NewTek | Code Like It's 198x

By the end of 1991 NewTek’s advertisements could let other people do the talking. Business Week had called the $1,595 Video Toaster “as capable as gear normally costing $60,000”; Rolling Stone said it “effectively crams hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of video production equipment and software into a $4000 box”; CBS News compared it to “a $100,000 video system”. The company behind it was in Topeka, Kansas, and had started a few years earlier as one man in a garage, making a gadget that put colour photographs on an Amiga’s screen.

The historian Jimmy Maher calls NewTek the company “most important of all” to the Amiga “over the long term”. Its Digi-View digitiser of 1986 and its Video Toaster of 1990 took the machine into television studios, and the 3D program it gave away with the Toaster, LightWave 3D, is still on sale after the NewTek name has gone.

Fast facts

Founded: 1985, in Topeka, Kansas, by Tim Jenison. Paul Montgomery joined in 1987 and became vice-president.
Products: Digi-View (1986), Digi-Paint (1987), the Video Toaster (1990) with LightWave 3D, the Screamer (1993), and later the TriCaster (2005).
Owner: Vizrt, from 2019. The NewTek name was dropped in 2023.

A Color Computer programmer

Before the Amiga, Jenison wrote software for Tandy’s Color Computer at a company called ColorWare. His best-known program was CoCo Max, a paint program in the style of the Macintosh’s MacPaint. Reviewing a pre-release copy in February 1985, the Color Computer newsletter Undercolor was won over: “It has long been one of my fantasies to own a Macintosh and be able to Macpaint any time I wanted to. Tim Jenison and the folks at Colorware have made that dream a reality.”

The Amiga gave Jenison bigger ideas. According to the historian Jimmy Maher, he “left ColorWare and the Color Computer behind quickly to begin NewTek as a one-man garage startup from his home in Topeka”. What drew him were two features most reviews passed over: HAM, the display mode that could show 4,096 colours at once, and the Amiga’s ability to put out interlaced video that ordinary television equipment could use. The first was the key to Digi-View, the second to the Toaster.

Digi-View

Early in 1986 a handful of startling pictures went round the Amiga’s public-domain software channels: colour photographs, reproduced on a home computer’s screen. Jenison had made them to promote a digitiser that was not yet on sale. Amazing Computing reported in April 1986 that “NewTek’s digitizer has an announced price of $199”, with a companion video camera planned at about $200. The method was patient rather than fast. A black-and-white video camera took the same still picture three times, through red, green and blue filters, and the software combined the three into one HAM image.

Digi-View went on sale late in 1986. Maher puts its eventual sales at more than 100,000, and in 1994 NewTek claimed it as “the best-selling image capture device, on any platform, in the history of computing”. The next product was a companion. Digi-Paint, one of the first two HAM painting programs, appeared in 1987 and let owners retouch their digitised pictures without losing colours.

Montgomery and the Toaster

Paul Montgomery came from the other end of the Amiga world. He had founded the First Amiga Users Group in Silicon Valley and worked for Electronic Arts as its link with Amiga artists. In 1987 he left EA to join Jenison. Maher compares the pair to Wozniak and Jobs: Jenison the quiet engineer who kept to his workshop, Montgomery the promoter who loved demonstrating a new gadget. Montgomery hired the model Kiki Stockhammer to star in NewTek’s demonstration tapes and show its products at trade shows.

The product he talked about from the start was the Video Toaster. NewTek first showed it at the autumn COMDEX show in November 1987, as a prototype. It took three years to ship. It shipped at last in September 1990, a single card that plugged into the Amiga 2000’s video slot. NewTek’s advertisements listed what $1,595 bought: a “broadcast-quality four input switcher”, real-time digital video effects, a character generator for titles, a paint system and two frame buffers in 16.8 million colours, a frame grabber, an overlay genlock, a luminance keyer, and 3D modelling, rendering and animation. The keyer cut out black or white, not a blue or green screen; it was not a chroma key. The 3D software was LightWave, written for the Toaster by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson.

The customers were local television stations, cable companies and production houses, and by 1993 the work was on network television. Foundation Imaging made the space scenes of Babylon 5 with LightWave on Toaster-equipped Amigas, and Amblin used the Toaster and LightWave for the underwater effects of NBC’s seaQuest DSV. In 1993 the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave NewTek’s design group and Jenison an Emmy for television engineering. The full story is in the Video Toaster and LightWave 3D entries.

Europe was harder. The Toaster worked only with NTSC, the American television standard, and NewTek never made a version for PAL, the standard in Britain and most of Europe. In June 1993 Amiga Format counted over 60,000 Toasters sold in America and wondered why. The workaround came from outside: in 1994 Amiga Format reported a Passport converter from Prime Image, developed in co-operation with NewTek, and by 1995 British dealers were advertising “THE PAL VIDEO TOASTER”, an NTSC Toaster working through a Passport with updated software.

Montgomery leaves

Early in 1994, a year after NewTek’s most successful year, Montgomery left with a group of colleagues. Amiga Format reported that he and five other staff had gone, among them Kiki Stockhammer and the marketing director Mark Randall. Jenison told dealers that “Paul Montgomery and a small group of other Newtek employees have determined that their future lies in opportunities outside Newtek.” Amazing Computing’s rumour column put the number leaving at “nearly a dozen”.

After the Amiga

NewTek did not wait for Commodore to fail. In 1993 it announced the Screamer, an external rendering engine with four MIPS R4400 processors that took LightWave’s 3D rendering off the Amiga’s own processor. A stand-alone LightWave followed in 1994, and a Windows version the year after. As Commodore collapsed and Amigas grew scarce, NewTek moved its products to the PC.

On the PC it kept making live-production equipment. Its TriCaster, introduced in 2005, combined live video switching, broadcast graphics, virtual sets and effects in one system. In April 2019 the broadcast-graphics company Vizrt announced that it was buying NewTek. Vizrt sold LightWave to a new company, LightWave Digital, in April 2023, and in September 2023 it folded NewTek’s products into its own range and stopped using the NewTek name.

Sources

Undercolor volume 1 number 4, February 1985, p. 20: review of CoCo Max “by Tim Jenison / Colorware”.
Amazing Computing volume 1 number 3, April 1986, pp. 61–62: Digi-View and NewTek’s digitiser announced at $199; Tim Jenison quoted; the red, green and blue filter method.
Amazing Computing volume 3 number 1, January 1988, p. 22: “NewTek showed the ‘Video Toaster’ at COMDEX for the first time.”
AmigaWorld, October 1990, p. 26: the Toaster plugs into the Amiga 2000’s video slot.
Amazing Computing volume 5 number 12, December 1990, p. 64: “The Video Toaster was finally shipped out before the end of September”.
NewTek advertisements: AmigaWorld, October 1991, p. 136 (the Business Week, Rolling Stone and CBS News quotations); INFO issue 45, December 1991, p. 70 (what “every $1595 Video Toaster” includes; the luminance keyer; Kiki Stockhammer’s demonstration tape).
Amazing Computing volume 8 number 11, November 1993, p. 98: the Screamer announced; the Emmy for the Toaster’s design group and Jenison; Foundation Imaging’s Babylon 5 animation and Amblin’s work on seaQuest DSV.
Amiga Format issue 47, June 1993, p. 32: over 60,000 Toasters, and no PAL version.
Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994: Paul Montgomery and five other staff leave; Jenison’s statement to dealers; Prime Image’s Passport, developed with NewTek.
Amazing Computing volume 9 number 5, May 1994, p. 70: “Roomers” on the departures.
Amiga Format issue 71, May 1995, p. 101: dealer advertisement for “THE PAL VIDEO TOASTER” using the Prime Image Passport.
NewTekniques volume 1 number 1, April 1997: interview with Tim Jenison, “Frustration Breeds Innovation” (NewTek “established in 1985”).
Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 5, pp. 111–140: NewTek’s importance to the Amiga; ColorWare and the garage start-up; HAM and interlace; the first digitised images; Digi-View’s launch, sales and NewTek’s 1994 claim; Digi-Paint; Montgomery’s background and arrival in 1987; Kiki Stockhammer; television customers; LightWave for Windows in 1995; the move to PCs.
TV Technology, “Vizrt Folds NewTek Name into Product Portfolio”, 5 September 2023 (web, secondary): the NewTek brand combined into Vizrt’s range; Vizrt’s purchase in 2019. https://tvtechnology.com/news/vizrt-folds-newtek-name-into-product-portfolio-broadcast-and-pro-av-markets-are-converging
Vizrt, “A new chapter for LightWave”, press release, 27 April 2023 (web, secondary): LightWave sold to a team led by Andrew Bishop, trading as LightWave Digital. https://www.vizrt.com/vizrt/press-center/a-new-chapter-for-lightwave/
Wikipedia, “NewTek” (web, secondary): the TriCaster in 2005; Vizrt’s purchase announced on 1 April 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek