It never made it past prototype, There was also going to be a daughter card for the cpu and some sort of bridge to connect the toaster up.
A bunch of boards were made before everybody had to admit they legally probably couldn’t produce these.
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NewTek claimed a toaster could replace “hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment”. Us regular Amiga nerds had no idea what they were talking about; we could only assume studio pros understood that. Now, I believe they were talking about the Quantel Paintbox, a completely different can of amazing, and also pretty forgotten. DextersLab2013 has been working on those.
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No rat’s nest of 30AWG jump wires? Some prototype!
(And thank you for your awesome post.)
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No rat’s nest of 30AWG jump wires? Some prototype!
LOL, There was one of those but these cards were a bit past that. The cpu daughter card that isn’t in these pictures one had a ton bodges on it.
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Did someone say… toaster?
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Sweet, almost no glue chips.
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Somehow? You mean obviously by burning each frame into a different slice of bread, slide by slide. I’ve already perfected the system; the problem is playback. Too many crumbs and the viewer gets jammed.
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So is todayAmiga day on BB?
Lets hops so!
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Plus the ban on fully automatic toasting systems for domestic use really screwed any chance of getting the technology developed and to market at a reasonable price point.
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Back in the day, when I worked for the short-lived MicroPACE UK, I headed up a very small team of people trying to make a PAL Video Toaster. It wasn’t a new card, merely the existing NTSC Toaster in an Amiga A3000T with two TBC cards. It only had one PAL input and one PAL output (via the TBC cards) and the quality was subpar to say the least (at a higher price). There were so many people that wanted one, we even had London councils eager to buy the monster we made, but the quality just wasn’t good enough. It did mean that I ended up with an A3000T, still my favourite computer of all time 
[Mumblesomething] years ago I was at an electronics show in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. Many of the computer exhibitors were promoting their video software by showing tapes of what they could do. The Video Toaster booth had a professional video camera on a tripod at their table. They would do framegrabs of people passing by and use those to demonstrate a near real time special effect.
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No kidding. The do-gooders always say ‘even an army mess hall doesn’t need 30 slices per second’ so we get stuck with 4 slices per second, which looks like a bad 80s anime video.
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Kikki Stockhammer!
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So cool, but those aren’t bodge wires at least - that’s just how they did things back then.
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That is indeed - I saw her at the IBC show in Amsterdam this September, still working for Newtek.
(I was with DPS back then, we produced what I believe was the first personal computer based full rate SD digital video recorder/player, the PAR. Got a lot of use on Babylon 5 and many other shows)
By the time we got to an HD product (the DPS Hollywood) it used 4 x 9GB SCSI drives in an external stackable case - can’t remember the manufacturer, may have been Micropolis, but I know at one IBC show we were putting beercans on top to cool them down 
OMG: I don’t do ego surfing, but I just found a press release and quote from me - I love the internet:
My baby!
I was also in the gear biz and the Toaster reduced my sales of more expensive AB Roll and higher priced Non Linear systems, but it did open the way for more people to make videos. My favorite of the inexpensive systems was the Fast Video Machine which I thought was insanely low priced for it’s quality and many innovative features. It controlled decks, had on-card TBCs and later had a very nice DVR. The interface was beautiful. The inferior Toaster had far too much momentum and Pinnacle evntually bought Fast and upped the price considerably and the really nice software eventually went to Avid.
I remember all these well. I started out in R&D for a high end broadcast manufacturer, and even now the industry is still going through cycles of lower cost gear -> increased functionality to keep the cost high as technology gets more sophisticated -> commoditisation of the high tech -> lower cost gear.
But ultimately how much processing power do you need to produce good quality media? It’s starting to resemble the evolution of multiblade shaving gear - 5 blades? Bah! We got 7! HD? no no no you need 4k UHD… no, 8k!
And now Cisco, HP, Amazon, Microsoft et al are eating big chunks of our lunch… just do it in the cloud! It’s only video, how difficult is that! Yeah right…
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