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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."
...in the report for Video Toaster CG as analyzed by CPD.
The Army reading list
the video toaster was basically written around the Amiga custom chippery, right ?
:-)
:-) Saves us all from having to buy an Octane from Ebay and register with Discreet, although to be honest, I prefer my Flame :-)
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
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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 ?
Ploum.net.
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.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Public Domain? GPL? BSD?
What are we allowed to do with it?
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?!
i don't like style guides
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
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.
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.
The Video Toaster's hardware was designed by Dana Carvey's brother, Brad.
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.
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...
Geez, you microsofty, the correct term is guru meditation. This is an article about the Amiga you know.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Final Cut Pro and Shake.
Though at Sundance this year, an enterprising individual edited and produced a movie for $218.32, using iMovie.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.
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.
What were you expecting?
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
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 .
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.