Video toaster. An advanced video editing software from the early 90's

before personal video editor even exist video editing itself is really expensive. if you want to edit your home video then you need to purchase an expensive video editing system that costs around $50.000-100.000. I'm pretty sure no one could afford that much. there is two options for you, the first option is that you have to work at a major news station then you can edit your home video by borrowing their video editing system or you can buy those expensive video editing equipment.

none of these options are great. that's why some genius guys invent the video toaster, the very first home video editor. the video toaster is not only cheap but offers you a feature that was really powerful. the video toaster's features are chroma fx, luminance keyer, 4 input switcher, digital video effects, character generator (CG), paint package, and a 3D animation studio. at the time these features are what you need to produce stunning network quality videos. these features alone combined with the video toaster's built-in 3D graphics animation software is what makes the video toaster an attractive choice for making your home movie.

but video toaster itself has a loooong~ history.

How the video toaster was developed

it started out by two guys. Tim and Paul is the guys that were responsible for creating the first home video editor. Tim Jenison was born in 1956, the son of an electrical-mechanical engineer. As a kid, Jenison dabbled in making 8mm home movies. It was a frustrating experience being an aspiring filmmaker at the time. To make any kind of edit required literally cutting and pasting film together. After dropping out of college and teaching himself engineering and programming, he started a small business selling software for the Tandy Color Computer. The very fact that the word “color” was in the name of the computer showed how primitive computer technology was. Yet back then, Tim was already dreaming about editing a video on a computer.

Around the same time in California, a man named Paul Montgomery went into a RadioShack to look for a device to spice up his homemade videos. The sales manager showed him a special effects generator that cost about $450. The conversation went like this:

“This looks great! Can I fade from one image to another?” Montgomery asked.

“No, no way,” the RadioShack associate replied.

“Can it do fades at all?”

“Yeah, you can fade to black.”

“Can it do anything else?”

“Yeah, fade to red or green.”

“What about squeezing the image and flipping it?”

“No, no way. That takes a $100,000 piece of equipment. You’re never gonna find that here.”

Then the amiga arrives

When Jenison read about the capabilities of the Amiga in the August 1985 issue of Byte, he went straight down to the nearest Commodore dealer and bought the first Amiga 1000 that came in. He immediately created a product called DigiView that was a simple video capture device. It would take snapshots of a single frame of video and save it to a floppy disc in the Amiga’s 4096-color HAM mode.

Jenison had saved three demo pictures on a single floppy when he ran into Jeff Bruette, a Commodore employee. Jeff asked if he could make a copy and take it back to Commodore with him. Tim agreed, but he asked that Bruette delete the disk’s READ.ME file, since it contained his home phone number. But within 24 hours, Tim’s phone started ringing. “This thing had spread all across the country,” he said.

Paul Montgomery was one of the first people to call. His friend Brad Carvey (the brother of comedian Dana Carvey) had come over to his house and showed him the images. There was silence in the room as they stared at the pictures; it was a wonderful experience. Computers weren’t supposed to be able to do things like that because the hardware itself is still weak.

Jenison knew he had a winner on his hands with DigiView, so he sold his interest in the Tandy CoCo software company and started a new company to make video products for the Amiga. This was the beginning of NewTek. DigiView eventually sold more than 100,000 units, and it spawned DigiPaint, a paint program that worked with the Amiga’s 4096-color mode. Originally, this HAM mode was supposed to only work with static images because of the sequential algorithms used to store the data. DigiPaint simply worked around that problem to achieve what had formerly been impossible.

Montgomery asked Jenison if the Amiga would be able to serve as the centerpiece for a video effects generator. Jenison liked the idea, but Montgomery kept pushing: “What about squeezing the image and flipping it?” he asked.

“No, that would take a $100,000 piece of equipment” Jenison replied.

“OK, yeah, I knew that,” Montgomery said. “But it would be pretty cool if you could do it.”

The development of Video toaster begin

Montgomery suggested that Jenison meet his friend Brad Carvey, who had been working on projects involving robotic vision. The three of them got together in a pizza restaurant in Topeka and started drawing block diagrams on the placemats.

Brad built the first wire wrap prototype of the board, and Jenison and software engineer Steve Kell helped get it working. In a few days, it was doing the flipping effect, and they were on their way.

The prototype was unveiled at Comdex in November 1987, causing quite a stir. By itself, the Toaster was already an impressive video effects board at an unbeatable price. But Jenison and the NewTek engineers wanted it to be much more. Their dream was for anyone to be able to afford video effects that looked as good as what professional TV network studios produced. Creating a single, affordable, add-on card to replace network studio equipment seemed too hard or in this case impossible.

The toaster unleashed

The Video Toaster was released in December 1990 for an entry-level price of $2,399. It consisted of a large expansion card that plugged into an Amiga 2000 and a set of programs on eight floppy disks. The complete package suite, including the Amiga, could be purchased for less than $5,000.

For that money, an aspiring video editor received a four-input switcher, two 24-bit frame buffers, a chrominance keyer (for doing green/blue screen overlays), and an improved genlock. The software allowed video inputs to switch back and forth using a dazzling array of custom wipes and fades, including the squishing and flipping effect that Montgomery had originally wanted.

Bundled with video toaster was Toaster CG (a character generator to make titles and text), Toaster Paint (a paint software for making static graphic), Chroma F/X (for modifying the color balance of images), and the bomb to finish it off: Lightwave 3D, a full-featured enterprise 3D modeling and animation suite written by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson.

At the time, 3D modeling and animation was the sort of thing people did on an expensive $20,000 SGI workstations computer, using software that cost nearly as much as the hardware it ran on. Video Toaster users could create any digital effect that they could ever imagine.

It's showtime

The launch of the Toaster changed the entire equation of producing video content. it created a massive paradigm shift in the world of video production. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission had long-established rules defining a minimum level of video quality called broadcast-safe that was required to air programming on television. Consumer video cameras didn’t reach this level and couldn’t be used to make content for TV, and there were only a few exceptions for news programs showing short video clips recorded by amateurs. The equipment required to produce a broadcast-safe video was really expensive, running from $100.000-$1.000.000. This meant that unless you were a worker of a major television network, you couldn’t make your own videos and show them to anyone but your friends and family.

The Toaster changed this. For less than five thousand dollars, anyone could create videos that looked as good as the networks. One of the earliest and most enthusiastic Toaster adopters was rock bands that needed to make exciting videos for MTV on a budget. Rocker Todd Rundgren got especially motivated and connected 10 Toasters together to render his revolutionary music video for the song "Change Myself" Effects that we consider “cheesy” today, like star wipes, only became that way because the Toaster made them commonplace. Just as the Macintosh led to a brief period of font abuse in the 1980s, the Toaster made possible times of wild transitions and fades in the 1990s. The concept of “Wayne’s World” was very much a Toaster-based phenomenon.

Major studio steps in

Community cable upstarts, rock bands, and independent electronic news gatherers weren’t the only people in the television community to be affected by the Video Toaster. The inclusion of Lightwave 3D made it possible for a revolution in special effects that has carried on to this day.

For instance, writer and showrunner Joe Michael Straczynski had received the green light to make his dream series, a science-fiction epic called Babylon 5. He hired Ron Thornton, whom he had worked with on Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, to handle the special effects. Thornton convinced Straczynski that this new Video Toaster could be used to make breakthrough visuals at one-third to two-thirds the cost of using traditional models.

Thornton’s team, Foundation Imaging, grew from five to 15 people to meet the demands of creating the special effects for Babylon 5. They networked a series of Amigas together to render the graphics for the pilot episode. Later, Pentium PCs and DEC Alpha workstations were used as a render farm for the Lightwave 3D effects. The move from models to computer graphics images seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time the industry was uncertain that CGI was up to the task. Star Trek, for example, waited until 1997, the sixth season of DS9 and the fourth season of Voyager, to transition over from shooting physical models. When they finally switched, they hired Foundation Imaging to help with the process. Babylon 5 was ultimately nominated for several Emmy awards, and the Video Toaster itself received an Emmy Award for technical achievement in 1993.