NewTek first showed the Video Toaster at the Fall COMDEX computer show in November 1987, as a prototype due “next year” at $799. It took three more years to arrive. Meanwhile Amazing Computing suggested it “should win an award for the Most Anticipated but Delayed Product”, and its gossip column ran a spoof “Laser Toaster” with a “cereal port” that turned out to be NewTek’s own code name for the project. When the Toaster finally shipped in the autumn of 1990, at $1,595, it justified the wait. One card in an Amiga 2000 did the work of a rack of broadcast equipment: a four-input video switcher, digital video effects, a character generator for titles, a frame grabber and a paint program, all in 24-bit colour, with a 3D animation package in the box. Within three years it was making effects for network television.
Fast facts
- Maker: NewTek of Topeka, Kansas, founded by Tim Jenison.
- First shown: Fall COMDEX, November 1987.
- Shipped: September 1990 according to the Amiga press; NewTek’s advertising later said October.
- Price: $1,595; $2,495 from early 1992 with the 2.0 software; the Toaster 4000 was $2,395 in 1993.
- Host: the video slot of the Amiga 2000, with at least 3MB of RAM. The Toaster 4000 of 1993 fitted the Amiga 4000.
- Video standard: NTSC only.
- Bundled: LightWave 3D, Toaster Paint, the character generator and the ChromaFX colour processor.
- Award: an engineering Emmy for NewTek’s Toaster team in 1993.
What was on the card
AmigaWorld’s first look, in October 1990, listed “a production switcher, a DVE [digital video effects] generator, a frame grabber, a character generator (CG), and two frame buffers”. The card was a full-length, two-tiered board with four composite video inputs and two outputs, all on BNC connectors, and it carried two megabytes of its own memory. NewTek said it had designed four custom VLSI chips for it.
The switcher could cut, fade or wipe between seven sources: the four live inputs, the two frame buffers and a matte generator. Transitions were the Toaster’s showpiece. A picture could shatter, spin away or fly off the screen to reveal the next. Until then, as Jimmy Maher points out in his history of the Amiga, effects like these had needed the professional switchers of network news and sports studios. On first seeing it in 1988, Amazing Computing wondered why NewTek called it a “Toaster”: it was “closer to a ‘Cuisinart’”, able to “flip, spin, freeze, and ‘pixelize’ video images”.
The Toaster took over the Amiga’s display completely, so it could not use the Amiga’s existing graphics programs. NewTek wrote its own and put them in the box: Toaster Paint for 24-bit pictures, the character generator for titles, and LightWave 3D for modelling and animation. The ChromaFX module was a colour processor, not a keyer. It could tint a scene sepia, invert it, posterise it or give it a high-contrast look.
The keyer was a luminance keyer, which cuts out the parts of a picture that are black or white. NewTek’s own advertising described it as working “like a Chromakey except the background is black or white instead of blue”. A blue- or green-screen chroma key had been promised in the Toaster’s early previews, but the shipped card did not have one, and AmigaWorld’s 1991 survey of Amiga keying put the Toaster among the luminance keyers.
LightWave 3D
LightWave was written for the Toaster by Allen Hastings, the author of the earlier Videoscape 3D, and Stuart Ferguson, who wrote its Modeler. INFO reported in October 1990 that the two had moved to Kansas to work on “Toaster-based 3D products”. It came free with every Toaster. AmigaWorld’s review said it “absolutely blows away everything else in its class”.
For its first years LightWave only ran on a Toaster-equipped Amiga. In late 1994 NewTek announced LightWave 4.0 for Windows, Windows NT and Silicon Graphics machines as well as the Amiga, and from then on it carried on as a program in its own right.
Television and film
The Toaster’s biggest customers were not hobbyists. Its inputs had to be synchronised, and the time-base correctors that did that could cost more than the Toaster itself. Local television stations, cable companies and production houses bought them, and from 1993 the Toaster and LightWave appeared in network drama.
- Babylon 5. Foundation Imaging, run by Ron Thornton, made the space scenes for the series with LightWave on Toaster-equipped Amigas. Amiga Format described a network of twelve Amiga 2000s, each fitted with a Toaster. Amazing Computing reported that one shot in the 1993 pilot, The Gathering, had 200 ships on screen at once. In November 1994 the same magazine reported that Foundation was already planning to move to PCs or Silicon Graphics machines, and the historian Jimmy Maher dates the switch to Windows machines to the summer of 1995.
- seaQuest DSV (1993). Universal set up a studio called Amblin Imaging for the series. AmigaWorld reported in November 1993 that it had eight animators and more than 60 Amigas, “easily the largest Toaster facility in existence”, and that “No miniature models are used”: the submarine and its underwater world were LightWave models.
- Other work. AmigaWorld reported that Toaster-equipped Amigas helped storyboard the T. rex sequence of Jurassic Park, and that Todd Rundgren made the music video for “Change Myself” with LightWave and the Toaster.
In September 1993 Tim Jenison and the Toaster design group received an Emmy for television engineering, for “developing computer technology that has brought many editing tools out of high-priced editing suites”.
No PAL version
NewTek never made a PAL Toaster. It was built for NTSC, the American television standard, and European television uses PAL. As early as February 1991 Amiga Format noted that “at present it is only available in NTSC”; by October 1992 Amiga Computing was calling it “a product which will never appear in PAL form”. In June 1993 Amiga Format reckoned that one in every twelve American Amigas had a Toaster in it, over 60,000 boards, and wondered why NewTek had never made a PAL version. It could only report the suspicion that the Toaster used a chip with no PAL equivalent. Looking back in 1998, CU Amiga gave two reasons: a video processing chip that was not made for PAL, and the fact that the Toaster “works its magic with a lot of trickery and guile which relies on the characteristics of NTSC”.
Europe got the Toaster through a converter instead. In April 1994 Amiga Format reported that NewTek, still giving “no comment” on a PAL Toaster, would bundle it with the Passport 2000 standards converter, developed by Prime Image “in co-operation with Newtek”. It expected British buyers to pay around £2,500 for the Toaster and £3,000 for the converter. By May 1995 a dealer was advertising “THE PAL VIDEO TOASTER” in Amiga Format: the Toaster with Prime Image’s Passport and “specially updated Toaster software”, giving “a true PAL input and output”.
Later history
NewTek kept upgrading the Toaster: the 2.0 software shipped on 10 February 1992, and the Toaster 4000, announced at the NAB broadcasting show in 1993, moved it to the Amiga 4000 with AGA graphics. The Video Toaster Flyer, a non-linear video editor, was announced at NAB in 1994. As Commodore collapsed and Amigas became scarce, NewTek moved its products to Windows PCs. NewTek introduced the TriCaster, a live video production system, in 2005, and in 2019 the company was bought by the broadcast-graphics company Vizrt.
Sources
- Amazing Computing: vol. 3 no. 1, January 1988, p. 20 (the Toaster’s first showing at COMDEX, “a proto-type of a device for sale next year”, flyers giving $799); vol. 3 no. 2, February 1988, p. 78 (“Laser Toaster” was NewTek’s code word); vol. 3 no. 4, April 1988, p. 12 (the “Cuisinart” comparison); vol. 4 no. 1, January 1989, p. 58 (“Most Anticipated but Delayed Product”); vol. 5 no. 5, May 1990, p. 56 ($1,595); vol. 5 no. 12, December 1990, p. 62 (shipped before the end of September, in limited quantities); vol. 6 no. 3, March 1991 (review, price $1,595); vol. 8 no. 3, March 1993 (Babylon 5 effects, the 200-ship shot); vol. 8 no. 7, July 1993, p. 50 (Toaster 4000, $2,395); vol. 8 no. 11, November 1993, p. 6 (the Emmy award); vol. 9 no. 6, 1994 (the Flyer announced at NAB); vol. 9 no. 11, November 1994, p. 62 (LightWave 4.0 for Windows, Windows NT and SGI; Foundation Imaging’s plans).
- AmigaWorld: October 1990, pp. 22–24 (the Toaster reviewed: components, the A2000 video slot, RAM, LightWave); December 1990 (shipping from September); December 1991, p. 76, “The Keys to Keying” (luminance keying); July 1993, p. 12, and August 1993 (Toaster 4000); November 1993, pp. 44–46, “Amigas in Hollywood” (Amblin Imaging and seaQuest DSV, Jurassic Park storyboards); September 1994 (Todd Rundgren’s “Change Myself”). 1990 special issue, Video & Animation: “four VLSI custom chips”.
- INFO: issue 32, September 1990, p. 59 (Penn & Teller’s promotional tape and the $60,000 comparison); issue 33, October 1990, p. 43 (Hastings and Ferguson); issue 34, November 1990, pp. 26–27 (seven switcher sources, the 35 ns character generator, $1,595); issue 46, January 1992, p. 19 (price raised to $2,495 with 2.0); issue 49, April 1992, p. 34 (2.0 shipped on 10 February 1992).
- NewTek advertisements: AmigaWorld and Amazing Computing, July 1991 (the Business Week quotation, the seven-source switcher, the luminance key, “four custom VLSI chips”); INFO issue 41, July 1991 (“In October 1990 the Video Toaster shipped”); INFO issue 45, December 1991, p. 70 (the contents list at $1,595).
- Amiga Format issue 19, February 1991, p. 8 (NTSC only); issue 47, June 1993 (one in twelve American Amigas, 60,000 boards, the PAL question); issue 48, July 1993 (twelve Amiga 2000s at Foundation Imaging); issue 58, April 1994, news (the Passport 2000 bundle, developed with NewTek; the prices); issue 71, May 1995, dealer advertisement (“THE PAL VIDEO TOASTER”).
- Amiga Computing issue 53, October 1992, p. 111 (“never appear in PAL form”).
- CU Amiga, August 1998 (why there was no PAL Toaster).
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 5, pp. 132–138: professional switcher effects, time-base correctors, television stations, Babylon 5 and Foundation Imaging’s move to Windows machines in summer 1995.
- Wikipedia, “NewTek” (web, secondary): the TriCaster in 2005 and the purchase by Vizrt in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek