Source of Amiga Video Toaster Software Released 394
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 wasn't used for Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here (Score:5, Informative)
For some cool ScreenShots go to my Web page Here the Link [akcaagac.com] or for more look at MorphZone [morphzone.org] (top right Image Gallery).
greetings,
oGALAXYo
Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
True, however the effects for Babylon 5, Sliders, SeaQuest DSV, Star Trek Voyager, etc. *were* created and rendered on consumer-level computers with a single 680x0 processor. No NTSC/PAL video board, though, other than for dailies. Lightwave rendered this stuff out using ScreamerNet, a cluster rendering tool over a "renderfarm" of Amiga computers. This was all before there was a PC version of Lightwave.
-Charles Hill
Ah, memories... (Score:2, Informative)
Discreet Toaster (Score:2, Informative)
Lightwave != Video Toaster (Score:1, Informative)
The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The Video Toaster was a revolution in video (Score:5, Informative)
This is incorrect. Check out a comprehensive Amiga history [emugaming.com] 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.
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:3, Informative)
Guys? (Score:3, Informative)
For more details visit http:\\www.ann.lu
Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget the Mac version of Lightwave which, I believe, shipped with an Amiga tucked in there. :^P
Toaster vs $100K mixers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC (Score:1, Informative)
They also released the source code for the ToasterFlyer which is a addon/followon to the toaster. The ToasterFlyer is NLE; non-linear editing, tapeless hard drive based editing of video.
This is excellent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice code, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Video Toaster WAS video quality (Score:3, Informative)
basiclly a 68030 Amiga with a fancy linear video i/o board and some software for basic effects.
No, the Original video toaster didn't come with an Amiga.. the toaster was the "fancy linear i/o board and some software for basic effects."
It was basiclly a fancy video switch / mixer.
Yes, that's the point.
the Toaster didn't even do ful 640x480, it was a bit less than that
First of all, "640x480" isn't "full" video, it's "VGA", which is significantly different than a TV signal. (VGA is underscanned, with a 1:1 aspect ratio, NTSC video is overscanned, with a 4:3 aspect ratio.)
And second, the Toaster did do full 752x480 - full overscanned NTSC.
There is no way this was used for film work.
It was used for film work - just not the way you think. Although it wasn't used in the final cut, it was used to do rough-ups for staging.
Source.... (Score:3, Informative)
We might as well start from scratch...
unless of course u own a AMIGA, then it is very useful.
-Hack
Re:Modern alternative? (Score:3, Informative)
If I'm a low budget cable access, or UHF station, I can't use Final Cut Pro for my live broadcast. In fact, my local cable access station still uses, guess what, the Video Toaster for this purpose.
Grandpa starts to mumble... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC (Score:4, Informative)
Chroma/Luma/Alpha Keying.
Some of the code may still be usable (Score:3, Informative)
"There's too much confusion"... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I thought Amiga was deader than BSD (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you'd ask the same question around 1990, the answer would be pretty straightforward. Amiga OS was a superb blend of CLI [nethkin.com] and GUI [nethkin.com]. 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.
Where oh Where is Kiki Stockhammer? (Score:3, Informative)
One Warp11's web site there are even some videos!
-- Multics
p.s. no she's not 'let herself go' -- mostly the contrary!
Re:Nice code, but... (Score:2, Informative)
43 fucks is good enough for linux (Score:3, Informative)
$ grep -ir fuck
./Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl:&nb sp; If you don't see why, please stay the fuck away from my code.
./Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl : <title>The Fucked Up Sparc</title>
./arch/x86_64/kernel/mtrr.c:/*  ; Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
./arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
./arch/sparc/kernel/process.c:
./arch/sparc/kernel/head.S:
./arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
./arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c:
./arch/mips/sgi-ip22/ip22-setup.c: * fucking with the memory controller because it needs to know the
./arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0
./arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
./arch/ppc/kernel/ppc405_pci.c: * the kernel try to remap our BAR #1 and fuck up bus
./arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c:
./arch/sparc64/kernel/process.c:
./arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c:
./arch/sparc64/mm/init.c:
./arch/parisc/kernel/signal.c:
./drivers/net/sunhme.c:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
./drivers/net/sunhme.c:
./drivers/net/b44.c:
./drivers/net/macsonic.c: fuck did SONIC_BUS_SCALE come from, and what was it supposed
./drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:extern int DRM(release_fuck)(struct inode *inode, struct file *filp);
./drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */
./drivers/scsi/esp.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
./drivers/scsi/esp.c: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
./drivers/scsi/esp.c:
./drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
./drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:
./drivers/sound/aci.c:/* The four ACI command types are fucked up. [-:
./drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c: blkdev_dequeue_request(req);
./drivers/ide/pci/cmd640.c: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
./fs/binfmt_aout.c:
./fs/jffs/intrep.c: don't fuck up. This is why we have
./include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h:
./include/linux/netfilter_ipv6/ip6t_limit.h:&n bsp;
./include/asm-m68k/sun3ints.h:/* master list of VME vectors -- don't fuck with this */
./include/asm-sparc64/system.h:
./include/asm-parisc/spinlock.h: * writers) in interrupt handlers someone fucked up and we'd dead-lock
./lib/vsprintf.c: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
./net/core/netfilter.c:
./net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_snmp_basic.c: * (And this is the fucking 'basic' method).
./net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_limit.c: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
./net/ipv6/netfilter/ip6t_limit.c: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
It's all in the bit depth... (Score:3, Informative)
That's mainly the reason for running big render jobs on big iron - there is literally twice as much data to shift, four times the precision needed in calculations (at least), and don't forget you need extremely specialised processes to get the digital output onto film.
Re:Nice code, but... (Score:3, Informative)
not quite (Score:4, Informative)
My (admittedly sketchy) memory of the answer is that the FX shots for the original 2-hour pilot episode of B5 were composed and rendered with ScreamerNet/Amiga, but that by the time the actual series got picked up and put into production (over a year later), they'd pretty much migrated entirely to LightWave NT, and were doing their rendering on Intel hardware.
I can't speak for Sliders and DSV (and, frankly, don't care), but Voyager was certainly not rendered on Amigas: Foundation was entirely an NT (and SGI?) shop by that point.
Re:Source.... (Score:1, Informative)
then. hell the OS gui and all fit in 512k of rom and maybe about 5-10 mb hard disc space for utilites. Even today the only way, ONLY WAY to get the most out of hardware is to code in assembler. or use a compiler built by someone who actually give a dam about code size.
Re:video toaster wasn't used for Jurassic Park (Score:2, Informative)
She's still out there (Score:2, Informative)
Re:All well and good, but (Score:5, Informative)
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. [l8r.net] 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.
Way to paste in the story. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know why you'd do that, especially when you break all formatting and make it impossible to read. Paragraph breaks are your friend.
Re:The heart of the Toaster was a custom ASIC (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think the "preview" with a $500 PC and a $250 ADVC-100 is anywhere close to the realtime effects the Toaster was capable of creating. I have a $1000 PC and an ADVC-100 so I should know.
What might've been.... (Score:2, Informative)
I worked for NewTek during the Toaster heyday. Tim & Paul tried to negotiate with Irving Gould (of Commodore fame) in his Bahamaian Commodore headquarters (can you say 'evade taxes'?) in an attempt to get him to license the Amiga chip-sets.
With 'em we could've made a Mac & PC Video Toaster!
But alas, old Irving knew that his shell game of moving Amiga's around the world would cease (currency trading is very profitable if done right) and the Toaster was the only thing that was keeping the Amiga going.
Being at the Christmas parties with "Lurch", Wil Wheaton, James Doohan (Scotty), Kiki and the other "Cool Friends of NewTek" made me even more aware of my un-coolness. But the buzz was really there and it really, really felt like the early Apple days (I rep'ed them too in 1980).
Imagine had Commodore done it....what might've been.
Re:"There's too much confusion"... (Score:5, Informative)
You're completely wrong. The Amiga had several NLE systems designed for it, including the Flyer Toaster (an addon board for the VideoToaster), the MacroSystems VLAB Motion, and the Applied Magic Digital Broadcaster.
In addition, two entire NLE turnkey systems, the MacroSystems Draco and MacroSystems Casablanca were based on the Amiga hardware and OS. The latter sold pretty heavily into educational institutions because it was simple to use and almost VCR like in operation.
As for whether or not you consider them professional, the majority of Amiga NLE users were lower end--they used them for everything from corporate training videos to local broadcast market productions. A lot of small firms used the Amiga as an NLE, and made a good amount of money doing it. Not everyone uses an Avid to cut a wedding video or a training film about machine tools, but there certain were a lot of Amiga shops.
It's NOT Dead (Score:4, Informative)
They still kick ass and i still want one (damned lottery not picking the right numbers)
Re:You are wrong Screenshots of MorphOS look here (Score:3, Informative)