Video Toaster

The related software tools support video switching, luma keying, character generation, animation, and image manipulation.

[1] Together, the hardware and software provided, for a few thousand U.S. dollars, a video editing suite that rivaled the output of contemporary (i.e. early 1990s) professional systems costing ten times as much.

It allowed small studios to produce high-quality material and resulted in a cottage industry for video production not unlike the success of the Macintosh in the desktop publishing (DTP) market only a few years earlier.

[2] Other parts of the original software package were spun off as stand-alone products, notably LightWave 3D, and achieved success on their own.

The company also produced what is essentially a portable pre-packaged version of the Video Toaster along with all the computer hardware needed, as the TriCaster.

The card has several BNC connectors in the rear, which accepts four video input sources and provided two outputs (preview and program).

[6] Aside from simple fades, dissolves, and cuts, the Video Toaster has a large variety of character generation, overlays and complex animated switching effects.

These effects are in large part performed with the help of the native Amiga graphics chipset, which is synchronized to the NTSC video signals.

The frame delays passing through the Toaster and other low-cost video switchers make precise editing a frustrating endeavor.

[citation needed] The Toaster was also the first such video device designed around a general-purpose personal computer that is capable of delivering broadcast quality NTSC signals.

[citation needed] As such, during the early 1990s the Toaster was widely used by consumer Amiga owners, desktop video enthusiasts, and local television studios, and was even used during The Tonight Show regularly to produce special effects for comedy skits.

Because of the heavy use of dark blues and greens (for which the NTSC television standard is weak), the external submarine shots in seaQuest DSV could not have made it to air without the use of the ASDG Abekas driver, written specifically to solve this problem by Aaron Avery at ASDG (later Elastic Reality, Inc.).

The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, then famous for Star Trek: The Next Generation, who worked on product testing and quality control.

The Flyer portion of the Video Toaster/Flyer combination is a complete computer of its own, having its own microprocessor and embedded software, which was written by Marty Flickinger.

The Flyer uses a proprietary Wavelet compression algorithm known as VTASC, which was well-regarded at the time for offering better visual quality than comparable motion-JPEG-based nonlinear editing systems.

In 2004, the source code for the Amiga version was publicly released and hosted on DiscreetFX's site Open Video Toaster.

NewTek released a spin-off product, known as the TriCaster, a portable live-production, live-projection, live-streaming, and NLE system.