Before personal video editing software came along you need to buy a hundred thousand dollars of video editing equipment. that it self is not cheap, no one could ever afford a video editing equipment that was that expensive. fortunately, things are about to change when some genius guys decided to change the rules.
The very first home multimedia PC came along
Tim Jenison was born in 1956, the son of an electrical-mechanical engineer, he has a friend, his friend’s name is Paul. Tim always wanted to create his own home video but there was a problem…. the technology at that time is extremely limited. back in the early ’80s computer can’t do much except displaying 8-bit colors. even the top notch computer the Commodore 64 have its own limits. that will change when a special computer came along in 1985. The computer is called the Commodore amiga, Commodore amiga computer is well known for being so ahead of its time. the reason was because Commodore amiga computer have something that no other computer have and that is the ability to do multimedia. Now for younger gens, multimedia is not something very special but back then, it was a dream. something that everyone have dreamed is to do multimedia with affordable price.
when Commodore amiga computer came along, it blew people’s minds away, the reason is because it is the only multimedia personal computer out there that are capable of doing multimedia. IBM, Apple machintosh, Atari st, and Wintel PC (Windows intel) machines are not capable of doing actual multimedia work and in order for you to do multimedia, you need to purchase an expensive workstation or in this case, a super computer. now when Tim saw Amiga computers and its potential, Tim started to develop applications for the system.
the image above is Tim’s published software. the image quality is crap, i know.
Before he publish his first software, he first have to buy an amiga. he went to the nearest Commodore dealer to buy himself an amiga computer. the Amiga computer model that he bought was the Amiga 1000. after toying with the A1000 (Amiga 1000 for short), Tim started to write his software but before he do that he founded his own company called NewTek. After NewTek published their first software for the Amiga, Tim’s phone gone crazy. he received multiple calls from people who used his software. his software alone has spread to across multiple cities.
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.
At the same time, Montgomery moved on to work at Electronic Arts but resigned when the company failed to live up to its founders’ goals of pushing computing forward with the Amiga. He ended up moving to Topeka and joining NewTek right at the time when the company was looking to expand with a new product.
Montgomery (Tim’s friend) 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 starts
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 studios produced. Creating a single, affordable, add-on card to replace network studio equipment seemed impossible.
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, 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 or 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 the system was Toaster CG (a character generator to make titles), Toaster Paint (an updated DigiPaint for making static graphic overlays), Chroma F/X (for modifying the color balance of images), and the real kicker: Lightwave 3D, a full-featured 3D modeling and animation package written by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson.
At the time, 3D modeling and animation was the sort of thing people did on $20,000 SGI workstations, using software that cost nearly as much as the hardware it ran on. Bundling Lightwave with the Toaster was like including a free 3D printer with a new computer. It meant that Toaster users could create any digital effect that they could imagine.
example of a video made by VT (Video Toaster)
Video Toaster set the stage
The launch of the Toaster changed the entire equation of producing video content. 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-level 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 taken by amateurs or in other countries. The equipment required to produce broadcast-safe video was expensive, running from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. This meant that unless you were an employee of a major television network, you couldn’t make your own programs and show them to anyone but your friends and family.
The Toaster changed this. For less than five thousand dollars, anyone could create programs 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 a time of wild transitions and fades in the 1990s. The concept of “Wayne’s World” was very much a Toaster-based phenomenon.
Pen from the Pen and teller show in the VT advert
Big TV producer step 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.
That’s all for today folks!