![]() PVR’s on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside. Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. If that isn’t platform independent, I don’t know what is! The arsenal looks like the following-Īlphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Even farther back, the Amiga and the Newtek Toaster were employed.Ĭurrently we use Pentiums and Alphas for animation, Macs for Editing, Matte paintings and Compositing, and SGI’s for Compositing and titling. She has enough of a fanbase that there’s even this extended-length documentary, with some, uh, kinda questionable camera work for the host (the dude who is not Stockhammer), but let’s do this!Įven though the Joe uses “another” platform, the show actually uses many! Macs have been essential to the creation of the show from the beginning. She’s the literal face (and shadow) of Video Toaster through its whole history. It’s actually her silhouette in the Video Toaster’s transitions, as this behind-the-scenes shoot proves. Also – here’s one thing Steve Jobs never did. She’s still doing this sort of work today ( recent video), and basically any of us working tech ought to follow her and take some notes. She’s probably one of the greatest tech spokespeople of all time. Kiki also had a driving role inside the company, and is legendary for her ability to deliver product pitches even off-script. NewTek is also famous for their long-time spokeperson and technology evangelist, Kiki Stockhammer. Honestly, jokes aside, how is this demo video so much better than the corporate snooze-fest of the new Apple, Google, and Microsoft presentations? It’s like everyone had their souls removed through their nose sometime in the early 2000s. ![]() Uh, sperm? Did someone just try to literally interpret every line?) Want some video artifacts of this age? Oh, does YouTube ever have you covered.įirst, for peak 90s, you’ve got to have Todd Rundgren’s “Change Myself” video, which definitely seems like it was just a Video Toaster demo more than something with a … concept. ![]() (And keep in mind that Steve Jobs at the time was still trying to sell Pixar’s Image Computer, with complete rigs running more into the six-digit territory again.)Įventually, you could buy complete ready-to-play rigs for around US$5000, the likes of NBC popularized usage, Wil Wheaton (yeah, that Wil Wheaton) signed on as a technology evangelist and consultant, and LightWave 3D had a life of its own as a standalone system.Īrs Technica’s Jeremy Reimer wrote a beautiful history of the Amiga and dedicated a chapter to the Video Toaster:Ī history of the Amiga, part 9: The Video Toaster But this more than any other invention democratized visual effects and made them mainstream not just for high-budget films, but for television, as well. It was the 90s, so you’d need some video tape recorders and a controller since all this beauty would be going to video tape. The Video Toaster was a complete bundle: a full-sized card to add video connections, a real-time four-channel video switcher, a bundled LightWave 3D modeling / rendering / animation package, frame buffer-based effects, character generation, overlays, animated transitions – the works. And the Amiga’s innovative on-board graphics chipset helped, too. Oh yeah, bonus – the Amiga’s system clock ran conveniently at double the NTSC color carrier frequency for easy sync. (Even in 2023 dollars, that’s only $5,470.53, or roughly the price of a set of Apple Pro wheels and a video cable or whatever.) You would need an Amiga 2000, but even that was not a wildly expensive machine at the time. Announced in 1987, the first edition was a US$2399 Amiga add-on – an insanely low price given six-digit costs of broadcast rigs at the time. ![]() NewTek founder Tim Jenison loved Vermeer and designed the first edition, with Brad Carvey (who also worked on Men In Black VFX) building the prototype. So, a very brief history of the Video Toaster. (Of course you recognize a Vorlon spacecraft already!) Also, way to not underestimate your audience or talk down. That video is doubly significant as it coincides with the native edition of LightWave3D. ![]()
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