I still don’t understand why the Video Toaster succeeded on the Amiga and why the software and add on cards didn’t make a successful jump onto PCs and Macs.
Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?
The Amiga video system had genlock capabilities so it could lock onto an external master clock to keep it in sync with other equipment in an editing suite. This was fairly unusal for consumer equipment. I believe this was originally intended to sync with a laserdisc player if the chipset was used in an arcade machine, but it came in useful giving the Amiga a niche in the lower end of broadcast video as well.
Video Toaster did get ported to Windows when the Amiga died, and NewTek are still around doing various broadcasting related stuff. I guess it's just less prominent when it's just another company doing pro video stuff behind the scenes rather than a company Amiga fans can point to and brag about as one of their few "wins".
Yes, the Amiga ended up declining, but it was ahead of its time with a multi-tasking OS, advanced sound capabilities and great graphics for its time (4096 colours!).
Commodore torched its US dealer network during the C64 days by both not informing them about a drastic price cut (because it was by all by all means an impulsive rapid choice by Tramiel), and focusing on low-end retailers like Kmart, and so when the Amiga came and the Commodore US tried to push it as a business machine that needed a dealer network they were screwed.
Some of the reasons Commodore kept doing so much better in Europe (to the point that Commodore UK management attempted to get financing for a buyout of their parent after the bankruptcy) was a mix of allowing the regional companies a lot of latitude to do their own thing (UK and Scandinavia was very games focused, Germany pushed more business sales) in smaller markets, not screwing their dealers over in Europe, and many of the European subsidiaries going full in on games more so than the higher end machines.
As a long time Amiga user (and Commodore 64 before that) it was really sad to see the fall, but Commodore was so deeply dysfunctional that it was just a question of when not if they'd eventually fail irrespective of whatever technology might fall in their laps.
Well, I'm in the UK where it was moderately popular, but according to Wikipedia it sold less than a million units in the US as it was sold in toy stores and seen as a toy compared with PCs which were more expensive.
The irony is that Commodore in the US pushed it a lot harder as a business / graphics workstation, but they'd ruined their dealer network a few years before and never really managed to build it up again, so they struggled to get it into professional dealers, while they failed to market well to the gamer market.
Meanwhile, Commodore UK achieved most of their success by making games bundles that the US was very reluctant to try to push.
E.g. the Commodore UK "Batman pack" in '89 was near legendary [1][2] in its ability to drive Amiga sales.
Commodore UK did well enough that they tried to assemble a consortium to buy Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt...
It was quite strong over here, besides the PC, it was the Atari and Amiga that ruled the 16 bit days, in many European countries there were hardly anyone selling Apple devices, and Acorn were mostly an UK thing.
Growing up in Norway saw a grand total of one Apple machine in the 1980's and until maybe '93 or '94 or so: A lonely Mac sitting ignored in the corner of my local computer store.
They must have sold a few, but a whole wall was taken up by Commodore/Amiga machines, Atari ST's, and Spectrum. An Amstrad was located next to the Mac, and that got far more attention, but that too was rare.
I first saw more Mac's when briefly dealing with marketing/desktop publishing companies when I started working in the mid '90's, but only sporadically until the iMac.
Interestingly, the first time I got platformed shamed was by an Amiga kid. He found out I had a 286 at home and told me to "get a real computer, get an Amiga."
> I still don’t understand why the Video Toaster succeeded on the Amiga and why the software and add on cards didn’t make a successful jump onto PCs and Macs.
Well eventually the PCs replaced the Amiga and the Unix workstations for all the video effects.
But back when the Amiga came out (1985), and then five years later Video Toaster (1990), PCs were still running... DOS. And Apple was still mostly selling monochrome Mac computers (I've got a Macintosh Classic at home which came out in late 1990 and it's still got a monochrome screen).
And 1990 is when it came out: developers had to start working on it before 1990. PCs were simply, back then, complete turds?
I was there and fully remember moving from my Amiga to a 386 PC. This fells like taking a step backwards of several years.
The Amiga was a machine way ahead of its time for its price.
I don't see how that'd have worked before Windows NT (1993) or Windows 95 (1995). As I remember it it's only half a decade later, around 1996, when 3DS Max came out, that people began to take the PC half-seriously for this kind of stuff.
> Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?
Not a coincidence, and there was also an additional hardware feature: the "genlock".
Normally when doing graphics generation your software keeps track of the "vertical blanking interrupt", which tells you when a new frame has started. Normally this is generated internally. The Amiga let you lock the output video generation to an input video signal, so you could draw over a TV signal without having to digitize the incoming signal or use some sort of external chromakey system.
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that most of the VideoToaster software and hardware were specifically designed for the Amiga hardware architecture and therefore did not easily port to other systems. The extension card was Zorro II and the performance critical software was written in 68k assembly. In some cases the assembly code is written in such a way that it depends on cycle exact sync with the video signal. Original source code is on github.com, search for OpenVideoToaster.
If I recall correctly the original video toaster, and I believe even the revised toaster 2000 and 4000 all occupied the video slot, a dedicated internal interface that provided direct access to analog RGB component signals as well as some other video timing and audio channels. There was no connection to the Zoro II or later Zorro III system buses. The Amiga 4000 video slot added digital rgb counterparts to these analog signals, and also some oddball 8 bit connections to,I believe the parallel port UART pins.
Its because Newtek cheated! Same reason there never was a PAL Toaster.
All those fancy effects they did would normally require decoding incoming analog composite Video signal into RGB, sampling 3 channels, storing those 3 channels in dedicated framebuffer, having very performant effects engine juggling this huge amount of data around, then on the way out again encoding RGB back to Analog Video resulting in loss of quality. What Newtek engineers (Carvey?) did was a brilliant hack - Toaster effects are performed on raw undecoded NTSC samples. Amiga has no access to the capture framebuffer, its only used for UI and as a fancy graphical titler (like Sony HB-G900P MSX2 with built-in genlock, but much better). PAL video wouldnt work because every second line has inverted phase, shuffling raw samples would result in artifacts. PC wouldnt work because you still need Genlock and precisely synchronized 59.94Hz video output meaning now you need to build and ship custom Video card to replace whole Amiga.
That very same technique got reused on PC in 1995 by Paul Montgomery (Newtek co-founder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Montgomery#Play_Inc.) in Snappy Video Snapshot LPT dongle. @TubeTimeUS on twitter did a Snappy deep dive, teardown and reverse engineering down to schematic and figuring out remarked "PLAY HD-1500" main chip is just a XC2064 FPGA. PLL + 30msps ADC + special 2Mbit video ram capable of holding whole field = this thing grabs whole one field of video all at once after perfectly synchronizing to 14.318MHz video clock. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1301990455182155776
Purely speculation on my part, but I'd imagine that they must have had enormous "room for failure" on the UI side of things: the full screen dashboard in those videos would have felt super outdated on a Mac, and even on a PC at the time multimedia picked up steam there. So they would be torn between catering to the habits of their Amiga audience and leveraging contemporary UI paradigms. Go full retro continuity? Even their old users might want prefer to try something new and shiny. Abandon everything? Chances are your new UI approach just doesn't work so well, this wasn't the era of quickly iterating through a number of exploratory working prototypes. Try a best of both worlds compromise? Old hands will likely find it almost but not quite close enough to what they need to continue well-entrenched habits, newcomers will be confused by paradigms they don't know.
As I said, it's all speculation, but there are just so many things that can go wrong in a transition like that.
The Amiga's hardware was designed with television output in mind -- not just the clock speed but the genlock. A "Toaster for PC" would've required additional hardware. Such systems did exist -- Matrox Studio being one -- but it was somewhat more expensive (and way less sexy) than the Toaster.
NewTek did make a Video Toaster for Macintosh. It came in a box that connected to the Mac's SCSI port and was largely controlled via a Switcher interface on the Mac. You may have figured out that the box was a complete Amiga 2000 system with the Video Toaster add-in cards installed.
As the Amiga declined, NewTek saw the writing on the wall and released a Video Toaster for Windows NT PCs. Today, a turnkey version of this system is available under the name TriCaster.
Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?