's much more responsive. That's why I still like to use it, when I get tired of roaming the 802.11b LAN.

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, until the mid 1990's Amiga was a much better gaming platform than a Mac.

Yes, but in those days that was considered a knock on the Amiga, "toy computer"... only today do we know that gaming systems are the most powerful ones around.

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Akimotos]

At uni in 1992 (studying the art of user-interfaces) we had to do a multimedia project. Everyone student fought for one of the few SG computers, others took there own macs and quite a few chose one of those Digital i386's..... We took my Amiga 4000 with some tools: scala, lightwave, toaster.
Now for the real fun: for presentation purposes everyone was running around with great stacks of material and plugging mighty sets of cabels and stuff. Preperation times of 45 minutes per event were pretty normal. Everything just to show a few wacky 3D balls jumping around a screen or something similar. And the crowd went wild....
We didn't do anything in preperation for the presentation. In an old blue bag, we just brought in an Amiga 600 (the tiny one, with internal HD) and when we were called to do our 'project', we took it out of the bag, connected it there and then to there standard TV set, including the standard classroom audio system. We switched it on, booted the OS and ran our work: 3d graphics (self-made!), nice effects, video, animation and wild 16 bit stereo sound (rave-tune). We knocked everyone off their feet, including those with their SG material and their high-end Mac's.
It were the days that the Amiga simply didn't have an any competition, especially taken the 'pricing' aspect in mind. Too bad that the real enemy was to be found inside the company selling them ....

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Lord Kano]

Also, until the mid 1990's Amiga was a much better gaming platform than a Mac.

Until the mid 1990's, the games that were released for Amiga, Mac, and Dox/Win were almost always best on the amiga.

I'll never forget the first time I played Carrier Command on the Amiga.

LK

Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, since when has Mac had ANY games on it? ;D

Rumors

[frenetic3]

this is the same device CNN allegedly used to spruce up their Gulf War footage :)

god bless america...

-fren

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, nothing like a hard evidence link there. Your link contains one sentence claiming "this is what CNN was rumored to use." No substantiation whatsoever. If you weren't such a liberal, you'd call yourself an idiot for believing anything.

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the word R U M O R. Poster wasn't claiming anything. And you obviously don't understand the use of quotation marks because the actual quote was "Rumor has it that some of CNN's Gulf War coverage was Toasted"

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

If you weren't such anonymous cowardly prick, you'd realise that article was written a long, long time ago. Oh Yeah, Bush stole the election.

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like CNN has ever been caught red-handed broadcasting fake news before *cough* Arnett *cough*. Or the BBC, or the New York Times, or al-Reuters...they NEVER invent news to try to change the world to be more in line with their own little fantasies.

Re:Rumors

[Sycraft-fu]

CNN has editing and switching devices that are just SLIGHTLY more powerful than a toaster. Slightly in the same way that a Mack truck has slightly more towing capacity than a 5-year old on a bike.

I have a feeling this is just an Amiga fanboy rumour to make themselves feel good (you haven't met a real zealot till you've met an Amiga zealot). By necessity, the big broadcast networks have some really heavy hitting hardware, there'd be no need or want to have a toaster to do anything.

I mean even little local stations have more. In highschool I vistited the local Flagstaff news channel. It is a pathetically small operation, that puts on a pathetic broadcast by any real standard. None the less, they have a full out video switcher/wiper/etc unit, about 20 tape decks, several editing workstations, and so on.

Re:Rumors

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, nothing like a hard evidence link there. Your link contains one sentence claiming "this is what CNN was rumored to use." No substantiation whatsoever. If you weren't such a liberal, you'd call yourself an idiot for believing anything.

Ahem. Did you happen to notice the author of the linked article? It was Penn Jillette. Now, since you are probably just a little boy, let me explain something to you. Pen Jillette is a famous comedian who usually performs on TV at hours that are probably way past your bedtime. He is part of the comedy duo called "Penn and Teller". Now, I'm not surprised you didn't know this, because Mommy probably doesn't let you watch their act. It's usually on HBO (do they have HBO in your trailor park?) and involves lots of cuss words and fake blood.

By the way, nothing makes a joke funnier than some complete idiot taking the joke seriously and getting mad at the person who was joking. Seriously, an idiot like you makes the joke much more complete. So, uhm...thanks! Moron.

All well and good, but

[Space cowboy]

the video toaster was basically written around the Amiga custom chippery, right ?

Perhaps you could get some FPGA to do the video work, and recreate the video toaster in all its' glory, unless y'all have them lying around in the attic :-)

OTOH, it's a nice gesture :-) Saves us all from having to buy an Octane from Ebay and register with Discreet, although to be honest, I prefer my Flame :-)

Simon.

Re:All well and good, but

[downix]

Using an FPGA to replace the Amiga custom chips has been discussed for ages.

Noone's gotten it to work. The timing ends up wrong.

Discussing with a former Amiga chipset engineer, they couldn't even migrate the core chip from the ancient fabs to newer ones because when they did, the timing got schewed, rendering the toaster worthless.

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

chippery?

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

rendering the toaster worthless

I think if it was so sensitive to the hardware, it was useless far before that.

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Short term? Nobody cared.

But long term, you're right on. Not being able to modernize the assembly process is THE biggest reason the Amiga platform died.

Re:All well and good, but

[downix]

The chipset provided the timing and genlock signals necessary for the toaster to work. It is these signals that make traditional editing machines so expensive to produce. The Amiga's chipset gave these to the toaster cards so Newtek didn't have to.

But, if your timing is off by even a percentage, your broadcast signal falls apart, rendering dependent systems, such as the toaster, useless for their primary job of interfacing with these signals. This is analog technology here, can't use digital techniques to solve the problems.

Re:All well and good, but

[notsoclever]

My understanding is that the Toaster itself did all of the graphics work, and that the Amiga was really just there to control it. Though the way it was implemented (the computer sent signals through the VBI portion of its composite video output) is still pretty Amiga-specific, but that could conceivably be done by a PC with custom hardware as well.

Basically, Toaster was a hardware package with controlling software, not just a software package. You can't really port it to the PC any moreso than you can port, say, the custom software used in a flatbed scanner to a PC; you might be able to emulate the internal operation, but the hardware itself is missing.

Re:All well and good, but

[tiger99]

Being mainly an analogue designer, I find this very amusing.

But there must be a solution. There are generally an almost infinite number of ways of doing something in hardware, as in software. Don't know much about the Amiga, but clearly the internal clocks would need to be synchronised to the incoming video, same as in an audio application. To get 16-bit audio with no corruption, at 44.1KHz sampling, needs about 200pS maximum jitter.But, I don't see why video needs to be so precise, well under one pixel would probably be about OK, say 10nS. The eye is much more easily fooled than the ear. You barely need 8-bit DACs either (24-bit colour), 7-bit is probably adequate.

I guess the Amiga uses a PLL to synchronise everything to the incoming video. It would be hard to do that on a modern PC, you would need to butcher the motherboard to inject your own clock signal, and the crude PLL clock multiplier in the CPU would probably mess it all up again. Sometimes older technology is best.

Proper video editing cards for PCs are expensive because they have to run synchronously to the video, not the PC, amongst other things.

Still, it is good that this software has been released. I wonder if the price of used Amigas is going to rise, as everyone wants a toaster?

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

rendering the toaster worthless.

Worst. Pun. Ever.

Re:All well and good, but

[drinkypoo]

I don't know much about electronics (my knowledge is enough to do auto wiring and that's about it - even then if I wanted to change how things worked and not just repair or add on, I'd have to at least use some scratch paper) but I recall the amiga taking an external clock for genlocking. I believe the clock came in on the video connector, which is over on the right side of the system as you are facing it, past the power supply. This is on the 2000/2500. (The amiga 500 is basically the same machine without the video connector.) I used to have an A2000 with a genlock, and later I had an A2500 without one. (I also have owned several 500s and a 3000, and still have a 1200.)

Anyway Agnus, the biggest chip in the Amiga and the one most frequently upgraded because it increased your chip memory, is responsible for clock generation in OCS amigas (2500 and below.) here is a pinout for the video slot. Agnus does not generate a clock, it divides an external clock which is apparently 28MHz.

Unfortunately I don't have any amiga manuals lying around any more, so I can't look in the schematic for clock pins and trace them.

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I got the blueprints to my Amiga 1000 and had a genlock (which fit underneath the system, behing where you could put the keyboard). It's normal running frequency (all 3 processors) was 7.16 Megahertz (ok, very slow compared to what is available today). When an external video source was plugged into the genlock, a phased lock loop would re-sync the processor (and memory and co-processors and audio --the whole thing) to 7.15909 MHz. Exactly twice the NTSC colorburst frequency. I have a tv tuner card on my computer, but I could match external video with computer graphics and pump it back out to video --all in sync. in 1987.

Re:All well and good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

"I guess the Amiga uses a PLL to synchronise everything to the incoming video. "

Not quite.. it used a central 28MHz clock (to be precise, 8x the NTSC color carrier frequency, 3.579MHz, on NTSC systems) which could be sourced externally. That external source was usually a genlock, which incorporated various PLL's to lock that frequency to incoming video. I know because I designed and built a genlock to use with my Amiga 500.

Re:All well and good, but

[nahual]

Since the amiga was sincronized to the video signal, it was very easy to gennlock the amiga video signal to video, and mix the amiga graphcis.

The amiga even provide its own key signal, so it was very clean.

Also, a very easy to overclock an the amiga.. was to put your video inf fast forward....

Of course a very fast forward could break the system. Thas why the Toaster required a TBC for getting a stable signal, and a satable machine. :)

Re:All well and good, but

[downix]

The genlocking signal was present on all Amiga's. The 23-pin video connector on the back *also* had the genlocking signal, allowing for even the small-box Amiga's like the 500 to be used in video production. (One setup I worked with directly used a pair of 1200's to run a public access station with the software, SCALA)

The typical clock in an amiga is 28.something Mhz. NTSC and PAL models have slightly different clocks. Plus this clock can be replaced with an external clock, to allow perfect-synching with other devices.

Re:All well and good, but

[brycen]

I was part of the team at Commodore-Amiga working on those chips (helping the chippies from the software side).

Skewed timing has little to do with it. The chips stayed in old fabs because there was no compelling reason, and not enough sales, to move them to more modern fabs. Some chips actually did move to better fabs as they were modified.

The real limitation of the Amiga chipset was more fundamental than timing skew. The Amiga chips were inherently based on the NTSC/PAL video standard. Everything about the chips was tied in lock step to the ideosychrocies of video.

That was fine as far as it went, but it made everything that was not video a hack. In particular you were tied to video refresh rates, even as computer monitors got larger and faster. The video and blitter memory was tied in lock step with video refresh rates, even as CPU capabilities grew.

Eventually it became simpler and faster to just do everything in software in main memory, and ignore the special purpose Amiga hardware. These days you can just throw fast CPUs and frame buffers at problems the Amiga once solved with special purpose hardware tricks.

If you want something of value from the Amiga take inspiration, not obsolete hardware optimized only for NTSC/PAL video frames.

Can it be reused ?

[Ploum]

I'm not sure at all, but can we excpect improvements in linux video editor with this code ?

I don't know, I just ask.. I just imagine, for example, using some codes to build a NLE editor under Linux... Is it possible ?

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the effects algorithms could be re-used.

Re:Can it be reused ?

[grolschie]

Does the Linux kernel even have support for raw bread devices e.g. /dev/muffin ??

Re:Can it be reused ?

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

I doubt it - from a quick look at the program I was interested in (Toaster Paint) it looks like it's all 68k assembler. Porting even bits of it would not be an easy job at all.

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Ziviyr]

That a toaster can take video from a kitchen sync and superimpose the results of blender on it.

Well, it isn't all that far fetched.

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Anonymous Coward]

muffin is NOT raw bread, it is finished, cooked bread. raw bread would be flour, eggs, baking pow-oh screw it, you're a fucking moron. the moderator who thought you were funny is a fucking moron, too.

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that marked funny? Kitchen Sync and Blender were third-party products for the Video Toaster.

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Anonymous Coward]

/dev/muffin

I just tried:

more /dev/muffin

and my girlfriend slapped my hand ;-)

Re:Can it be reused ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There actually was a time base corrector for the amiga called the Kitchen Sync. Heh.

video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[green pizza]

Video Toaster was great for local-access cable channel type work, but it wasn't even full broadcast quality... at least it was cheap.

Some of the early rough-out effects for Jurassic Park were prototyped using an old version of Lightwave on an Amiga, but that's about it. All of the CGI effects in the movie were done on big iron Silicon Graphics machines at ILM, some of which included the use of the SGI IRIX version of Lightwave.

Again, Jurassic Park effects were done with big iron... not with a consumer-level computer with a single 680x0 processor and an NTSC/PAL video board.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[chill]

Again, Jurassic Park effects were done with big iron... not with a consumer-level computer with a single 680x0 processor and an NTSC/PAL video board.

True, however the effects for Babylon 5, Sliders, SeaQuest DSV, Star Trek Voyager, etc. *were* created and rendered on consumer-level computers with a single 680x0 processor. No NTSC/PAL video board, though, other than for dailies. Lightwave rendered this stuff out using ScreamerNet, a cluster rendering tool over a "renderfarm" of Amiga computers. This was all before there was a PC version of Lightwave.

-Charles Hill

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[T-Ranger]

Maby not for Jurassic Park. Saying so was stupid. But TV production quality != movie quality. TV broadcast quality isnt realy saying much - even HDTV sucks :)

All the CG for Seaquest DSV was done with the Video Toaster. That was definitly TV broadcast quality.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow ... Babylon 5, Sliders, SeaQuest, and Voyager. These software programmers are probably facing charges on felony conspiracy to commit bad science fiction.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Schnapple]

I used this back in High School - we had a "Broadcast Journalism" department, producing television shows for local networks, and a daily news broadcast (student body president, announcements, etc.) for which we hijacked the "Channel One" TV's.

For a while, I could "spot" when it was being used somewhere - like in low budget syndicated television shows, or in the early days of small networks, like Comedy Central.

The "problem" with it was - it was something you outgrew. That Commodore/Amiga went the way of the dodo didn't help, but really it was for small-time or hobbyist operations at best. Once your operation became big enough, you started looking elsewhere.

I should probably go back and see if my alma mater's operation is still going, and what they use today.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[AndroidCat]

This was all before there was a PC version of Lightwave.

Don't forget the Mac version of Lightwave which, I believe, shipped with an Amiga tucked in there. :^P

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Pharmboy]

Wow ... Babylon 5, Sliders, SeaQuest, and Voyager. These software programmers are probably facing charges on felony conspiracy to commit bad science fiction.

Thats NOT true! The first two seasons of Sliders were pretty good. Sucked like the rest after of those after season 2 tho....

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

was i the only guy that though quinn in sliders was, ohh so hot?

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Pharmboy]

well, i wasn't getting chubby over him, but i think the original concept of parallel universes was pretty freaking cool. Once the new chic joined the show, its sux0red big time.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[mindstrm]

No doubt. I twas.

Babylon 5 ranks up as my favorite sci-fi of all time too... at least the first 4 seasons or so.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[drinkypoo]

It is my understanding that earlier episodes of B5 were rendered on amigas using SN (btw, windows versions of lw did exist while b5 was going on) but that later they used something else to do their rendering. Do you have any idea how many amigas you would need, even with '060 accelerators, to render broadcast quality video clips of those lengths? The power bill alone would justify purchasing faster machines.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw an old post of yours about sanctuary mud. who were you there? I was Cortez the Wolf Brother.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[DNS-and-BIND]

Whaa...since when does Silicon Graphics make Big Iron? Nothing their company makes requires a seperate building to contain its own chilling machinery. You're expected to maintain and administer the machines yourself! They don't even come with a staff of technicians when you buy one! Big Iron indeed. Putz.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga's were used for some of the modelling/animation aspects of Jurassic Park (but not for rendering) simply because the user interface was more responsive for that sort of work.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[T-Ranger]

... When they bought Cray Research. Or was it Cray Labs? Hard to keep all those Crays straight..

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a follow up for the curious.

http://www.sciflicks.com/jurassic_park/facts.htm l

Excerpt:
Director Steven Spielberg was worried that "computer graphics" meant "Nintendo" type cartoon quality. He originally only wanted the herd of gallimimus dinosaurs to be computer-generated, but upon seeing ILM's demo animation of a T-rex chasing a herd of galamides across his ranch, he decided to shoot nearly all the dinosaur scenes using this method. The animation was first plotted on an Amiga Video Toaster, and rendered for the film by Silicon Graphics' Indigo workstations.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[neko9]

oh memories... i remember first pc version if i'm not mistaken LW 4.0 it was. and interface still was like in Amiga style...

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[spare.dave]

It was apparently a toaster generated rendering of the stampeding dinosaur herd (albeit only the skeletons) that originally sold the production on CG in the first place. From what I've read, up until that point that had been planning for more traditional techniques but weren't satisfied with the results...

This is foggy memories of articles and features on the production though, so I could be just talking bullshit...

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[afidel]

64 CPU's in one cabinet and up to 1,024 CPU's in a single system image qualifies as big iron for most people =)

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[kasperd]

All of the CGI effects in the movie were done on big iron Silicon Graphics machines at ILM

Actually I have been wondering if those were the same computers as those seen in the movie.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[DNS-and-BIND]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Big Iron needs a seperate building to be built to contain it. Big Iron takes three years to install and build. Big Iron needs a staff of 12 to monitor it at all times. Big Iron does not run piddly-ass consumer-level operating systems like Unix. Nice try, but seriously, you're a backwoods tribesman thinking a Piper Cub or a Twin Beech is the sine qua non of aviation. Obviously you've never seen a real modern airliner, much less a beast like the 747 or C-17. Putz.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[afidel]

By that definition there hasn't been any big iron since the mid 80's =) IBM Z Series nee S/390 are the quintisential big iron and modern ones are a single rack sized cabinet without DASD. Btw I think a 1,024 CPU SGI cluster would require a special building and some interesting cooling solutions =) Oh yes, how did a troll get a +1 posting bonus?

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[jmauro]

Except they resold Cray and are out of the industry once again.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[StarWreck]

Its my understanding that Amiga's were indeed used for the making of Jurrassic Park and so were your "Big Iron" computers. The scenes were designed on Amiga's (aka the artist's interface), once the design work was complete it was then sent to a MASSIVE render farm made up of your Big Iron's. Remember how old the first Jurassic Park is, circa 1991 I believe. In 1991 the Amiga 4000 was not a "cheap" consumer-level computer, it was THE top of the line professional computer. The Amiga 1200 was its home-use counterpart. Nothing could touch it. Sure, its terribly outdated now without massive hacks. And no it wasn't a single 680x0 processor!! It had processors for each individual task! The 680x0 processor was just the central processor. It had a GPU and a seperate blitter (your Pee-Cee dosen't have a blitter! your GPU had to handle that on top of all its other work). Muahahaa -Amiga Fan Boy's Attack!

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[xtronics]

but it wasn't even full broadcast quality...

Sorry to tell you- but the toaster was/is full broadcast quality.

Lightwave - a related product is used by hollywood - remember the opening scene in "Men In Black" where there is an animated dragon fly? That was all Lightwave.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[T-Ranger]

Beh.

I only need to find one counter example to disprove the theory.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[Anonymous Coward]

So anyone who contradicts you is a troll? Get a clue, you misused the term and he called you out on it.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[afidel]

No, he called me and the OP a putz for no reason, and his posting history shows him to be a troll. Btw I'm not exactly the only one to call large SGI systems big iron as you can see with a simple google search, also SGI has a white paper entitled Bringing big iron to Linux.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[scottgfx]

No, the video output of the Toaster was top notch RS170A grade NTSC. As long as you stayed away from the KIKI wipes or DVE transforms, no one would ever know the video went through a Toaster.

My brother still has a BetaSP dub from NewTek of the "Revolution" demo. That demo was cleaner then what we could produce in our edit suite with a GVG-200 switcher and Abekas A53D.

At a later job, I single-framed many animations from the Toaster out to Betacam-SP that always looked great. I even used the "Falling Snow" wipe on some holiday IDs. I processed the "snow" through a GVG Kaleidoscope (Best DVE ever made) to soften it up a bit. It was great having the Toaster as a utility machine for an edit suite.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[torpor]

Babylon 5

Created and rendered on the PC version of Lightwave, actually, with a farm of PentiumPro's for rendering...

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[stefanjo]

From http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html:

The B5 effects teams, both at Foundation and at NDI, use Lightwave 3D by NewTek and specialized software to design and render the visual effects. For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays.

So Amiga was used atleast in the beginning.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[melorama]

Sorry to tell you- but the toaster was/is full broadcast quality

You do, of course, understand that "broadcast quality" is a completely meaningless term, right?

Probably the only thing that defines "broadcast quality" is the ability to conform to FCC specs for over-the-air broadcast of a video signal (i.e. subcarrier bandwidth, "legal" chroma/luma levels, etc). It's an objective engineering term at best, and definitely NOT a subjective visual judgement.

That being said, as a former user of the Video Toaster in a professional environment, I can say that as great and liberating as the original VT was, the video quality left much to be desired. Being that the Toaster was a native composite video I/O device (third party hacks like the Y/C Plus notwithstanding), you could never really achieve the same raw video quality of a component video signal (i.e. BetaSP or MII) or an S-Video signal. No matter how good your "I" was, the "O" was always composite-video, and doing an A/B comparison between the source input and the toaster output would show a VERY obvious (and often horrific) degradation of video-signal quality. In fact, it was often significant enough that many of our (generally) clueless clients would notice it with thier own eyes.

And yet, the Toaster was still "broadcast quality", because it adhered to FCC and NTSC broadcast specs, regardless of the fact that the video signal output from a Video Toaster would have a noticeable difference in visual quality from a standard component-video (IOW, BetaSP) workflow.

A common joke among broadcast engineers is that all the crappy home videos shown on America's Funniest Videos are ipso facto, "broadcast quality", simply because they are being shown on a broadcast television network.

Of course, back then (we're talking the early 90's, after all), digital video was a nascent technology, so there wasn't much to compare the Toaster to in terms of quality, so these shortcomings were often overlooked in light of the Toaster's overall functional advantages. It's very similar to the growing mass acceptance of Final Cut Pro, which still has MANY glaring deficiencies that call into question its "Pro" moniker, but are overlooked/excused because of it's general feature-set.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[xtronics]

Quite true - the spec for broadcast quality has to do with the NTSC standard and is set by NAB.

All compression will cause some degrade to the image. The artifacts from the toaster were not bad for it's time. Also because it was free of cascading depredation it was a good choice for video editing at the time.

Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park

[mindstrm]

Zed, thief.

Formerly of the Tinkers, formerly of the Furies.

Excellent

[heironymouscoward]

It's not about using the software today. It's about the historical record. Software - especially landmark software like this - is part of a common heritage, and should be accessible to all. I'd like to see more companies release the source code for their crown jewels when the commercial exploitation phase has ended.

Re:Excellent

[BiggerIsBetter]

Or to put it another way...

Wow, you guys did something revolutionary - now give it to me.

Re:Excellent

[Pharmboy]

Amen. MS-DOS should be next, Then Windows 3.1. They are not usable for OSes today except in very limited circumstances, but would be great as learning tools. I have been saying this for years.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

MS-DOS should be next, Then Windows 3.1. They are not usable for OSes today except in very limited circumstances, but would be great as learning tools.

Yeah, learn how to not do it.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

s/now give it to me/please don't let it slip into oblivion/

Re:Excellent

[DNS-and-BIND]

Learning tools? Surely you mean "cautionary examples of how to fuck up a simple task like an operating system." 20-bit addressing?

Re:Excellent

[innocent_white_lamb]

MS-DOS should be next, Then Windows 3.1. They are not usable for OSes today except in very limited circumstances,

I beg to differ, at least to a degree. Win3.1 is indeed obsolete, and MS-DOS, yeah that train left the station too. But DOS itself is in use in a great many dedicated control/monitoring and other industrial setups and won't be going away any time soon. It works, and it doesn't crash. See freedos for one example of a freely distributable DOS that's under active development and does the job. I'm sure I'm not unique in stating that my DOS compilers (PowerBASIC and Turbo C) still see fairly regular use.

Re:Excellent

[Pharmboy]

I have seen FreeDos, and installed it. Wasn't that impressed to be honest. I know DOS is still used for stuff like gas pumps, etc, but I doubt that MS makes much $$ from it, and releasing it would generate more good will than lost revenue.

Re:Excellent

[innocent_white_lamb]

I have seen FreeDos, and installed it. Wasn't that impressed to be honest.

Really?

Then I suspect you've not tried dosemu; I use it for my DOS development environment and couldn't be more pleased with its performance and utility.

Of course, that's just me and I suppose it depends on what you want to do with DOS and what your expectations are. But for text-based DOS application development, dosemu is the cat's pajamas.

Open Source Software is one thing

[ajs318]

So now we have the source code for the software, will we get the schematics for the hardware? This could breathe new life in to old Amigas. There must be a few in the backs of wardrobes all over the land .....

Re:Open Source Software is one thing

[tzanger]

The amigas all shipped with full schematics. Problem is that a lot of the custom chips the Amigas used are no longer available, and attempts at recreating them have ended up with timing issues. Personally I find the latter hard to believe but I haven't actually tried to recreate it myself. :-)

Re:Open Source Software is one thing

[ajs318]

Yeah, I have my old Amiga schematics somewhere. But didn't the Video Toaster use some extra hardware as well? IIRC the Amiga's frame buffer ran synchronously to the processor, and it took some high-order mucking aroud to sync it to an external timing signal such as you would get from a video source.

Re:Open Source Software is one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, the amiga's processor and custom chips were _designed_ to be external syncable. The x86 PC-AT architecture had no such capability at the time, which is why a genlock was a pricey but somewhat affordable (hundreds of 80s dollars) add-on for an amiga, but horrendously expensive (1000s of 80s dollars -and VERY difficult to program - on the PC. But as genlocks were kinda Geffen goods (idiots^Wpeople reasoned the PC ones must be better because they were 10x the cost)....

There was a PC version of the Video Toaster released, in an external form factor. In the relabeled box was... an entire Amiga 2000...

Re:Open Source Software is one thing

[runderwo]

OT, but did you ever get anywhere with your Z64 BIOS replacement from here? There is another project called ZeOS on sourceforge aiming to do the same thing. Nobody uploaded any code yet though. :( I'm starting from dextrose hw1/hw2 sources but they specifically claim not to work with a hw3 unit.

Jurassic Park

[duffhuff]

I don't think Video Toaster was used on Jurassic Park, at least, not for rendering; SoftImage was used for the majority of the work. VideoToaster could have been used for compositing or other image effects, but I'm almost certain they never rendered any models with it. I pretty certain because I attented a presentation given by one of the guys who worked on JP, and it was all about SoftImage, but that was a long time ago.

Re:Jurassic Park

[Directrix1]

SoftImage is a 3D modeller. VideoToaster is a non-linear video editor. Who said that VideoToaster was rendering 3d animations in Jurassic Park.

Re:Jurassic Park

[sjhwilkes]

I believe it was used for the onscreen displays - where the girl says 'this is a unix system, we have these at school' and it's a 3D maze type user interface etc.

Re:Jurassic Park

[presearch]

Nope. That was SGI stuff, running the 'fsn' app. It was, indeed, a UNIX system.

Re:Jurassic Park

[notsoclever]

Toaster Flyer is an NLE. Video Toaster is a video mixing board on a card.

Re:Jurassic Park

[0racle]

That was all Irix. Irix screenshots showing the Jurassic Park interface.

Re:Jurassic Park

[ScottGant]

Alias PowerAnimator modeled the models, SoftImage did the animations, Renderman rendered the final frames.

ILM used a lot of different software packages along with their own code to do that movie.

Re:Jurassic Park

[ShadowRage]

maybe on a small part of it..

jurassic park used mostly realistic models for most scenes and prolly used video toaster to add in the models for some scenes.

for most 3d stuff, they used SGI's technology.

Re:Jurassic Park

[neko9]

here is Lightwave Project List. in that huge list is Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III.

Oh wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, it's the world's greatest troll, egg troll himself! Today he delights us with his latest masterpiece, "I thought the Amiga was dead" in an Amiga article. Such breathtaking originality! He has truly raised the bar for trolling with this one.

What's the license?

[One Louder]

I've downloaded some of the code, and neither the web site nor the source code itself seems to indicate under what license this code is being released.

Public Domain? GPL? BSD?

What are we allowed to do with it?

Re:What's the license?

[ThisIsFred]

Frame it and hang it on your wall probably. It's a nice gesture, don't get me wrong, but the code is little more than a curiosity. There are other open source projects out there that are much more capable, and that aren't limited to NTSC format.

Re:What's the license?

[Anonymous Coward]

how about sticking it up your ass?

Re:What's the license?

[thellamaman]

Who cares? It's available on the Internet, that means you should be able to do what you want with it. Right?

Re:What's the license?

[thellamaman]

C'mon, folks, that's a joke. In any case, it's how most people treat copyrighted music on the Net.

Im waiting...

[TheKidWho]

For my toaster to finish reflashing itself with some opensource Toaster software... Damnit! It looks like my english muffins are burning!!!

Re:Im waiting...

[Linker3000]

They're not burning, just making use of 24-bit colour rather than 8-bit brownscale. Notice how your heat settings dial used to be marked 1-10 but now shows RGB values?

Re:Im waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. that's a LOT of not funny in this thread.

Re:Im waiting...

[Linker3000]

Yep, and you've just added to it.

Huh, care to explain?

[snofla]

cg/readme.polite: "One of NewTek's requirements in releasing the complete source code for the Toaster and Flyer was that any rude or potentially offensive language in the original text based material be politely modified or removed." WTF?!

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, let me guess: The original implementors had added tons of helpful comments like /* this fucking sucks, rewrite asap */ in the code - it's not like anyone else is going to read the code anyway...

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[HeghmoH]

cg/readme.polite: "One of NewTek's requirements in releasing the complete source code for the Toaster and Flyer was that any rude or potentially offensive language in the original text based material be politely modified or removed." What the heck?!

Well gosh, I sure don't see a problem with that....

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Pharmboy]

well, im not much of a programmer, more of a wannabe perl hack, but if you "cat FILE |grep fuck" you will find several lines. "this is fucked up, fix it." etc. I would not be shocked if i am the only one. My guess is a real programmer says it more than I do.

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ grep fuck FILE

is much better than

$ cat FILE | grep fuck

(why is there such a shortage of people here who can actually use unix? :P tinker around in linux a little and everybody thinks they're geniuses.)

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not, since you use an extraneous 'cat' when you can pass the filename directly to grep.

cat FILE | sort | cat | grep `echo fuck` | cat

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[gabba_gabba_hey]

more specifically:

~/unzip/CG/src$ grep -i fuck *
NewCrawl.c: //if (RD->CursorPosition > 14) FUCK2();
NewCrawl.c:VOID FakeFucked(VOID)
NewFunction.c:char *DefNameFcn(void *fuck, int Entries)
NewGadgets.c: LB = BufferedOpen("hd0:fuck",MODE_NEWFILE,80,R->ByteStr ip->Planes[1],DOSBase);
NewGadgets.c:char *NameFcn(void *fuck, int Entries)
Panel.c:char *NameFn(void *fuck, int Entries)
cgrexx.c: if(DoLoadBook(ARG1(msg),NULL) ) // fucks up if page not empty
cgrexx.c:// if(DoLoadBook(ret,NULL) ) // fucks up if page not empty
newrender.a: XLABEL _FuckBM
newrender.a: DUMPREG
newrender.a: DUMPMEM ,(a0),#bm_SIZEOF

~/unzip/CG/src$ grep -i pussy *
cgrexx.c: int DouchePussy=REFRESH_NONE;
cgrexx.c: return(DouchePussy);
cgrexx.c: if(IS_FUNCTION(msg)) DouchePussy=HandleCommand(msg);
cgrexx.c: return(DouchePussy);
cgrexx.c: int i,DouchePussy=REFRESH_NONE;
cgrexx.c: if(iNULLid && Handler!=NULL) DouchePussy=Handler(msg);
cgrexx.c: return(DouchePussy);

fun fun...

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Beatlebum]

Well they didn't do such a great job. I checked several of the c source files and found gotos. It don't get much ruder than "goto".

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Pharmboy]

Hey, I never said I was a Linux genious, only messing with Linux for about 6 years now.....and often I double grep.

cat FILE |grep fuck |grep you

;)

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[parkanoid]

Do grep -ri /usr/src/linux 'fuck' for an example of colorful programmer language. Not sure why they would remove it though.

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Greyfox]

marklar:/usr/src# find linux-2.6.0 -name "*.c" -exec grep -yl fuck {} \; | wc -l
31
marklar:/usr/src#

Hmm... now I'm curous... :-)

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[Trejkaz]

Now now, you can cut that down a bit more if you get rid of duplicates before wasting time grepping.

cat FILE | sort | uniq | cat | grep `echo fuck` | cat

*snicker*

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[MtlDty]

You seem to be implying that us 'real' programmers curse more than is strictly necessary. I think thats a fucking libelous statement.

Re:Huh, care to explain?

[melorama]

Uh, let me guess: The original implementors had added tons of helpful comments like /* this fucking sucks, rewrite asap */ in the code -

I would hazard to guess (or at least, I would like to think that it's true) that that specific comment was excised from the VERY TOP of all the ToasterPaint source...dear lord, that had to have been the CRAPPIEST paint package, ever.

Hehe...

[FrostedWheat]

You know for the longest time I actually thought that a the Video Toaster really was a toaster with some sort of video output. I could never understand what all the fuss was about :-)

And I was an Amiga user! (I'm recovering now...)

Re:Hehe...

[AndroidCat]

They were going to put it in a winged toaster case, but the lawyers from Berkeley/After Dark warned them that they'd slap them with a trademark suit, and changing it to a toaster with a propeller just wasn't going to work. (Just kidding.)

You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

No that's partially true. There ARE indeed new Amiga Hardware either in the AmigaONE or the Pegasos II. It's a new PowerPC architecture with industry standard formfactor and components. I have one here running MorphOS a native PowerPC Operating System with full AmigaOS 3.1 API compatibility + MC680x0 JIT for emulating old Amiga programms in full speed (even faster)

For some cool ScreenShots go to my Web page Here the Link or for more look at MorphZone (top right Image Gallery).

greetings,

oGALAXYo

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever spent reading the previous comment ?

The native PowerPC is totally compareable to a modern PC or APPLE hardware. Maybe you should read the stuff before making yourself look like a faggot in the public.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, that stuff isn't exactly Amiga hard-/software. It's just something new (going to die like Be, of course) with bizarre emulation capabilities to win over some old users. No point in buying it, really. Get a nice linux system (PPC or Intel, doesn't matter) and forget about that stupid Amiga crap.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I am on Linux for the past 8 years now even working on GNOME (contributing stuff, written own programs etc.). Although I got a nice offer and thus I am working on the Pegasos II now.

Sure it's NOT like the old Amiga was, but same is for AmigaONE etc. With the new Hardware and OS they finally made a cut under the old rubbish and continue going a new way (like Apple did). Sure this step comes really late but it has to go forward somehow stagnating and whining on the old Hardware makes no sense, it has to go forward.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you spent time reading my comment and visiting my page if you think it all sucks so much. Don't you have better things to do with your time ?

The Amiga community has an existance the same way QNX, BeOS, Windows, Lunix, BSD and all the other stuff has. There is no need for us to excuse towards others why we do what we do. Some stuff is simply passion and beliving. Like a hobby - We are not in a competition with Microsoft or Apple, we are doing this because we want to do it.

And you are wrong, there are many Amiga applications that are quite good. Even the Desktop experience with Ambient (MorphOS) is far better than the experience I had with GNOME (even when being a long years contributor to the GNOME project and even Foundation Member).

greets,

oGALAXYo

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, why would you even want to run "old Amiga programs"?

Because nothing gives an Amiga user a hard-on like rendering a chessboard in Lightwave.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

dont feed the trolls, please, it only encourages them.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Your way of conversation is on a really low level. I think something must have gone wrong in your past but anyways I am not here to value your behavior.

Speaking about re-inventing the Wheel. GNOME on Linux was re-inventing the wheel, we all know KDE was there 1 year earlier. Do we value and judge about GNOME ? no, they have their reason to exist and they are doing fine. It's not just about re-inventing the wheel. It's about believing that the stuff they are doing is the right thing to do. Not everyone is happy with Linux, GNOME, KDE, Windows, Apple or QNX.

Sure re-inventing the Wheel can be wrong by times but sometimes the new Wheel (such as GNOME from using experience) can be wrong as well specially when you disagree with how things are being done.

Forking complete systems or applications in the open source world can be seen as 're-inventing' wheels as well. See GALEON -> Epiphany, see net-Rhythmbox -> Rhythmbox -> Jamboree, see Emacs -> Xemacs and so on. We don't complain why people are doing this, we simply accept it. So I do expect you to accept our decision as well.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Everyone who doesn't agree that the Amiga is the best thing since sliced bread is a troll allright.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll tell you what: trolling you is no fun. Wish ya all the best for your project. ;-)

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sure. Everyone who doesn't agree that the Amiga is the best thing since sliced bread is a troll allright.

Now you're on to something. Call it the acid test.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[Anonymous Coward]

With the new Hardware and OS they finally made a cut under the old rubbish and continue going a new way..

"Finally"? "made"? "continue"? You speak as though OS 4 has been released and you're running it right now. How many years have they been promising but failed to deliver OS 4? How many years have you been told to "Keep the faith" and "Hang on in there"? Come off it; Amiga was a stinking corpse back when Amiga Inc. was showing off the Walker at WOA '99 and making promises they had no way to keep (Hey, do you remember all the talk of embedded devices, Java and Jini? No? Neither does anyone else; it was all bullshit!)

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[mdwh2]

"Finally"? "made"? "continue"? You speak as though OS 4 has been released and you're running it right now.

No, he's running MorphOS on a Pegasos, which certainly is out.

Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here

[HughsOnFirst]

The toaster banged on the Amiga custom chips pretty hard, so the "this code only runs on dead hardware" gripe is pretty on target. Oh, and what wasn't banging the custom chips was running on the toaster hardware which were a few xilinx FPGAs if I remember correctly.

Ah, memories...

[Perdition]

I remember distinctly lusting after the Video Toaster for a while, but budget restraints (having NO money) and other factors kept me from it. Sure, the Toaster was a bit crude, but it probably jump-started a few video editing careers... It was used in a few music videos, such as the Todd Rundgren song "Change Myself", which shipped with the demo tape of the Toaster's promotional package.

Cool, but is it of value ?

[MajorDick]

I mean this is cool, that they released the source, but it it of any real value compared to currently available packages ? I mean we are talking about 15 year old code (maybe older from development to production) in a very dynamic medium.

Re:Cool, but is it of value ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean this is cool, that they released the source, but it it of any real value compared to currently available packages ? I mean we are talking about 15 year old code (maybe older from development to production) in a very dynamic medium.

That this is even news is testament to the sad state of Open Source "innovation."

Re:Cool, but is it of value ?

[drinkypoo]

I'd be much more interested in the hardware (though the software certainly enhances its value) of both this, and the Amiga 2000. Obviously one will need AmigaDOS sources or a very, very good workalike, I don't know if AROS qualifies. Anyone ever use a toaster on AROS? Anyway if the hardware for the toaster and toaster flyer, and the Amiga 2500 were opened, then someone could make a super cheap little video editing box. It would be nice if they'd integrate a TBC, too, and replace (augment, actually) the composite video output with S-Video as well. It would fit easily within a 1U rack space, and require no active cooling. A small hard drive (say, a ~4GB laptop drive) would provide ample space for custom wipes, fonts, stills, and so on.

It will probably never happen, even though I doubt that either device contains any licensed components.

Re:Cool, but is it of value ?

[mrseigen]

It's nice to see what these guys have done with this; it's an incredibly complex project and the software uses every trick in the book to get decent performance on the little Amiga.

Re:Cool, but is it of value ?

[Trilobyte]

This was done -- as was mentioned in previous comments -- by the makers of the Casablanca and Draco workstations.

It has also been done by a company called Screenplay, though they didn't use the actual Amiga-style hardware/software like Draco did.

A little 1U video editing box can actually be done a lot cheaper these days by using off-the-shelf ATI, nVidia, or Matrox hardware and a cheap motherboard design than it would be to do something Amiga-like.

The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[StandardCell]

This is a significant development because Newtek brought to the desktop level what used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment only broadcast stations could afford. It was an Amiga 2000 based box, which is why a reference exists to the Amiga in the first place. The original price was around $5000, and that didn't include the price of time-base correctors, frame-by-frame editing decks, cameras, etc.. But any professional videographer or low-end filmmaker suddenly had the most amazing set of tools to create what was in the hands of only the big players or the well funded. Their original promo video, called "Revolution," was an amazing demo. If you can find a copy, I suggest you view it and see that in 1991 terms this was a truly revolutionary concept.

Beyond that, Amigas with Newtek's Lightwave software were used in the production of series like Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. Huge render farms with 10^3 computers were generating graphics for major television series. You had better believe that it's significant from a historical perspective.

Today, Newtek's online editing setups are pretty interesting but vastly different. It's no skin off their backs to release the source because it's not really commercially valuable. That's because in the last couple of years editing come to the point where it is really accessible by the average person. I do technical consultation for video editors, and know for certain that the seed for desktop editing today was planted by Newtek's Video Toaster over 12 years ago.

One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[downix]

I have never heard of IBM bidding on the Amiga technology. The only other firm I had heard interested in the technology at the time was Atari. (it was Atari's bid that made Commodore aware of the technology, from what I've heard)

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[Anonymous Coward]

One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.

This is incorrect. Check out a comprehensive Amiga history and you'll see that the original corporate investor wanting to buy Amiga was in fact Atari, who produced the ST in competition to the Amiga after Commodore saved Amiga's IP butt by foiling a dirty funding deal by Atari.

IBM wasn't really involved at all. Would the computing landscape be different if Atari had bought Amiga? Maybe, maybe not. Atari had a great bit of mismangement as well, but it might've been a winning combination nonetheless. We'll never know. :(

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[cheekyboy]

Back in those days, i read in the magazines that it was apple who was the other party, not ibm.

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[ciggieposeur]

Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.

(Other posts discount the historical accuracy of the parent, I don't know about that. But I do know IBM.)

Had IBM bought it, they would have killed any chance that serious video editing would exist outside the high-end Unix machines. They would have also used their patents to squish any independent development of said features.

Remember, in 1984 IBM *HATED* the PC market. PC's were only ever meant to interface with mainframes via 3270 emulators using SNA over a token-ring network.

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[johne_ganz]

Not IBM, it was Jack Tramel at Atari around 1984.

SGI was also interested in the Amiga's chips, but that obviously never got very far.

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[drinkypoo]

One thing we can be sure of, Atari would have spent more money on advertising.

Something else I'm sure of, they wouldn't have spent enough. How many commercials for the Jaguar did you see? (And did you laugh at how much they wanted for it, too?)

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[ewhac]

One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable.

Uh, no.

The other company was Atari, headed by Jack "Business is War" Tramiel. He had just left Commodore to head up Atari, and was in negotiations with Amiga, Inc. to buy and develop their machine. In anticipation of closing the deal, Atari gave Amiga a $750K "advance", to be repaid if negotiations fell through.

Well, Tramiel is a soundrel of the first rank, and used this "advance" as a lever against Amiga to try and buy the company cheap. Meanwhile, Dave Morris was also negotiating the sale of Amiga to Commodore, and managed to secure a better deal. (Commodore were also interested in annoying Tramiel.) After closing the deal, he flew back to California and, to their utter shock, repaid Atari.

Tramiel was furious, and ordered his people to develop a competing machine. Thus was born the Atari 520XL, which was significantly cheaper, had a slightly faster CPU, no graphics accaleration, marginal sound, and a crap operating system. He positioned it directly against the Amiga and ran "attack" ads against it.

Someone should write a book about this...

Schwab

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[ewhac]

Thus was born the Atari 520XL

Trust me to screw up something so basic... The correct name is the Atari 520ST. The 'XL' moniker belonged to their second-generation 6502-based systems (which were pretty darned good).

Schwab

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw all too many commercials for the Jaguar -- DO THE MATH1!!!!1 -- and a really boring late night infomercial.

Then again, like Atari, I was living in the Bay Area.

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[bovinewasteproduct]

How many commercials for the Jaguar did you see?

Plus when you factor in that fact that it was NOT FCC certified for home use (I was the tech at one of the major houston Atari dealers in 1990, and we had everyone that bought one sign a disclaimer that it was going to used in an industrial area), welllll...

The only people I remember buying them were the studio people that were already using Mega4s for audio editing, plus one or two other people I thought had more money than sense.

BWP

Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video

[Dogtanian]

One thing we can be sure of, Atari would have spent more money on advertising.

No, they wouldn't. You're thinking of Atari when they were owned by Warner Communications (late 70s to 1983/84(?)).

By the time of the Amiga, the consumer-electronics division of Atari (Atari Corp) had been sold to the Tramiels, and I don't think they ever spent much on advertising.

...big deal

[Dan Farina]

I'm waiting for TURRICAN!

Re:...big deal

[c0d3h4x0r]

Download ZSNES or Gens and go grab Mega Turrican or Super Turrican. Far better than the old lame Amiga Turrican games anyway.

Re:...big deal

[Dan Farina]

You're kidding.

Those were incredible games of the day.

Video Toaster wasn't film quality (or video...)

[minnkota]

This article refers to the original Amiga VideoToaster... which is basiclly a 68030 Amiga with a fancy linear video i/o board and some software for basic effects. It could capture single frames, but it couldn't even digitize a clip. It was basiclly a fancy video switch / mixer. In fact, the Toaster didn't even do ful 640x480, it was a bit less than that. OK for UHF broadcast though. http://www.atv.net/images/Products/toaster.gif There is no way this was used for film work. Especially when ILM had a building full of SGI workstations and servers.

Re:Video Toaster wasn't film quality (or video...)

[downix]

Several elements of the Toaster could do much higher than TV quality. Lightwave and the paint program could do thousands by thousands in resolution.

Please don't mistake the limits of the TV card as the absolute limit of the system.

Re:Video Toaster wasn't film quality (or video...)

[minnkota]

Lightwave and the frame painter were very popular for film and print media, but they were not dependant upon the VideoToaster at all. You could use them with a VideoToaster if you wanted easier access to TV resolution video... but it was not required nor heavily integrated. In fact, Lightwave was also available for much beefier SGI hardware back then as well. NewTek had lots of great products, including the VideoToaster. But the VideoToaster itself was not magic do-all, do-anything fairy wand.

Re:Video Toaster wasn't film quality (or video...)

[Anonymous Coward]

> the VideoToaster. But the VideoToaster itself was not magic do-all, do-anything fairy wand.

Yes it was.

Whats the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly assembler in the intersting areas +++ all
tied to the Amiga's custom chips. I aint spending
my time reinventing the wheel to end up with
something that is way below the capabilities of
some of the budget programs that are out there
today.

If it was all written in C and didn't depend on custom chips I'd be interested ...

- Moomin

Interesting..

[chipset]

Now, there have been rumors around for years about what the Amiga and corresponding technologies have been associated with. Max Headroom (for the background, if I remember).

Now, some people are saying it wasn't broadcast quality, however, a number of people disagree. When the video toaster came out, it replaced a 100K production system for 6K. It took video editing/production by storm. For example, the FOX affiliate in Anchorage used one for years. The station manager told me how it was just incredible and could do much more bang for the buck than anything out there (circa '95).

The effects, depending on how you used them, could look cool or cheesy. Think of the effects of Home Improvement, when they did the scene changed. The one I remember out of the box for the Toaster was the legs crossing on-screen for a scene change.

So, now's the real question... How easy or hard will this be to port? It looks to support other languages, as well. I noticed Kanjii support.

Is the source code Amiga specific? I know they had other systems supported, but later. Amiga source code, at least the OS specific functions, are a lot different than coding today.

Most of the apps they have source to didn't require the additional hardware that the VT came with, which is good.

Personally, I think there might be some gems, but I doubt you'll see whole ports of the applications. Too much has changed since 91.

Re:Interesting..

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on who you were asking about "broadcast quality." Anyone with a vscope would have told you no.

As for porting, it was tied to the Amiga's custom chips and the Toaster hardware itself.

The programs were interesting but, other than Lightwave and the switcher, all of them had popular third-party replacements--especially since CG didn't support right-to-left languages.

Re:Interesting..

[BenFaremo]

I'll confirm that Max Headroom rumor for you. Because I had the issue of Amigaworld with that article.

All right. Fine. I mean to say "because I still have the issue of Amigaworld".

Re:Interesting..

[slashusrslashbin]

According to Neil Gaiman's "Hitch Hikers Guide to Douglas Adams" the Max Headroom character was created by the same studio that made the H2G2 TV 'Book' graphics (which were animated my hand, not computer), and the character was in a rubber mask.

Maybe post-processing/keying was done on Video Toaster?

Better late than never?

[suso]

I think it would be good for programmers (even those not into video) to look through their code. The team at NewTek supposibly did a lot of innovative stuff to get all that they could out of the Amiga hardware.

17,525 cinnomon cats later...

Discreet Toaster

[minnkota]

You can't even begin to compare Discreet's software to the original Toaster (or any toaster). The Toaster was basiclly a fancy video mixer controlled by an amiga. It was totally linear video (meaning you had to have a source deck and a record deck) it couldn't even capture video clips. NewTek later made "Toaster" software for Windows, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as editing/effects packages from Avid, Adobe, and Apple.

Modern alternative?

[Alomex]

Videotoaster was very famous in its time. What would be the comparable tool today for that type of video editing?

Re:Modern alternative?

[rolocroz]

Final Cut Pro, maybe?

Re:Modern alternative?

[rampant mac]

"What would be the comparable tool today for that type of video editing?"

Final Cut Pro and Shake.

Though at Sundance this year, an enterprising individual edited and produced a movie for $218.32, using iMovie.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

You used to be able to buy a $100 box at radio shack that did analog A-B mixes and effects. Basically the same thing.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Paint.

Re:Modern alternative?

[root:DavidOgg]

Video Toaster NT

Re:Modern alternative?

[notsoclever]

Final Cut Express on Apple, Premiere on Windows.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Movie Maker.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Broadcast 2000 on *nix.

Just kidding.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the Video Toaster was not a Non-Linear Editor (NLE) until it was re-released as the Flyer. The Toaster was a video switcher with a lot of trasitions and 2 framebufers, a character generator, a paint box, and included Lightwave 3D. The only thing like it on the PC is Video Toaster NT.

Re:Modern alternative?

[lostchicken]

This isn't entirely true. the Video Toaster could handle live video, something you really can't do with any good consumer systems right now. The closest thing that came to a replacement for the video toaster was the Play Trinity, but you can't buy that anymore, not to mention that it was for a much higher end market. It was a professional system.

If I'm a low budget cable access, or UHF station, I can't use Final Cut Pro for my live broadcast. In fact, my local cable access station still uses, guess what, the Video Toaster for this purpose.

Re:Modern alternative?

[Wesley Felter]

Live Channel?

Re:Modern alternative?

[R0]

Cinelerra is Broadcast 2000's successor -

ASSORTED FEATURES

VU meters
unlimited tracks
16 bit YUV compositing
background renderfarm
free form editing
Firewire, MJPEG, bttv video I/O
Firewire, OSS, Alsa audio I/O
Batch capturing
Batch rendering
SMP utilization
realtime effects
still image panning
Quicktime, AVI, MPEG, and image sequence I/O
OGG Vorbis audio
64 bit internal audio representation
LADSPA plugins
Bezier masks
Track routing like a real console
Track nudge for audio and video

The sun rising in the west, recall elections, heroines running for president: they all pale compared to the insanity Cinelerra brings to your web server box.

Re:Modern alternative?

[BenFaremo]

Why, the moderm alternative would be Newtek's VT[3] (www.videotoaster.com).Well, not for editing, although it does edit, but especially for live studio switching, like the original Toaster.

Newtek is alive and well, just not in Topeka (yes, Topeka) any more.

Re:Modern alternative?

[melorama]

You used to be able to buy a $100 box at radio shack that did analog A-B mixes and effects. Basically the same thing.

No, not basically the same thing.

Your little $100 Radio Shack box did not have a built-in, realtime alpha-keyed 35-nanosecond Character Generator (a resolution that, while pretty lame by today's standards, was considered "broadcast quality" back in the early 90's). In fact, this is the one thing that even a 14 year old Video Toaster /still/ does better than most prosumer and professional desktop digital video systems today. I wish I still had one in my studio for just this purpose (excellent for creating realtime "bugs", lower-thirds and scrolling credits)

That $100 Radio Shack box also did not have GPI control or a fully scriptable ARexx interface, which enabled automation and interprocess interaction. This was definitely one of the Amiga's greatest strengths, IMO. Not even Applescript approached the depth of ARexx on the Amiga, where there seemed to be a unwritten, yet strongly accepted cultural rule among developers to provide an extensive ARexx "port" in all thier applications, so that end-users could expand on the functionality of the original application. There were hundreds of Toaster specific public-domain ARexx scripts written and distributed through BBS's and eventually the web.

Lightwave != Video Toaster

[minnkota]

Seaquest used Lightwave, a 3D package from NewTek, for its CG effects. The Video Toaster was a combination of hardware and software, also from NewTek, for doing fancy computer-controlled video switching and mixing ("blue screen" chroma key, wipes/fades/disolves, graphics mixing, etc) in real-time via two or three tape decks... one or two for source, one for recording. Seaquest probably used the Toaster to mix the graphics with the video... but the 3D effects themselves were done in Lightwave. The Video Toaster is not a magical fairy wand that can do everything... it's just a computer-controlled video mixer / switch.

There's a new os (OS4) and new Amiga One machine..

[BeatlesForum.com]

Us folks left in the Amiga community are kinda hoping for something nice from Amiga. A few of us in the area have our own Amiga user group and have managed to have two demos of the OS4 in the last few months.

Keep you fingers crossed.

strange toaster fact

[jjeffries]

The Video Toaster's hardware was designed by Dana Carvey's brother, Brad.

Re:strange toaster fact

[donglekey]

and Tim Jenison. Notice in Wayne's World 2 that Dana Carvey is wearing a Video Toaster t-shirt towards the end of the movie. Brad Carvey also went on to start Autumn Light which did the CG dragon fly at the begining of Men in Black.

//from Topeka and works in CG because of help from Newtek

Re:strange toaster fact

[Shriek]

Well, all I have to say on that is Schwingggggg!

Is this code useful anymore?

[ChiralSoftware]

Will this lead to anything useful or is it just "cool that they made it open source"?

Also, are there terms of use for viewing the code? If so, anyone who is interested in developing for other FOSS video projects (VideoGimp, etc) should understand the terms of use before looking at any of this source code. It would be terrible if a bunch of developers looked at this code, went on to do amazing (but unrelated) things with VideoGimp and a few years down the line we get an eerie feeling of deja-vu.

----------
Create a WAP server today.

The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[StandardCell]

IIRC the Toaster did utilize the Amiga's chips to the extent that it could. The magic was in that ASIC, and IMO that would be the more interesting thing to examine, although I'm sure if you dig into the code enough you'd have a rough idea of what they were trying to do.

However, to do anything with it today is pretty redundant. Your average $500 PC from Dell with a $250 Canopus ADVC-100 has more capability to edit than the toaster ever did, plus the ability to do real-time previews and output to DVD or DV tape. If you were to emulate the hardware, you'd have something that with full effects would take fractions of a second to several minutes per frame or more to render its output. Then you'd need an analog deck with frame-by-frame control, because that's how the Toaster used to do its thing: frame-by-frame, painfully, slowly usually. Plus you'd need stand-alone Time Base Correctors at a few hundred a pop for frame stabilization. To do a 1-2 hour video and have a render and print-to-tape go overnight or even over the course of a couple of days wasn't a big deal considering the lack of alternatives at the time.

I think for historical purposes or the code geek will appreciate the relase of code, but anyone with a PC from the last two years with a decent capture/output solution and a DVD writer can do far more than the original Toaster ever could.

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you'd need an analog deck with frame-by-frame control, because that's how the Toaster used to do its thing: frame-by-frame, painfully, slowly usually.

They also released the source code for the ToasterFlyer which is a addon/followon to the toaster. The ToasterFlyer is NLE; non-linear editing, tapeless hard drive based editing of video.

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[drinkypoo]

The toaster still has one feature that you won't get without spending a sack of cash today, which is the four-input switcher. Being able to do realtime wipes and fades (not to mention, what's that effect called? Where only a portion of a video source is overlaid?) is pretty damned useful. I don't think I'd use a toaster for video editing today, but an A2500 with a toaster in it would make a neat mixer.

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[ActiveSX]

what's that effect called? Where only a portion of a video source is overlaid?

Chroma/Luma/Alpha Keying.

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[adisakp]

Your average $500 PC from Dell with a $250 Canopus ADVC-100 has more capability to edit than the toaster ever did, plus the ability to do real-time previews and output to DVD or DV tape.

I don't think the "preview" with a $500 PC and a $250 ADVC-100 is anywhere close to the realtime effects the Toaster was capable of creating. I have a $1000 PC and an ADVC-100 so I should know.

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[Trilobyte]

Yeah, a person with a modern PC can do more *editing* than the *original* Toaster. But that person can not do it LIVE. The Toaster was all LIVE, remember that. It was not so much (by itself) an editor as it was a Switcher/Keyer/Character Generator/24-bit Framestore.

And as far as the editing goes, the Flyer when added to the Toaster hardware did some pretty nice editing with broadcast-quality output, again live, no rendering required (until you get to really special effects).

Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC

[WhiteDragon]

Alas, I don't think the Video Toaster did true chroma keying, only luma keying. That was a major wish of mine for a long time when I was in high school, true chroma keying. Without it, the best we could do was have our people wear light outfits and shoot thim in front of a black curtain with very hot lights, and then we could approximate the effect, but you could still see through their shadows. Pretty cool actually, but definitely not something you would want to do for a production quality broadcast.

Brings back memories

[jacobcaz]

If nothing else, this site brings back fond memories of sitting in a small, dark room rolling back the B deck to hit the right cue point for the A/B roll (I didn't have access to frame accurate or RS422 controlled decks back then).

My highschool got one of these back in 1992 or 1993 and I managed to convice them to give me THREE class periods of independent study time to shoot, write and edit our weekly "TV" show. It was a blast and it really taught me how to work under a deadline -- I was the only student doing the show and fourth period EVERY FRIDAY there had to be 15 minutes of show in the can ready to show.

At the time, it was somewhat of a jewel on our school's crown to have a weekly, entirely student-produced show. We just thought it was more fun that trig.

The last time I poked my head in my high school, they had several classes dedicated to broadcast and communications with a real teacher assigned to it and everything. They were also doing a daily show in lieu of the morning announcements over the PA system.

I feel proud I got to do it my way and learn something in the process. God bless the Toaster -- and who coudln't resist tossing in a few Kiki effects or falling sheep here and there! ;-)

Good times...

BSD???

[Dan East]

Geez, you microsofty, the correct term is guru meditation. This is an article about the Amiga you know.

Dan East

(Blue) Video "Toaster"

[minnkota]

How about this Blue Video "Toaster". :) http://www.schrotthal.de/sgi/o2/ OK, so it's not a VideoToaster, but with a large drive or two and Discreet Effect or Flame, it can blow the doors off of any real VideoToaster

well...

[relrelrel]

They seem to be keeping their price over on ebay.

Re:well...

[root:DavidOgg]

Not to mention the Amiga's underneat them. sheesh. Been trying to find an Amiga 4000 w/PPC accelerator under $1000, impossible!

Re:well...

[Vegeta99]

?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i tem =2984699256&category=21166

That seems to be under $1,000.

Re:well...

[root:DavidOgg]

?
invalid item

Re:well...

[Vegeta99]

Remove the space between item= and the rest of the url =)

Slow down coowboy.... it's only been 5 seconds....

Re:well...

[root:DavidOgg]

Ah.. (damn slashdot)

That's already at $500, and doesn't have the PPC accelerator :)

Used to require the VideoToaster board

[jago25_98]

Used to require the VideoToaster board. Originally retailed at ~2500. I think it was Zorro based and intended for A4000/A3000.

Re:Used to require the VideoToaster board

[root:DavidOgg]

The original Video Toaster was Amiga 2000 based

Re:Used to require the VideoToaster board

[ffnord]

The Video Toaster was originally brought out to go inside the A2000, then the top of the Amiga line. Commodore, in what was probably their largest blunder (because the VT was the best reason that ever came along to purchase an Amiga), then brought out the considerably more powerful A3000, whose case design would not allow for a VT to be installed (although there were various kludges). -g

So maybe...

[Threni]

...someone will do a PAL version now? Thought at this rate Duke Nukem Forever will come out first.

this is unix, i know this

[minnkota]

I believe it was used for the onscreen displays - where the girl says 'this is a unix system, we have these at school' and it's a 3D maze type user interface etc.
That's Silicon Graphic's FSN (fusion) file manager from the late 1980s. http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html. There's also a modern clone of it somewhere.

Re:this is unix, i know this

[innocent_white_lamb]

fsv

VideoToaster = tv resolution, linear

[minnkota]

Softimage and Lightwave were popular 3D modelers back then (before 3D Studio and Maya took the world by storm). The original VideoToaster (the one in question) was a fancy computer-controlled video mixer / switch that lived on a card inside an Amiga. It was only TV resolution (NTSC / PAL) and was very linear. To mix video you needed two source decks and a record deck. It was only able to capture a single frame at a time. The only way to do "realtime" effects or anything resembling modern random-access non-linear editing was to use serial-controlled frame-accurate video decks that could pause and record single frames at a time. (This was also common in the Mac world back then, folks would use a frame-accurate recorder to record frames of animation from StrataStudioPro, Infini-D, or other 3D modelers as they were rendered).

Guys?

[root:DavidOgg]

Guys? This is the source for a Zorro based card. You arn't likely to get any use of it unless your PC has a Zorro bus.

For more details visit http:\\www.ann.lu

Re:Guys?

[Ziviyr]

Not all of the software revolves around switching inputs. :-)

Re:Guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever used Paint or CG? You can't even claim limitations of the hardware considering the third-party industry that provided better solutions.

Put out the source to Lightwave and then we'll talk. :)

Re:Guys?

[Trilobyte]

The Toaster wasn't a Zorro board. It was a Video Slot board. The Flyer was a Zorro board.

The source code is to an Amiga-based program which drives this hardware (separate or in tandem) while also providing many features to the user which doesn't really use the hardware at all. There's bound to be some great stuff in the ToasterPaint code as well as the ToasterCG code. And probably some nice code in the Flyer NLE...

But you're right, porting the code to a PC wouldn't give them the bulk of anything because the original Toaster is a strictly Amiga phenomenon. Especially since most of the code is in 68k assembly. Open-source developers might find some nice timing routines in there, for audio/video sync.

Boing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always a beautiful day when you see the ball on /.

Toaster vs $100K mixers

[minnkota]

When the toaster came out it was a wonderful replacement for aging, expensive monster mixers and effects boxes. In fact, when it came out it's closest competition was nearly $50,000. Toaster had the huge advantage of being a totally new system using new ideas and new techniques. It wasn't as powerful or as capable as a true non-linear editing system or field-accurate paintbox machine... but it didn't cost nearly as much as one either.

That takes me back

[concordeonetwo]

The Video Toaster I thought was the coolest thing. After I saw a demo of it once, I was totally amazed. As I recall, there was one famous video effect it did. That effect oddly was used by lots of those sucide cults, such as the famous Heaven's Gate in ther propaganda videos.

Re:That takes me back

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the falling sheep, but it would be funny if it was one of the KiKiFX (transitions basedon a woman, named after Kiki Stockhammer, a sort of "poster girl" for Newtek in the old days.))

More News.

[Anonymous Coward]

More information, and comments from Amiga users here.

http://www.ann.lu/comments2.cgi?view=1075977824& ca tegory=news&start=1&21

Oh, it's PRODUCTION software?!

[Stupid White Man]

I first read that and thought to myself "Who gives a crap about that Win 95 Plus Pack Flying Toasters screensaver?"

I need to lay off the crack for a while.

I wasn't chips, it was ideas

[NickFusion]

Mainly, the idea that individual persons could make TV. That was a pretty revolutionary thought. It was that crazy idea and the Video Toaster/Lightwave bundle that got me into CGI, and out of Fargo North Dakota, where I was quite literally making industrial videos in a barn.

These days I live in the Boston area, and make games for a living. I don't want to exaggerate the impact the Video Toaster had on my life, but it was pretty significant. And I'm not the only person of that vintage with such a story.

So the real open source idea here is that technology can be fashioned to empower the individual. A somewhat quaint idea in today's multinational world, but one I'm quite fond of.

Bravo New Tek! You made a difference. Keep it up.

This is excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst thing about working in television is the editing - there's an editor sitting at a big dumb expensive machine and you don't experiment at 300 bucks an hour, you stick with grey. But there's a company that's changing that. There's a new machine that may give us real color TV. NewTek in Topeka, yes Topeka (the "yes Topeka" gag is right on their stationary) has done another one of those technological end runs around politics and conventions. They have invented the Video Toaster, desktop video. It costs around 1500 clams and works in an Amiga (I know you don't have an Amiga but if you want to play with video buy one, it's no big deal - it's just an Amiga for Pete's sake - you don't have to eat crow and buy a Mac). The Toaster does everything those pesky dinosaur machines do and you don't need any editor person in you face. You can do all those digital video effects you see on real TV yourself. It has a character generator, ChromaFX and Luminance Key (that's like blue screen so you can put things behind you that aren't really there - you can do your rap in front of a big nude picture of Uma Thurman). It has screen buffers so you can pull in pictures of, oh let's say, Uma Thurman and has a 3D animation thing and an incredible paintbox so you can doctor up those pictures or draw original ones and throw them right onto video tape. And, get this, it's broadcast quality. Rumor has it that some of CNN's Gulf War coverage was Toasted. This means one person can shoot footage of meat-puppets on HI-8 and, with a couple of tape machines and time base correctors, put out no-kidding television. The editing can be done in your home - alone. Once the set up is paid for, the editing is free. This machine is going to fill wedding videos with lots of 3D flying titles and "infinity slides" but, face it, we're going to have world peace before we have watchable wedding videos. I love playing with the Video Toaster but what really kills me dead is dreaming of a lot of people using Toasters. When it gets universal enough we'll have video that has the pure artistic white light/white heat of writing and painting - glimpses into another person's vision. Of course MTV will still show Robert Palmer - computers can't solve all our problems.

Re:This is excellent

[drinkypoo]

Most people don't need realtime. A MiniDV camcorder and a PC with firewire input and a DVD burner suits most people's needs much better, and the whole kit and caboodle will run you less than $1500. (I'd say around $1200.) The video toaster was awe-inspiring when it was new but these days they're not all that impressive. Unless you have a need for real-time effects, which is to say cable access or maybe VJing at a rave or something, this is fairly unnecessary.

This actually looks like you snagged the text from something very old - gulf war? - and spewed it on here as an AC to see who would bite. And, I did. You can get toasters used for $500 now, or sometimes less (more with a flyer, though.)

Wait....

[linuxdawg]

I thought the toaster was Toast??....

Re:Nice code, but...

[ScottGant]

The Video Toaster itself wasn't really used in Babylon 5, but it came bundled with Lightwave...and THAT was used in the CGI...and continued to be used and is still used today...though not on an Amiga.

I remember when Alan Hastings was looking for another distributer when the one that distributed VideoScape 3D crapped out and NewTek gobbled him up. He was even looking for a name for the new "Videoscape" which later turned into Lightwave. This was back in the day when I was trying like mad to get Pixar to port Photorealistic Renderman to the Amiga, even getting them to go to a couple of Amiga-worlds...but I guess they saw the writing on the wall.

Oh well, that was a long time ago. But it's cool that they released the source for the Toaster. Now if they would release the source for Lightwave that would REALLY be cool. lol

Re:Can it be reused ? (no!)

[rduke15]

As far as I remember, the Toaster was not an editing program. It was used for titles and effects.

So at most, the code might be useful for an add-on to an editing program. But I would guess that there is nothing there that the 2 current editing programs (Avid and FCP) don't have already.

Still, the Amiga was cool in it's time. I remember a purchase decision around 1995 for a computer that had to generate stuff and output it in a PAL video signal. The choice was a second hand Amiga for around $1000, or a second hand SGI for around $30'000. I can't remember the video card that was in the Amiga, but anyway the picture quality of the Amiga was much better! The choice turned out to be very easy...

But for pure professional editing, there is nothing on Amiga (or Linux) for now, and there never was. It's Mac or Windows (only Mac if you want FCP).

Re:It's only a pile electronics, not a girlfriend

[cheekymonkey_68]

Actually the Amiga was originally to be called 'Hi Toro', but that was changed because a lawnmower-company had a similar name

So they decided to call it 'Amiga', which is of course Spanish for 'girlfriend'.

So it was not only a revolutionary pile of electronics, but also a girfriend!

Re:Video Toaster WAS video quality

[schon]

Your facts are incorrect. The Toaster most definitely was video quality.

basiclly a 68030 Amiga with a fancy linear video i/o board and some software for basic effects.

No, the Original video toaster didn't come with an Amiga.. the toaster was the "fancy linear i/o board and some software for basic effects."

It was basiclly a fancy video switch / mixer.

Yes, that's the point.

the Toaster didn't even do ful 640x480, it was a bit less than that

First of all, "640x480" isn't "full" video, it's "VGA", which is significantly different than a TV signal. (VGA is underscanned, with a 1:1 aspect ratio, NTSC video is overscanned, with a 4:3 aspect ratio.)

And second, the Toaster did do full 752x480 - full overscanned NTSC.

There is no way this was used for film work.

It was used for film work - just not the way you think. Although it wasn't used in the final cut, it was used to do rough-ups for staging.

Comedian Dana Carvey's Brother Designed Toaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Dana Carvey's brother, Brad Carvey, designed the hardware in the Video Toaster.

Brad is also the inspiration for Dana's portrayal of the "Garth" character in Wayne's World (on Saturday Night Live and the movies) -- you'll notice that Garth is essentially a quiet geeky guy who is really good with electronics.

Re:Comedian Dana Carvey's Brother Designed Toaster

[BitwizeGHC]

Dana plugs his brother's invention in the movies, too. There's a scene where you see Garth wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt.

Blew everybody's minds at the time. In high school, I was a geek who hung out with music and A/V geeks. Not only were we all Wayne's World fanatics... but we did much of our postproduction work on a Toaster.

What I find really cool

[rsilvergun]

is seeing all those open source apps on MorphOS. Please don't misunderstand me, this is _not_ a 'you should use Linux' troll. What's cool is that, thanks to open source, MorphOS is able to become a complete desktop environment (with a highly compatible set of applications including media player, web browser, office software, etc) almost instantly.

I envy the speed and sharp look of MorphOS (can't really afford the hardware though, and I'm stuck on X86 for gaming). Still, I like imagining a future where I can swap out my hardware and OS and hardly notice because the core apps are available everywhere :).

Re:What I find really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, we benefit a lot from the open source movement, like GCC, Binutils etc. even a lot of people from Amiga side opened their programs as open source so we can guarantee that we can use them for a longer time (see Yam, AWeb, Jabberwocky and many more). We also port good bits from open source like MPlayer to MorphOS and more to come. SDL etc are all ported already so using stuff like ScummVM and other SDL compliant stuff is no problem.

Source....

[hackus]

its all in M68K assmebly language...

We might as well start from scratch...

unless of course u own a AMIGA, then it is very useful.

-Hack

Re:Source....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only do I still own an Amiga, but I also have a working toaster card. Unfortunately some of the installation floppies are flawed. No more worries!!!

Re:Source....

[Anonymous Coward]

M68K assembly language looks very like C, much more so than x86. The x86 instruction set and architecture essentially sucks hairy monkey balls. So naturally, it's the most popular in the world >:-((.

Re:Source....

[Anonymous Coward]

of course it is! Code bloat was not an option back
then. hell the OS gui and all fit in 512k of rom and maybe about 5-10 mb hard disc space for utilites. Even today the only way, ONLY WAY to get the most out of hardware is to code in assembler. or use a compiler built by someone who actually give a dam about code size.

Re:Source....

[trouser]

Actually the OS, gui and all, fit on a single floppy. Even Kickstart was originally on floppy though it found it's way into ROM, probably with the release of the A500.

Hard disk? Well OK I did know a guy with a hard disk but most of us made do with the single floppy drive.

Re:Source....

[ottffssent]

Hey, my calculator has an M68K in it!

Re:Source....

[hackus]

The Motorola line had avery easy to use instruction set, I agree.

I also agree with all the screwy legacy memory modes the x86 instruction set had, it was anything but easy to scale programs that required lots of memory.

-Hack

Re:Source....

[Anonymous Coward]

its all in M68K assmebly language...

Not exactly. There's a lot of C-code, REXX-scripts (ARexx to be exact) and of course a bunch of Assembler-code for optimizations. But not all of it is in assembler.

terminologically challenged

[misterpies]

>>The Video Toaster ushered in the age of affordable desktop video in 1991 and was used in products such as Babylon 5 and Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park a product? And there was me thinking it was a movie.

Re:terminologically challenged

[root:DavidOgg]

Isn't a movie a product?

What about toilet paper? is that not a product because it's "toilet paper?"

Re:terminologically challenged

[the drizzle]

Everything made by humans is a product.

Further...all movies have producers, which etymologically can be linked to product.

So nya-nya-nya.

Re:terminologically challenged

[NanoGator]

"Jurassic Park a product? And there was me thinking it was a movie."

Lightwave is meant for the "I gotta have it yesterday" workflow that TV studios often adopt. They probably used it because they could rough together a bunch of the scenes on it and see how they look before they dump days worth of render time into generating the dinos. I doubt anything you saw on-screen was LW generated, that doesn't mean it wasn't extremely important to their workflow.

Re:terminologically challenged

[misterpies]

maybe so at some level, but usually cultural/artistic works are not described as products. Consider the following:

"did you see the Van Gogh exhibition?"
"sure, that sunflowers painting is a great product!"

"Sgt Pepper was the Beatles' best-selling product"

"Steel construction techniques made products such as the Empire State Building possible"

If these sentences sound natural to you, OK. But I'd guess you're in the minority, and that most people wouldn't call Jurassic Park a product either.

No explicit license == default copyright

[iota]

Well, I haven't seen anything either --
So it is only safe to assume that the source follows normal copyrights, and you may not redistribute it in any way without permission. Until there is some announcement from NewTek that says otherwise, this is their code and only their code -- it can be used for "reference" or your personal source-code museum, but not much else.

Re:No explicit license == default copyright

[bkhl]

Well, in most civilized countries it would still be legal to reverse engineer anything interesting you find in there for your own project.

I have no idea, however, about how interesting that would be for this particular project. I would guess not much, since there are a few high quality 3D type thingies in the free realm already.

OTOH, they should have been even more inclined to write optimal algorithms back then, which could be reused nowadays through reverse engineering.

Re:Nice code, but...

[neko9]

if they port Lightwave to Linux THAT would be really really really cool. ScreamerNet for Linux don't really counts. Maya, Houdini, Softimage all have ports on Linux... i want my Lightwave on LINUX!!!

Source of Amiga Video Toaster Software Released

[The Ape With No Name]

What was he in jail for? Does the MPAA know about his release?

Is there a ports project?

[gbulmash]

It's old technology, but still... Just for purely academic reasons, I think it would be interesting to see how a ported and tuned version would work on a high-end Pentium or AMD system.

Of course, I don't program, so this is a "gee, it would be great if someone else did this" post,. Take it with as many grains of salt as you wish.

- G

Re:Nice code, but...

[drinkypoo]

My understanding is that much of the design and a small amount of the rendering for B5 was done on the Amiga platform, but the rendering was done... somewhere else. These days current versions of lightwave run on any Windows after 95 (98 and up) and on MacOS (9 or X), with the rendering engine also running on some other platforms (linux?) I seem to recall that for some projects, screamernet has also been ported to other architectures, but I don't know if they actually sell sn for anything else.

T'oaster demos..a little off topic.l.

[macguys]

I saw Video Toaster demoed several times at various trade shows. I remember at least once at a MacWorld Expo. The demo goddess was a nice and funny woman named Kiki Stockhammer. She did a great demo and during the product's life, I (and a lot of other people) looked forward to seeing Kiki present.

In my old foggy memory, I seem to remember that the product had one short rebirth after being dormant for a bit.

--------------
On the road and seldom seen.
Davie Brightbill

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Best comment on /. ever

Grandpa starts to mumble...

[K8Fan]

I was in Kansas City working for an Amiga dealer, and I remember when Tim Jennison came to demo the DigiView. At the time, it was astonishing. Mac users were buying Amigas just as a way to get frame captures and higher color scans.

The name Video Toaster was the end result of humorous false rumors spread by NewTek. They leaked that they were working on a "laser toaster" to toast graphics onto white bread for hotels and resturaunts. Then they said that they had expanded their project to include a "JellyJet printer" that could spray mint, rasberry and blueberry jelly onto the bread for color output. The next month they announced that they had expanded it to the Amiga's 4096 color "Hold and Modify" mode for "HAM on Toast". This went on until the actual product was announced. At which point it became vaporware for a very long period of time.

The Toaster was broadcast quality by the only standard that mattered - would a broadcaster broadcast it? They did. The video output was comparable to the quality of a 1" C-format machine, and the CG letters were comparable to Dubner or Chyron systems of the time. What people fed into the Toaster was another matter. VHS in is going to look like VHS coming out. But I put the Toaster directly on air several times, and the engineers looked closely at it's bars on their waveform monitors and vectorscopes and were happy.

I have doubts how worthwhile this code is going to be for anyone. The Video Toaster development team had a reputation for bizzare hacks, making the Amiga chipset do things that they were never meant to do. Woz would have been proud of their kind of hackery. But I doubt if any of it is going to be transferrable to any other platform - maybe the CG code.

Cinelerra

[DrunkenPenguin]

It is interesting piece of software, but if you want a true professional video editing software for your Linux box, I suggest you use Cinelerra. It's an amazing software - equivalent to something that would probably cost hundreds of thousand dollars - and yes, it is open source.

Find some more information here .

Re:Cinelerra

[rduke15]

if you want a true professional

The link you give clearly shows this is NOT professional editing software. Or if it is, the feature set definitely doesn't give that impression. Not a single word about time code, EDLs (edit decision lists), imports/exports from/to ProTools, DAT tapes, ... I'll stop here since the list is endless.

But a lot of advertizing for completely irrelevant (to not say silly useless) stuff like importing MP3 or Ogg/Vorbis. (These audio compression formats are great, but what on earth does it have to do with professional editing?).

I certainly would like to see professional editing software on Linux, but still haven't seen the slightest hint to it.

Re:Cinelerra

[DrunkenPenguin]

The link you give clearly shows this is NOT professional editing software.

What's wrong with the link? I think you should actually try it and then review it rather than judging it by looking at some webpage.

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who's downloaded and attempted to use Cinelerra knows that it is far from professional, and hardly ready for even hobbyist use. It lacks a lot of features, the UI stinks, and there's almost zero documentation.

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

Why post as anonymous coward? Because you're way out of line. There's a lot of tutorials out there.

Here's O'reilly story about Cinelerra.

There are also some commercial products using Cinelerra such as this.

Re:Cinelerra

[rduke15]

If I told you "look at this, it's a great pizza oven", and you see a toaster, would you get the toaster, bring it home, make a pizza, and try to bake it in the toaster?

(note how I manage to pretend staying on topic).

As for Cinelerra, which may be nice software, the web page has definitely enough information to show that whatever it is, it can't be a professional NLE.

I hope you don't take my remarks personally. They were just meant to be informative. Getting the "tone" right is difficult in a foreign language (especially when trying to be slightly ironic, with Americans who seem so sensitive :-) ).

Re:Cinelerra

[c0d3h4x0r]

Hey, man, not all of us Americans are "so sensitive". I'm a US native, and I'm a callous mean fucker with a dry sarcastic wit and a hatred for political correctness.

So, like, uh, fuck you. Yeah.

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

Why reply as an anonymous coward, to say someone is posting as anonymous coward because they're way out of line?

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that a lot of people use the word "professional" to mean something like, "works the way I was taught how to use this stuff in ".

I'm sure Cinerella is lacking in polish and features, and I'm sure you're a highly skilled professional yourself, but from your list, I don't get the impression that you're not a trained monkey.

Re:Cinelerra

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off dickwad!

Some of the code may still be usable

[Sycraft-fu]

BAsically, what would need to be done is all the parts that deal with hardware would need to be reimplemented in software. Not a huge deal, given the power of today's CPUs. Not sure if it would be worth the effort or not, but it's still something that people can tinker with.

"There's too much confusion"...

[rduke15]

Most people here seem to have it all mixed up.

The Amiga, with Toaster or whatever else has never been an NLE (non-linear video editor). Professional NLEs are Avid (Mac and Windows) and Apple's Final Cut Pro (Mac only, of course). There are a few others for hobbyists.

What the Amiga had, was hardware producing high quality analog video output (PAL or NTSC), and video software to go with it like Toaster, for effects, mixing, switching, etc. and all that at an incredibly low price.

Another thing that adds to the confusion is that the Amiga also had a great 3D package called Lightwave, which enabled it to do 3D rendering for film output. The rendering was slow, but the quality was great. For faster rendering, people could just add more cheap Amigas.

So Lightwave on Amigas certainly has been used for 3D stuff in some big movies. (I have no idea if it was really used in Jurrassic Park. Probably not, because they would have had the budget to afford many SGIs with SoftImage, but it could have been used).

But this 3D stuff has not much to do with Toaster or the Amiga's video output abilities (except for previews). 3D stuff is output in single files of a single frame each (usually TIFF files), and transfered to film negative in a specialized lab, frame by frame (even today, these later printers do not work in real time; I think they print a few frames per second).

And all these movies were definitely not edited on an Amiga. They were edited on film or on an Avid.

Hope that clears up a little bit the confusion between NLE, 3D, video hardware and video effects and mixing software.

Re:"There's too much confusion"...

[kubrick]

Another thing that adds to the confusion is that the Amiga also had a great 3D package called Lightwave, which enabled it to do 3D rendering for film output.

I'm pretty sure that Newtek shipped a Toaster/Lightwave bundle for a number of years, so people may have used the term "Toaster" when referring to the 3D graphics the whole package produced as well.

Regarding Jurassic Park, I think Amigas running Lightwave may have been used for some rendered storyboards, but definitely not for anything you see in the film.

(Going by my memories of old Amiga magazines here...)

Re:"There's too much confusion"...

[POds]

T2 was edited with an Amiga, not sure what kinds though! I think an A4000? Maybe VideoToaster?

Re:"There's too much confusion"...

[xtronics]

Toaster plus Flyer = NLE

I think people should discount anything else in the post by rduke as he does not know anything about the toaster.

I worked on this project (in 1995) testing hard drives to see if they were fast enough.

The reason it was so popular was that the compression used did not introduce artifacts from editing. It is because the compression does not use the previous frame data as some of the others do.

Re:"There's too much confusion"...

[tsangc]

The Amiga, with Toaster or whatever else has never been an NLE (non-linear video editor). Professional NLEs are Avid (Mac and Windows) and Apple's Final Cut Pro (Mac only, of course). There are a few others for hobbyists.

You're completely wrong. The Amiga had several NLE systems designed for it, including the Flyer Toaster (an addon board for the VideoToaster), the MacroSystems VLAB Motion, and the Applied Magic Digital Broadcaster.

In addition, two entire NLE turnkey systems, the MacroSystems Draco and MacroSystems Casablanca were based on the Amiga hardware and OS. The latter sold pretty heavily into educational institutions because it was simple to use and almost VCR like in operation.

As for whether or not you consider them professional, the majority of Amiga NLE users were lower end--they used them for everything from corporate training videos to local broadcast market productions. A lot of small firms used the Amiga as an NLE, and made a good amount of money doing it. Not everyone uses an Avid to cut a wedding video or a training film about machine tools, but there certain were a lot of Amiga shops.

A decade = 13 years?

[Zenmonkeycat]

"About a decade..." and "in 1991" don't match too well. "More than a decade" would me a more appropriate phrase.

Oh, and BTW, SCO Group actually owns this source code, since Amiga starts with an A, just like AIX, which is actually based on programming practices that SCO claims they own. So by using this source code you are completely violating SCO's IP claims, and you could face 15 to 20 years in jail, as well as fines in excess of five million dollars per byte of data produced. Just so ya know...

JavatToaster graphics production

[spydink]

Actually, toaster graphics have been ported to java:



"It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been
motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."
- Charles Peguy 1905

It's dead, Jim!

[turgid]

It has ceased to be. It has run up the curtain and is singing with the choir invisibule. It is a polygone. It is a dead platform.

Please, let it rest in peace.

Where oh Where is Kiki Stockhammer?

[Multics]

Over at The State Hornet from the Califronia State University at Sacramento has a story from March 2003. She's the front woman for a rock band called Warp 11.

One Warp11's web site there are even some videos!

-- Multics

p.s. no she's not 'let herself go' -- mostly the contrary!

Re:Where oh Where is Kiki Stockhammer?

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys (and gal) look like they should be moving out of their parent's basement in oh, at least ten years.

Unbelievable..

Re:Where oh Where is Kiki Stockhammer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great body, horrible face. I'd still do her, those legs and ass look fantastic!

Re:Where oh Where is Kiki Stockhammer?

[x-guru]

p.s. no she's not 'let herself go' -- mostly the contrary!

As evidenced by this pic which comes from here.

Re:Nice code, but...

[neko9]

Lightwave ScreamerNet nodes don't need licences. for example you can have unlimited amount of Linux machines to do your rendering. Linux ScreamerNet rpm comes with 7.5c update.

[OT] I know but, that wasn't a windows plus pack..

[Phil John]

...that was a commercial piece of software called After Dark that contained a buttload of really sucky screensavers, it was the Incredimail of its day, only without the spyware.

Re:Nice code, but...

[deanj]

The company that used to distribute Videoscape was called Aegis.

Yeah, releasing the code for Lightwave and Modeler probably won't happen soon. =)

43 fucks is good enough for linux

[Anonymous Coward]

$ cd /usr/src/kernel/linux-2.4.24
$ grep -ir fuck .
./Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl:&nb sp; If you don't see why, please stay the fuck away from my code.
./Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl : <title>The Fucked Up Sparc</title>
./arch/x86_64/kernel/mtrr.c:/*&nbsp ; Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
./arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
./arch/sparc/kernel/process.c: /* fuck me plenty */
./arch/sparc/kernel/head.S: /* XXX Fucking Cypress... */
./arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
./arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c: /* Binary compatibility is good American knowhow fuckin' up. */
./arch/mips/sgi-ip22/ip22-setup.c: * fucking with the memory controller because it needs to know the
./arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0 /* XXX No fucking way dude... */
./arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
./arch/ppc/kernel/ppc405_pci.c: * the kernel try to remap our BAR #1 and fuck up bus
./arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c: /* Why the fuck did they have to change this? */
./arch/sparc64/kernel/process.c: /* fuck me plenty */
./arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c: /* Fuck me plenty... */
./arch/sparc64/mm/init.c: /* Fucking losing PROM has more mappings in the TLB, but
./arch/parisc/kernel/signal.c: /* ARGH! Fucking brain damage. You don't want to know. */
./drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
./drivers/net/sunhme.c: /* This card is _fucking_ hot... */
./drivers/net/b44.c: /* ??? What the fuck is the purpose of the interrupt mask
./drivers/net/macsonic.c: fuck did SONIC_BUS_SCALE come from, and what was it supposed
./drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:extern int DRM(release_fuck)(struct inode *inode, struct file *filp);
./drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */
./drivers/scsi/esp.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
./drivers/scsi/esp.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
./drivers/scsi/esp.c: /* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
./drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
./drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: /* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
./drivers/sound/aci.c:/* The four ACI command types are fucked up. [-:
./drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c: blkdev_dequeue_request(req); /* task can fuck it up GTL */
./drivers/ide/pci/cmd640.c: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
./fs/binfmt_aout.c: /* Fuck me plenty... */
./fs/jffs/intrep.c: don't fuck up. This is why we have
./include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h: /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
./include/linux/netfilter_ipv6/ip6t_limit.h:&n bsp; /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
./include/asm-m68k/sun3ints.h:/* master list of VME vectors -- don't fuck with this */
./include/asm-sparc64/system.h: /* If you fuck with this, update ret_from_syscall code too. */ \
./include/asm-parisc/spinlock.h: * writers) in interrupt handlers someone fucked up and we'd dead-lock
./lib/vsprintf.c: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up :-)
./net/core/netfilter.c: /* James M doesn't say fuck enough. */
./net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_snmp_basic.c: * (And this is the fucking 'basic' method).
./net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_limit.c: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
./net/ipv6/netfilter/ip6t_limit.c: * Alexey is a fucking genius?

Re:43 fucks is good enough for linux

[Pharmboy]

that is actually worth a mod point for Informative :D

Re:43 fucks is good enough for linux

[polyp2000]

LOL there are also numerous instances of crap bollocks and shit in the kernel files

Amiga, which in some dialects...

[Gordonjcp]

means girlfriend, and in other dialects has connotations of prostitutes.

Re:Nice code, but...

[neko9]

ehem... actually Layout and Modeler :-)

Awesome!

[b00fhead]

The first Amiga post of the year, and it's only February!

Someone mentioned previously that the Amiga's custom chips provided the timing. Since UAE emulates the custom chips, is it possible to use this under UAE?

Re:Awesome!

[bpjammer]

Yes! Sometime back there was a product for the Amiga that made Lightwave free from the Toasters Frame Buffer (Giant Dongle) so you could use the software without owning the Toaster card. I found a copy of this software on a game site and put it on a WinUAE harddisk image along with a copy of my real Amiga installation of the Toaster software. Lightwave and Modeler work fine and at times seem even a little faster than on my Amiga. The other modules (Paint and CG) won't run since they still need the Toaster card.

You're too much confused, and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, you're wrong. Bzzt.

Go RTFA and see that they've released the code for the Flyer, which absolutely was an NLE.

Mod this down, please.

Re:You're too much confused, and wrong.

[rduke15]

It is true that they added Flyer as an NLE, but I never heard of anybody actually using that professionally. For editing, everybody used Avid at the time (and mostly still does).

Re:You're too much confused, and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

but I never heard of anybody actually using that professionally.

Are you really that stupid? Do you really believe that if you haven't heard something then it just can't be? What a moron.

Re:You're too much confused, and wrong.

[FosterKanig]

Wow, you are not even close to knowing what you are talking about.

Re:You're too much confused, and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Flyer was expensive, compated to the Toaster.

Re:You're too much confused, and wrong.

[melorama]

It is true that they added Flyer as an NLE, but I never heard of anybody actually using that professionally. For editing, everybody used Avid at the time (and mostly still does).

Not to be a bandwagon jumper, but as the other A/C's here have already said, you are utterly ignorant.

The Toaster Flyer was used by hundreds of corporate and industrial videographers, as well as countless event videographers (weddings, etc). It actually boasted one of the best compression codecs that existed at the time (the Wavelet based VTASC codec), that was at least as good as Avid's highest quality AVR levels.

The Flyer was also used as the non-linear system of choice at the '96 Olympics in Atlanta, for on-site news packages and the like. In fact, there were numerous Avid systems available on site, but the Flyer reportedly became the favorite system after word got around as to how easy it was to use, how fast it worked (i.e. no rendering, unlike the Avid Media Composers) and the quality of the output.

It was also used on the Tonight Show (soon after Jay Leno took over the show) very extensively for realtime graphics, roll-ins and effects.

Re:Can it be reused ? (no!)

[FattMattP]

As far as I remember, the Toaster was not an editing program. It was used for titles and effects.

Right but the source for the Flyer, which is the editor component, is also available.

It's all in the bit depth...

[Gordonjcp]

Don't forget that 24-bit colour is woefully inadequate for film work. Cine film has got so much more dynamic range than video, so when you drop to video you lose all the detail in dark and light areas. That's why FilmGimp has 48-bit colour processes - you can choose to display a range from that on your monitor, with either the blacks flattened or the whites flattened. You just can't have both.

That's mainly the reason for running big render jobs on big iron - there is literally twice as much data to shift, four times the precision needed in calculations (at least), and don't forget you need extremely specialised processes to get the digital output onto film.

Re:It's all in the bit depth...

[kasperd]

Don't forget that 24-bit colour is woefully inadequate for film work. Cine film has got so much more dynamic range than video

This has often got me thinking that maybe it would make more sense to use a logarithmic scale rather than a linear scale for digital sound and pictures.

Re:It's all in the bit depth...

[LSD-25]

I don't know about a logarithmic scale, but high dynamic range images, like those stored in the OpenEXR format, often use 16- or 32-bit floating point.

Re:It's all in the bit depth...

[Nicolas MONNET]

Floating point is logarithmic scale.

Re:It's all in the bit depth...

[Gordonjcp]

Still doesn't work. If you use a logarithmic scale you don't get the fine gradations in colour at the "high" end.

Re:It's all in the bit depth...

[scottgfx]

You have probably seen many film composites done in 8bit per channel, and never were the wiser. If you're trying to extract a green screen, then yes, Cineon will probably allow you to extract a cleaner matte. Quantel swore by 8 bit for many years and their hardware did (does) the best video compositing. It's all in how you treat those bits. FilmGimp in 48 bits? Yawn. Try better algorithms before throwing more bits at a problem. i.e. look at what quantel does in 24.

Most modern software has keying

[StandardCell]

Avid Xpress, Apple FCP, Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, and most other modern NLE software have keying as a standard feature. The four-input switcher I'll have to concede, but in the context of emulating the hardware, there are alternatives if you're not too concerned about online capabilities. Frankly, if you want online you shouldn't really be using a stock PC anyway. Then again, I don't think that the online capabilities of the original Toaster, given its rendering speed for certain operations, was really a factor.

Re:Nice code, but...

[GregWebb]

Rendering moved off Amigas when Netter Digital took over from Foundation Imaging. Series 3 IIRC.

Re:There's a new os (OS4) and new Amiga One machin

[kubrick]

This is not flamebait... it's God's honest truth.

not quite

[Doktor Memory]

Back in the early days of B5, a couple of the Foundation Imaging guys were active on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 (along with JMS), and this question came up a lot.

My (admittedly sketchy) memory of the answer is that the FX shots for the original 2-hour pilot episode of B5 were composed and rendered with ScreamerNet/Amiga, but that by the time the actual series got picked up and put into production (over a year later), they'd pretty much migrated entirely to LightWave NT, and were doing their rendering on Intel hardware.

I can't speak for Sliders and DSV (and, frankly, don't care), but Voyager was certainly not rendered on Amigas: Foundation was entirely an NT (and SGI?) shop by that point.

Re:not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

WinNT yes - but at that time the render farms were probably Alpha CPUs, not Intel.

Re:not quite

[Doktor Memory]

AC writes: WinNT yes - but at that time the render farms were probably Alpha CPUs, not Intel.

D'oh. You are, of course, correct -- ISTR one of the Foundation guys bragging about their new 8-way AlphaServer at the time.

Re:not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC correctly they were using Alpha CPU's , not Intels

just a minor point..and one that people will ignore as i am posting this as an A/C

Flyer?

[Doktor Memory]

The Amiga, with Toaster or whatever else has never been an NLE

Wasn't there supposed to be an add-on product for the Toaster called "Flyer" that was a real NLE system?

I'd basically stopped paying attention to the Amiga market by that point, so if it never shipped I wouldn't have noticed.

Re:It's only a pile electronics, not a girlfriend

[jpop32]

So they decided to call it 'Amiga', which is of course Spanish for 'girlfriend'.

Dude, that's not the proper way to tell folklore.

You forgot to add: And besides, it was alphabetically ahead of Apple.

BTW: damn, I wish I could afford to blow 500 euros on that mobo... :-)

Switcher

[ryanw]

My only experiance with video editing is with finalcutpro on osx. Is there anything like VideoToaster out there currently in the market for realtime video broadcasts? I know apple does their keynotes with several cameras, live, etc. Do they use Avid for this? Any ideas?

Re:Switcher

[Anonymous Coward]

How about QuickTime Streaming Server and (the free) Darwin Streaming Server:
- http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/
- http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streami ng/

Re:Switcher

[ryanw]

Quicktime Streaming Server / Darwin Streaming Server don't offer switching between several different cameras... they just stream the current DV input....

Re:Switcher

[bpjammer]

There is indeed something like like NewTeks Video Toaster. It is NewTeks VideoToaster3 that runs on high budget PCs. Check them out at
http://www.newtek.com/products/vt/index.php

Tarball?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anyone going to adapt this for GNU/Linux environments( make a tarball )?

Licensing?

[polyp2000]

I downloaded the first one, CG.zip ... I could find no licensing information. What are the licensing conditions with this code? and is it compatible with GPL for example ?

Toaster Source Not Released for Dying *BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The Toaster source will not be ported *BSD, according to project members. See below for their reasons.

Yet another awful blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by an independent commission doing a year-long study concludes: *BSD is dead and mummified. Here are some of the commission's findings:

Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.

Fact: Apple is quietly changing the base kernel for OS X from *BSD to Linux. Insiders report that Apple's technical leadership has grown tired of the licensing battles and is seeking a more modern license; they find Linux's license more appealing. Many Apple technology experts -- from OS developers all the way up to Steve Jobs -- find Linux to be a more advanced OS, which will enable Apple to release a more mature product. The frequent hallway arguments and fistfights among the *BSD developers Apple has hired has also contributed to the decision.

Fact: XFree86 is dropping support for *BSD. The remaining core group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."

Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)

Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."

Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."

Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled .005% of internet servers. "It's just not reliable," said Christine McGee, VP of Technology for eBay, Inc. "Nor do we find it a very modern OS. I would recommend Linux to anyone contemplating a server OS, or maybe Windows, before I would recommend a BSD."

Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.

With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is dead and mummified.

The blame for creating Bab5 and Jurassic Park!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Video Toaster ... was used in products such as Babylon 5 and Jurassic Park."

Ah-ha! Now that we know who is to blame, let's load the source, coders, actors, and producers onto the B ark and aim it straight into the heart of the freaking sun!

I kid, of course. To paraphrase Einstein: there is no evil in the Video Toaster, only in the hearts of men.

She's still out there

[Here's Kiki]

http://www.warp11.com

timing required

[gumbi west]

S-VHS is 640 by 480 at a frame rate of 30 frames per second (well, half the lines at 60 frames a second, but same total pixels). Thera are also three colors. That makes for 36 ns per pixel-color. Since there is no I'm starting a pixel signal, the clock needs to be accurate to much less than this. Granparent poster said 1% makes it worthless... 0.1% of 36 ns. but thats just a guess.

A more important question...

[porkchop_d_clown]

Can it be ported without the dedicated Toaster hardware? If large parts of it are written specifically for the Toaster itself, the source might not be all that useful.

Way to paste in the story.

[Inoshiro]

Source of the comment from here, probably cribbed from this comment.

I don't know why you'd do that, especially when you break all formatting and make it impossible to read. Paragraph breaks are your friend.

Comparable tool

[Anonymous Coward]

The only one that comes to mind that is close to the Toaster(without the Flyer) is GlobalStreams' GlobeCaster(without the Time Machine) and even that is a bit of a stretch due to the GlobeCaster's capability of doing deck control.

The only product that was indentical to the Toaster was Pinnacle's Genie but I don't believe that is sold as a separate product these days.

The previously mentioned GlobeCaster is simply a rebranded Trinity which was the creation of Play, Inc. Play was founded by the people who left Newtek over disagreements with how Tim Jenison was leading the company. Most of you will probably remember Play as being the company that released Snappy.

Re:Nice code, but...

[jrnchimera]

It would be nice though to have the code released..

What might've been....

[borschski]

I worked for NewTek during the Toaster heyday. Tim & Paul tried to negotiate with Irving Gould (of Commodore fame) in his Bahamaian Commodore headquarters (can you say 'evade taxes'?) in an attempt to get him to license the Amiga chip-sets.

With 'em we could've made a Mac & PC Video Toaster!

But alas, old Irving knew that his shell game of moving Amiga's around the world would cease (currency trading is very profitable if done right) and the Toaster was the only thing that was keeping the Amiga going.

Being at the Christmas parties with "Lurch", Wil Wheaton, James Doohan (Scotty), Kiki and the other "Cool Friends of NewTek" made me even more aware of my un-coolness. But the buzz was really there and it really, really felt like the early Apple days (I rep'ed them too in 1980).

Imagine had Commodore done it....what might've been.

Re:What might've been....

[BenFaremo]

Weird, because it seemed like the guys at Macrosystem in Germany accomplished something similar to what Tim attempted. They picked up the rights to build a non-linear editing system around AmigaDOS, using their own mainboard (no AGA chips, though). It was eventually sold in the US as the Casablanca.Still is, although it no longer runs AmigaDOS or uses the topaz font.To be fair, I think this was post-C=-bankrupcy, so maybe Irv was out of the picture.

LONG LIVE AMIGA!

[Anonymous Coward]

LONG LIVE AMIGA!

Re:Nice code, but...

[ewhac]

This was back in the day when I was trying like mad to get Pixar to port Photorealistic Renderman to the Amiga, even getting them to go to a couple of Amiga-worlds...but I guess they saw the writing on the wall.

They also saw the unicycle on the monitor, and that was my fault. I don't think they ever thought well of the Amiga or its people after that.

*sigh*,
Schwab

Aspect clarification

[Namarrgon]

VGA has 1:1 pixel aspect, 4:3 frame aspect.

NTSC has 0.9:1 pixel aspect, 4:3 frame aspect.

</slashdotpickyness>

Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[borgheron]

I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but this code is next to useless which is probably why it was released.

I mean this is a program which was big news over a decade ago. Much of the program is in assembler since the Amiga's of the time were 7MHz or maybe 14MHz or 25Mhz, if you were lucky.

Also, the program talks to the hardware of the toaster itself via the Zorro bus, which was a *predecessor* of ISA.

A nice gesture, perhaps a bit nostalgic for those of us, including myself, who once owned Amigas, but, for the most part, totally useless.

GJC

Re:Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[the_arrow]

Also, the program talks to the hardware of the toaster itself via the Zorro bus, which was a *predecessor* of ISA.

The Zorro bus may be older than the ISA bus, but it still had features that didn't come until PCI. Like working autoconfiguration, a.k.a. plug-and-play. And, if I remember correctly, it was a 32-bit bus.

Re:Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, the program talks to the hardware of the toaster itself via the Zorro bus, which was a *predecessor* of ISA."

Wrong.... the Toaster fit into the Amiga's "video slot", which was essentially a duplication of the external 23--pin video port, plus the *parallel port*. No Zorro bus. I bet that some of the hackery in that code involves sending high-speed data to the Toaster via hijacked video signals. But other than that, control signals were done via the parallel port, so it was worse than Zorro.

Re:Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[Anonymous Coward]

True, The zorro DID preceed the ISA. BUT it was 32 bit and had what essentially amounted to plug and play, with full DMA. We are talking about c.1991 here...how long did it take the PC to get 32bit DMA expantion slots?

Also, everyone here keeps saying that the Toaster was for the Zorro slot, which is also incorrect. The Toaster fit in the Amigas Video slot, which was a Zorro slot with several more pins for stuff like Genlock and video pass-though.

Re:Why this gesture by NewTek is useless....

[Single GNU Theory]

I'm thinking Zorro II at least was designed with ISA in mind. That allowed hardware like the 2086 and 2286 Bridgeboards (a PC on a card to fit inside your A2000 and later) to have access to an ISA bus on one end and the Zorro bus on the other. Zorro II was a 16-bit bus. Zorro III was, IIRC, a 32-bit version of Zorro II which squeezed 32 bits onto a 16-bit bus with a sort of double data rate scheme.

Dave Haynie's posted on Slashdot before. I'm pretty sure *he* could explain it better. :-)

HEY MODS!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't flamebait!! 1000+++ CUSTOMERS HAVE FALLEN FOR A PREORDER SCAM and are STILL WAITING for their MONEY! DO SOME RESEARCH before you mod down, it's the DAMN TRUTH!

Moderators, please read.

[Anonymous Coward]

The above post was definately not flamebait, but the sad state of affairs from a company that succeeded in using a preorder scam to get money from it's customers when it couldn't recieve investment money any more. Thousands of people have lost money because they trusted them. Please read this and correct the unfair moderation http://www.amiga.org/modules/sections/index.php?op =printpage&artid=14

Would a moderator please mod this up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who's been following the news knows it's true. If you don't believe me do a websearch, and you'll find Amiga vacated their offices, and was sued by 4 employees for millions in unpaid wages. On top of this, they sold "rebate" coupons for nonexistant products, and took the money and ran. They are now still in court, being sued by one of their parners for not honoring a contract.

unfair moderation!

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously just don't know. well *I* know, as they screwed me!

Re:There's a new os (OS4) and new Amiga One machin

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Amiga are 2.2 million in the hole, and they've already spent the money people bought the OS with, so I don't think it will help. http://www.amiga.org/modules/sections/index.php?op =printpage&artid=14

Re:Nice code, but...

[scottgfx]

When B5 first started, I remember seeing pictures of the render farm of Amiga 2000s with `040 cards and toasters in them. Something like 50 or 80 Amigas sitting on shelves. I think back then, Screamernet wasn't yet built. Soon after B5 started, someone (Aspen Computers?) started building outboard rendering engines... The name Raptor comes to mind.

I was still running Lightwave on a Toaster up until 1996.

Re:Discreet Toaster

[bluethundr]

was totally linear video (meaning you had to have a source deck and a record deck) it couldn't even capture video clips.

You are correct, but only partially. Yes, the Video Toaster was for linear video editing only. That is until you added the Video Toaster Flyer to your Amiga rig, which would allow you to do non-linear video editing and capture video on up to 21 SCSI disks.

It's NOT Dead

[Lehk228]

After reading many of the comments it seems that people are under the impression that VT and lightwave are dead products and of "historical" value, they aren't dead at all, still sold check out NewTeks' web site
They still kick ass and i still want one (damned lottery not picking the right numbers)

Re:Flyer!

[BenFaremo]

It did ship. I sold a few dozen, back in the mid-90's. It usually captured video onto a pair of 9gb Seagate Elite scsi drives. That would be 5.25" full height technology there.The Flyer worked, I know guys still using it. A little pricy, but way cheaper than an Avid.

My favorite transition...

[VValdo]

I don't know which video effect you're referring to, but my favorite was the silhoutte of the girl who looks over and pulls down the "shade"/B stream.

Then there was the cheerleader doing the cartwheel.

Good times, good times.

Re:Nice code, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh well, that was a long time ago. But it's cool that they released the source for the Toaster. Now if they would release the source for Lightwave that would REALLY be cool. lol "

Oh no it wouldn't, unless you like looking at software that's bypassed like a Christmas tree...

Does post need an SCO group???

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now... Does every single Slashdot post require a mandatory SCO joke? It's sort of like a guy who tries to tell knock-knock jokes at a party *for 8 hours* straight.

The first time it was *sort of* funny. The 2,000th time it was painful. Now it's just an infected abcess that needs serious treatment.

If I had a dollar for every time someone here made a "blah starts with blah so SCO blah, blah, blah," I'd be sitting on my own tropical island right now being served booze on ice by a lovely native girl or two.

The Pre-iMovie Video Solution

[PowerBooker]

Man, I remember working on a Video Toaster editing station at Sul Ross University back in '94. It seemed to take at least 5 times to get the output you wanted out of it than it should have.

I'm sure there are people really adept at Toaster, but it just seems like most of the sh*t you can now do on iMovie in just a fraction of the time.

If I'm wrong, please give me some insight...

the magnificent Flyer...

[nahual]

After you had a toaster, the natural step was to get a Flyer, is was a capturing card for NLE video.

Basically the flyer could reproduce two videos at the same time, from two hard drives, and a third hard drive was used for sound, it used the toaster as a switcher, so it did not need to render de effects, they were ral time, so it was very fast, even for today standards.

I made a living, editing on the flyer, from corporate videos, to TV comercials, we never get a complain about the quality.

I miss the interface a lot, i could edit faster on a flyer, than on a modern Avid system.

specially, i loved the arexx scripts to automate editing chores.

For example, with one script, i just put the music track, and the script would automatically put fade in, put volumen down and up, and fade out to the music. It was just a mateer of minutes to put music to a video. Today i hve to adjust each level by hand.

Another of my favorite scripts was to put video efect autmatically on my finished video. I would make a cut only edition, and then just put a soft cut in all my editions, in less thana aminute i could adjust all my efect, or chagen them glbally.

Finally, my favorite trick was used to make music videos.

First i load in the project all the video secuences i would like to use, then i load the music. Then i play the music and began to tap de rithm on the keyboard. Each tap would put a videsecuence in place. After that, a little cleaning, and voila, an instant music video. It aws wonderful and fun...

I miss all that power...

Unfortunatelly, the video signal was composite video. Today we are used to D2 quality. Altough still there are people who can,t see the diferences :)

By the way... Spielberg was a toater Fan, he used the toaster (lightwave) for storyboarding, int one of the books aopbut how jurasic park was made, we see Spielberb playing wit an open toaster...

After that photo, my chief never complained again that our toaster had almost always open... (screws are for cowards...) 8)

Re:It's (almost) dead, Jim!

[nahual]

sorry i could not resist...

I still have a toaster (on amiga 2000) and a flyer, and still use them.

Not for video editing, but for live production in corporate events.

I just paint them with a neat black paint and they look cool :)

Not bad. Probably you will see new postings until the last of those legendady machines still works..

Meeting the greats, remembering the past...

[Chordonblue]

I worked for a dealer in PA and flew to Minneapolis, MN (home of MST3K no less), for a week-long Newtek training session. Kiki and Jim, and other Amiga luminaries were there and even taught some of the courses.

It was an amazing time. The Toaster was in use by almost every local station, school, and videographer here. When the A4000 and the Flyer came out, things were just starting to crest when...

***BOOM***

Commodore imploded. I was there for the funeral of that company (the auction in West Chester), and let me tell you - it was a sad, sad day. A lot of companies like Scala, Newtek, and others were suddenly cast adrift. Newtek's situation was particularly bad. What could Newtek do without the Amiga? How could it continue to support the product it had out there? It was the Amiga's architecture that enabled the toaster's abilities.

Fortunately for Newtek, they were able to keep it together with Lightwave - a 3D package which had really matured far beyond the original VT's intent. Newtek was also able to get a hold of spare parts and used units and kept things surprisingly afloat for quite a while.

But other companies weren't as fortunate. A few years later, the dealership I worked at closed down. The niche market they relied on simply disappeared.

It's hard to explain to non-Amiga people why Amigans continually hope to bring it all back. The Amiga truly represented a revolution in computing. That level of innovation didn't occur on the PC until the word 'multimedia' suddenly made it ok for businesspeople to have great graphics and stereo sound.

The Amiga provided the world's first affordable desktop video production. There was NO competition - NONE. It was an absolute crime that Commodore never took full advantage of their position. Instead, they played around with primitive PC designs that cost them millions in losses and made other huge, obvious mistakes.

This is why Amigans worldwide are still not able to accept the demise of their favorite machine / OS.

One good thing may happen with this code release. It would be interesting to see if the user interface could be salvaged. The VT sold a lot of videographers on the simplicity of it's use. It didn't look like it was cobbled together by computer geeks. It truly resembled a dedicated video production product.

BTW, I still have my Video Toaster training certification. :)

Re:Meeting the greats, remembering the past...

[plover]

I don't believe that Commodore died for lack of trying to drive sales. I think they died because the Amiga was a niche product, that they always knew it was a niche product, and they desparately needed to come up with a new product to fill a mainstream need. In their minds, that meant some product that was PC based.

I was present at the Minneapolis release of the Toaster (I still remember the invitation came with an actual piece of toast in a box, which knocked around our lab for a few years afterwards.) Jim, Kiki et al were there. We were introduced to a Commodore VP of sales (or marketing.) He had heard about our application and that we had purchased 60 Amigas for use throughout our company. He wanted us to split from our company and take our product to the road.

I distinctly remember that within three seconds of our saying "we can't at this time because we're in the middle of a lawsuit over it" that we were given the cold shoulder; he was gone and off to fish for other potentials. They were actively looking for partners who were going drive sales, and if it wasn't you then they had absolutely zero time to waste in finding someone else.

I got the impression Commodore WAS pushing the Amiga as hard as they could, within the limited resources they had. They had a great product. I loved my A500 and I still get it out once a year or so for a nostalgic game of DungeonMaster. But, for all it did it was still a niche product and it always was. My apologies to the Amiga fanboys who never saw it that way, (most of them still don't,) but that's the simple fact. If it was more than a niche product, the proof would have been in the continued existance of Commodore Amiga.

BTW we never did get a toaster. :-( Our application was simple enough (and not so visually demanding) that we were able to use a $99 "ProGen" genlock.

Re:Meeting the greats, remembering the past...

[Chordonblue]

Well, that was half the story. The other half was legacy vs. future direction. For instance, there was nothing wrong with having a niche market - SGI and SUN had one for years. The problem was, C= was reaching (and the execs were undoubtedly expecting) for profits earned like the old days of the C64, and that wasn't ever going to happen again - for ANYONE.

At the time of C='s demise, they still leased that insanely HUGE building in West Chester at over $800,000 / MONTH. Most of it was unused due to having all of the manufacturing shipped to the Phillipenes.

Then you had the CEO earning 11 Million Dollars in 1992 - for no other reason then he could get it. His salary that year even beat IBM's CEO! To be fair, he 'lent' C= back a few million as a loan but it was clear that the company had bigger problems than simple marketing issues.

It's all water under the bridge now, but many of us dealers knew the score for YEARS. There were just a couple simple things that might have turned them around:

1) Put a COLOR composite out on the A500. Why Black and White? They saved .25 on a part. What a bonehead move. Companies like Scala could have sold 10 times as many A500's like that. The A600/A1200 fixed it, but it was too late.

2) Help support Newtek. Yeah, they did this in the end - but again, when it was WAY too late. People forget that C= feared Newtek in the beginning. Together, these guys could have been unstoppable in that market (and not a small one either).

3) Better product release timing. The next gen A1200 was a brilliant machine, but released too late as to avoid cannibalizing their A500 sales. But none of our customers wanted the A500 later on - all of them wanted the Next Big Thing. Announcements about future products killed Kaypro. C= should've known better.

4) They needed to stop building PCs and/or competing with IBM. They were still stuck in the home computing mode, even though it was clear for many years before the fall what was selling and what wasn't. HINT: 14 MHz 68020 A1200's sold like crazy, C= branded PC's grew dust.

For years C= refused to be boxed into any market, but as you observed, they eventually cozied up to anyone that could sell a box or two. It damaged their reputation and didn't help dealers much.

It was apparent to many of us in the know that C= was simply clueless about what made their product great and how to capitalize on it. I remember getting some demo discs from a sales rep once and all of them were virus-laden! This was the same rep who expounded on all the great business software the Amiga had. What a joke!

Star Trek V

[atcurtis]

I think that the CG in Star Trek V was done on Amigas with VideoToasters and LightWave... Check out the floating Klingon Blood shots.

I recall reading it in a magazine years ago...

White end bit-depth needs to mirror black-end?

[Dogtanian]

Still doesn't work. If you use a logarithmic scale you don't get the fine gradations in colour at the "high" end.

Yeah, I'm attempting some animation stuff, and it occurred to me that you really want an 'S'-shaped curve (well, not S-shaped, but steep at the low and high end, and flatter in the middle).

Consider it this way; you need more levels allocated to the high-end for the same reason you need more levels allocated to the low-end; the high-end starts with pure white, 0% subtracted; then, going down the linear scale, you'd have white - (minus) 2%, white-4%, white-6%.... white-48%.... and the perceived difference between white-2% and white-4% is greater than that between white-48% and white-50%. In other words, the white-end is the subtractive equivalent to the black-end; a mirror image, but with the same needs.

Amiga is friend, not girlfriend

[Dogtanian]

means girlfriend, and in other dialects has connotations of prostitutes

You sound like you know something about this, and my Spanish is extremely limited. However:-

My understanding is that 'amiga' translates as (*platonic*) 'friend'. More specifically, it is the female version of 'amigo'; in English, of course, we have one word for 'friend' that applies to both sexes.

I think the fact that Spanish uses different versions of 'friend' for male and female is what confuses the issue. Also confusing is the English use of boy'friend'/girl'friend' for *romantic* attachments.

My dictionary seems to back this up:-
girlfriend 1.(lover) novia (f) 2. (female friend) amiga (f)

However, please correct this if I'm blatantly wrong, or missed some subtleties.

Re:Amiga is friend, not girlfriend

[Gordonjcp]

I always understood that "amiga" meant girl friend (as in platonic) because a lot of European languages make strong distinctions between the noun genders. However, it was a friend of mine from Columbia that suggested the other meaning. Maybe it's a locally-specific thing.

Re:Amiga is friend, not girlfriend

[Anonymous Coward]

It means "Female friend", not girlfriend.

Legend has it, they used Amiga because it is alphabetically ahead of Apple and Atari.

Re:Video Toaster: a revolution in video (Atari

[vortexau]

> Back in those days, i read in the magazines that it was apple who was the other party, not ibm.
Care to cite such?
Here's my source:
page scan
.

Strangely enough...

[Gordonjcp]

Film has a more-or-less S-shaped transfer curve. If you want a nice black-and-white film effect in Photoshop or Gimp, or whatever you use, desaturate (but that doesn't look right, does it?) then use the curves thingy to bend the top and bottom 15% or so out a bit flatter. You get a slightly more contrasty image (steep slope in the middle) with the blacks and whites flattened a little. It looks like a slightly pushed black-and-white print.

Re:Strangely enough...

[Dogtanian]

Film has a more-or-less S-shaped transfer curve.

I'm not an expert in this area. However, what I was considering was not altering the white-level response per se, merely allocating the levels 'closer-together' at the top and bottom ends, giving more 'resolution', but beyond that, not altering the levels, gamma, whatever.

Something akin to having an image and (say) having greater (spatial) resolution towards the centre, but not actually stretching or distorting the image.

Give it to me

[dillon_rinker]

Yup. From your tone, I suspect this bothers you. If you are a US citizen, I suggest you avoid reading the Constitution, since it enshrines the notion that inventors MUST eventually give their inventions to everyone.

Re:Give it to me

[BiggerIsBetter]

Well that depends on your definition of an invention. If you see code as literature, and for copyright to apply then you must, there's no such stipulation.

Re:Give it to me

[mlyle]

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

US Constitution, Article I, Section 8.

Get a clue. :)

Mexican Television and the Toaster

[eudaemon]

I worked for an Amiga dealer in Houston, Texas before and after the Toaster was released.

Not only was the Toaster broadcast quality (as K8Fan said by the only standard that
mattered: was it broadcast?) but so were several other products using the same stick.

In fact, our largest customers for Amiga video editing setups were Mexican television stations.

Every weekend at least one maybe two Hispanic gentlemen would roll in with a large wad of cash
and buy a complete setup of some kind or another.

Maybe an A1000 or A500 on the low-end with a cheaper genlocker and a few fonts or a full blown
Toaster setup if they enough money.

FPGA, mc68k and arhitectures

[mr. spike 2]

Well, i don't much see any use of having sources for accessing proprietary hardware on very old (however pretty nice) computer, rather then to make a prot to SEGA MegaDrive, for example, because of arhitectural similarities. Besides general RAM upgrade and such stuff, if would also require getting VideoToaster unit wich seems harder then creating new one.
Because of Intel's architectures alltime weaknesses (dynamic crap - no 0Hz operational ability) Toaster hw can only be used by some other vendor processors.
Using FPGA to interface a Toaster to PCI is harder then to create a new home-brew "toaster".

Flyer Wavelet compression

[Anonymous Coward]

No one has really made much notice of the fact that they are also releasing the code for the "Flyer". The Flyer has a unique wavelet based image compression that might actually be useful to the F/OSS community.

Other nostalgic software...

[mamer-retrogamer]

To hear After Dark described as a "buttload of really sucky screensavers", makes me cringe when I think of the original (Mac only, black & white) Berkeley Systems After Dark and how PC users drooled when they seen the full-screen, full-motion animation of Flying Toasters being used simply as a screensaver (and not some kind of technology demo).

I agree that After Dark went down the tubes after it was ported to Windows. The novelty of it all started to wear off and hundreds (thousands?) of new and uninteresting After Dark modules were written to try to keep people interested in the product.

The death knoll for After Dark for Windows was when Windows 95 came out with a built-in screensaver engine that was as capable as the one from Berkeley Systems (which tells you the sad state of the Windows 3.1 screensaver engine).

Berkeley Systems stopped developing After Dark sometime in 1999 (IIRC) as they did not update it to work with Windows 2000 (and hence Windows XP).

I haven't used a Mac in quite a while so I am not sure when After Dark stoped working on that platform (Mac OS 9?).

However, it seems a Japanese company bought the rights to the software and has modified the modules to work with Mac OS X's built-in screensaver engine! You can get it for $10 for their website: Inifinisys, Ltd.

Re: IBM and Multimedia

[Trilobyte]

But! we have IBM to thank for the BRILLIANT "LinkWay" multimedia authoring system, running on PS/1 or PS/2 workstations going back to 1992 or so.

I have now pulled my tongue from my cheek.

Back in fourth through sixth grade, we had a computer class with a whole load of PS/1s, and then one or two Amigas which only our professor could use. He would do all image capture and editing on the Amigas, and then we would modify them on the PS/1s. We thought his computer had some kind of powerful black magic, but it was actually an Amiga. Some other kind of magic then.

LinkWay was a lot like throwing an Amiga-like interface with Deluxe Paint IV onto a DOS box.

Re:Modern alternative: VT2, from NewTek

[Trilobyte]

No. The VideoToaster 2/3 (VT/NT) from NewTek is akin to the early Toaster/Flyer, but on a modern PC. The interface can look almost exactly like the original Toaster, and the bundled software provides the same featureset. (It, of course, does a ton more too).

With the SX-8 breakout box, users get live switching between countless composite/s-video input sources. It's an amazing set up, I nearly s**tted my pants every time I got to use one.

It does what Play set out to do for a tenth of the price -- and it actually WORKS!

Six Degrees of Slashdot

[DG]

In a wierd connection betwixt Slashdot and Toaster, I have a NewTek demo tape featuring a clip starring our very own CleverNickName, where he gushes about how the Toaster is, like, going to change the world!

Hey Wil! It's blackmail time! How much to keep me from vidcapping that tape and posting it for the world to see? :)

Even weirder - NewTek's HQ was in Topeka, KS. Every year for the past 7 years or so, I travel from Windsor Ont to Topeka for the SCCA autocross National Championships - meaning that I take my frikin' vaction in WW's old stompin' grounds.

DG

Re:Nice code, but...

[scottgfx]

Found a fan website for the Raptor workstation.

http://z80.org/raptor3/raptor3.html