| This article is abridged from an article printed in the February 1999 issue of
VIDEOMAKER and written by Larry Lemm. For any videographer toiling on a Pentium-class editing system who ever wished hoped or prayed that someday, somehow, AMIGA would break from the ranks of cultishobscurity and back into the mainstream, take heart. The pieces are in place, and if everything goes as planned, the time is near. Way back in the middle of the 1980's, a little known computer company called Amiga set out to make the best game machine in the history of personal computers, fortunately Amiga also made the the most advanced multimedia computer available at the time. When it was released in the mid-80's the Amiga 1000, with a 7MHz chip could capture full-frame, 30 frames per second video. By comparison, 200+MHz Intel/Windows computers still cannot capture full-frame video at 30fps without the help of a video capture card and a speedy hard drive. When Amiga introduced the Amiga 1000 at the 1985 Comedex trade show, attendees were amazed at the 3D graphics, and the new machine quickly gained favor as THE multimedia computer. Commodore bought Amiga and began pushing the introduction of new models. vIdeographers began to discover the amazing video editing powers of the Amiga. In 1990, Newtek introduced the Video Toaster for the Amiga. The Video Toaster is a four-inut video switcher(mixer) with a built in character generator, special effects generator and Light Wave, a professional 3D animation program that is still being used today to produce animation for network broadcast programs. The Video Toaster turned the Amiga into a broadcast quality studio. Five years later NewTek introduced the Toaster Flyer which allowed for a complete nonlinear editing enviroment. However things were not all that rosy for the Amiga crew. Click Here For NEXT Page |