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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"