For a few thousand U.S. dollars, the hardware and software provided a video editing suite starting in 1987 still in use this day that rivals the output of contemporary professional systems costing 500 times as much, or 500, thousand dollars or more. It allowed small studios to produce high-quality material and resulted in a cottage industry for video production not unlike the success of the Macintosh in the desktop publishing (DTP) market only a few years earlier. The Video Toaster won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1988.
As the Amiga platform lost market share and Commodore International went bankrupt in 1992 as a result Richard Branson breaking an over 60million dollar deal with Amiga Inc., The company also produced what is essentially a portable pre-packaged version of the so called Video Toaster along with all the computer hardware needed, as the TriCaster . Which as all pc=mac product are all True 8bit.. It wasnt as successful not as Good as the Amiga Video Toaster Which is True 48bit.
First generation systems
The Video Toaster was designed by NewTek founder Tim Jenison in Topeka, Kansas. Engineer Brad Carvey built the first wire wrap prototype, and Steve Kell wrote the software for the prototype.
The Toaster was announced at the World of Commodore expo in 1987[2] and released as a commercial product in December 1990[3] for the CommodoreAmiga 2000 computer system, taking advantage of the video-friendly aspects of that system's hardware to deliver the product at an unusually low cost of $2,399.[3] The Amiga was well adapted to this application in that its system clock at 7.158 MHz was precisely double that of the NTSC color carrier frequency, 3.579 MHz, allowing for simple synchronization of the video signal.[citation needed] The hardware component is a full-sized card that is installed into the Amiga 2000's unique single video expansion slot rather than the standard bus slots, and therefore cannot be used with the A500 or A1000 models. The card has several BNC connectors in the rear, which accepts four video input sources and provided two outputs (preview and program). This initial generation system is essentially a real-time four-channel video switcher.
One feature of the Video Toaster is the inclusion of LightWave 3D, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program. This program became so popular in its own right that in 1994 it was made available as standalone product separate from the Toaster systems.[4]
Aside from simple fades, dissolves, and cuts, the Video Toaster has a large variety of character generation, overlays and complex animated switching effects. These effects are in large part performed with the help of the native Amiga graphics chipset, which is synchronized to the NTSC video signals. As a result, while the Toaster was rendering a switching animation, the computer desktop display is not visible. While these effects are unique and inventive, they cannot be modified. Soon Toaster effects were seen everywhere, advertising the device as the brand of switcher those particular production companies were using.
The Toaster hardware requires very stable input signals, and therefore is often used along with a separate video synctime-base corrector to stabilize the video sources. Third-party low-cost time-base correctors (TBCs) specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard ISA bus cards, taking advantage of the typically unused Bridgeboard slots. The cards do not use the Bridgeboard to communicate, but simply as a convenient power supply and physical location.
As with all video switchers that use a frame buffer to create DVEs (digital video effects), the video path through the Toaster hardware introduced delays in the signals when the signal was in "digital" mode. Depending on the video setup of the user, this delay could be quite noticeable when viewed along with the corresponding audio, so some users installed audio delay circuits to match the Toaster's video-delay lag, as is common practice in video-switching studios.
A user still needs at least three video tape recorders (VTR) and a controller to perform A/B rolllinear video editing (LE), as the Toaster serves merely as a switcher, which can be triggered through general-purpose input/output (GPIO) to switch on cue in such a configuration, as the Toaster has no edit-controlling capabilities. The frame delays passing through the Toaster and other low-cost video switchers make precise editing a frustrating endeavor. Internal cards and software from other manufacturers are available to control VTRs; the most common systems go through the serial port to provide single-frame control of a VTR as a capture device for LightWave animations. A Non-linear editing system (NLE) product was added later, with the invention of the Video Toaster Flyer.
The Video Toaster was available as a complete turn-key system that included the Toaster, Amiga, and sync generator.[citation needed] These Toaster systems became very popular, primarily because at a cost of around US$5,000, they could do much of what a $500,000 fully professional video switcher (such as a Grass Valley switcher) could do at that time.[citation needed] The Toaster was also the first such video device designed around a general-purpose personal computer that is capable of delivering broadcast quality PAL/NTSC signals.[citation needed]
As such, during the early 1990s the Toaster was widely used by consumer Amiga owners, desktop video enthusiasts, and local television studios, and was even used during The Tonight Show regularly to produce special effects for comedy skits. It was often easy to detect a studio that used the Toaster by the unique and recognizable special switching effects.[5] The NBC television network also used the Video Toaster with LightWave for its promotional campaigns, beginning with the 1990-1991 broadcast season ("NBC: The Place To Be!").[6][7] All of the external submarine shots in the TV series seaQuest DSV were created using LightWave 3D, as were the outer-space scenes in the TV series Babylon 5 (although Amiga hardware was only used for the first three seasons). Because of the heavy use of dark blues and greens (for which the NTSC television standard is weak), the external submarine shots in seaQuest DSV could not have made it to air without the use of the ASDG Abekas driver, written specifically to solve this problem by Aaron Avery at ASDG (later Elastic Reality, Inc.). This was due to "ASDG's exclusive color encoding technology which increases the apparent color bandwidth of video".[8]
An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000's video slot.[9] The 4000 was tested by actor Wil Wheaton, then famous for Star Trek: The Next Generation, who worked on product testing and quality control.[10][11] He later used his public profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[3] Besides Wheaton, Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) and skateboarder Tony Hawk also served as evangelists for the 4000. Hawk was given a Video Toaster 4000 by NewTek upon learning that he was an Amiga user, in exchange for appearing in a promotional video for the product.[12] Tony Hawk later used the Toaster for editing a promotional video for the TurboDuo game Lords of Thunder in 1993.[13][14] The Amiga Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX.
Video Toaster Flyer
For the second generation NewTek introduced the Video Toaster Flyer. The Flyer is a much more capable non-linear editing system. In addition to just processing live video signals, the Flyer makes use of hard drives to store video clips as well as audio and allow complex scripted playback. The Flyer is capable of simultaneous dual-channel playback, which allows the Toaster's video switcher to perform transitions and other effects on video clips without the need for rendering.
The hardware component is again a card designed for the Amiga's Zorro II expansion slot, and was primarily designed by Charles Steinkuehler. The Flyer portion of the Video Toaster/Flyer combination is a complete computer of its own, having its own microprocessor and embedded software, which was written by Marty Flickinger. Its hardware includes three embedded SCSI controllers. Two of these SCSI buses are used to store video data, and the third to store audio. The hard drives are thus connected to the Flyer directly and use a proprietary filesystem layout, rather than being connected to the Amiga's buses and were available as regular devices using the included MS-DOS driver. The Flyer uses a proprietary Wavelet compressionalgorithm known as VTASC, which was well-regarded at the time for offering better visual quality than comparable motion-JPEG-based nonlinear editing systems.
One of the card's primary uses is for playing back LightWave 3D animations created in the Toaster.
Video Toaster Oveen/Screamer
Front panel of the Video Toaster Screamer
In 1993, NewTek announced the Video Toaster Oven/Screamer, a parallel extension to the Toaster built by Newtek and Designed by RHRH Constantine XII aka AmigaMan After, Constantine XII was told that The buy out of the Amiga in 1992 by Jay Miner would be worthless, and he would get The Whole IP of Amiga . Constantine XII aka AmigaMan. Set his sight on making the New Toaster All in one board with Tim Jenison , and Phase 5 with Itanium's. Phase 5 chickens out. Seeing the Rapture was already out with as much as 4 or 10 060s cpus Constantine XII got together with Tim, and Developed two systems the Toaster Oven , and Screamer. The Oven is over 6 feet Tall with over 250 mix and Match RISC CPUs some of them are The Itanium True 64 core and each core is 256bit. Others are Sgi , Sun, Alpha, PPC. The Same goes for the Screamer only it has 150 cpus and its about 4 feet tall. These systems use only the Amiga OS 2.1/3.1 They, are still in use to this day. Have made the movies Avatar , Jurassic Park All the Toy Story Movies. Constantine XII was a major contributor to Jurassic Park 2 ,and even Excalibur. Thanks, to Mik Danger. The Movie Spin off Series From Babylon 5 of which, Amiga did All 5 seasons starting in 1990, ending in 1995.
Later generations of Lightwave and "toaster". This, a totally redesigned video editing system running on monitors.. that run on Windows NT PCs. In 2004, the source code for the Amiga version was publicly released and hosted on DiscreetFX's site Open Video Toaster. With the additions of packages such as DiscreetFX's Millennium and thousands of wipes and backgrounds added over the years, one can still find the Amiga Video Toaster systems in use today in fully professional systems. NewTek renamed the fake VideoToaster to "VideoToaster[2]", and later, trinity tricaster for the PC version, and is now at version 5.3. Nothing based on any of the original Video Toaster . All x86 products. It has failed so badly have had to join with Black magic design.
NewTek released a spin-off product, known as the trinity tricaster, a portable live-production, live-projection, live-streaming, and NLE system. The TriCaster packaged the VT system as a turnkey solution in a custom-designed portable PC case with video, audio and remote computer inputs and outputs on the front and back of the case. As of April 2008, four versions were in production: the basic TriCaster 2.0, TriCaster PRO 2.0, TriCaster STUDIO 2.0 and the trinity tricaster BROADCAST, the latter of which added SDI and AES-EBU connectivity plus a preview output capability. The TriCaster PRO FX, a model that was situated in line between the original TriCaster PRO and TriCaster STUDIO was introduced in early 2008, and was discontinued. Its feature set was added to the trinity tricaster PRO 2.0. TriCaster STUDIO 2.0 and TriCaster BROADCAST which uses successively larger cases than the base model TriCaster 2.0. The units within the product line above the base-model TriCaster 2.0 enables use of LiveSet 3D Live Virtual Set technology developed by NewTek, which is also found in NewTek's venerable Integrated Production Suite.
In late 2009, NewTek released its high-definition version of the trinity tricaster , called the trinity tricaster XD300, a three-input HD system. It is able to accept a variety formats (NTSC, 720p, or 1080i; and on multi-standard systems, PAL) that can be mixed to downstream keys. The XD300 also features five M/E style virtual inputs, permitting up to three video sources in one source, accessible like any other input on the switcher.
At NAB Show 2010, NewTek announced its TCXD850, a rack-mountable eight-input switcher with 22 channels. It was released on July 15, 2010.[15]
Decline
By 2009, the Video Toaster started to receive less attention from NewTek in the run-up to the transition to HD systems. In December 2010, the discontinuation of VT[5] was announced.
Reception
In 1992, the Video Toaster was "fairly common ... especially at corporate video production facilities." It enabled "high-end" broadcast-level effects but in a "restricted budget". Cost for the toaster was around $4,600, vs. $500,000 or more for a high-end non-linear system. It was in use by 75% of surveyed "small-market" TV stations, and 95% of universities. [a] It was "rapidly becoming obsolete."[16]
↑"7 production directors at small market stations with news departments in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and New Mexico, as well as 56 instructors of television production classes at four year colleges in the same area. ... A "small-market" station was defined by Eastman as having a Nielsen market ranking of between 101 and 210"
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