Truth about amiga in video editing

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

So now there's two trolls and flamebaiters... Great.

First rule: kolla is always right

Second rule: if not return to first rule



@Amigo79

You are joining an amiga forum in 2018 just to moan about someone who said something wrong or at least too enthusiastic to you in the 90s and made you looking silly?

Sounds a little weired and only like trolling

@Photon

To me it sounds reasonable that someone uses hardware/software where it was best of. And I would raise another question... if there was no desktop video market where amiga was used why all that partly very expensive hardware and software in that field? All developers and companies doing it for fun? It is a little strange that people now try to rewrite history even in the few fields where amiga was successful

[kolla]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

You are joining an amiga forum in 2018 just to moan about someone who said something wrong or at least too enthusiastic to you in the 90s

I think the source of such misinformation often was British Amiga magazines, as they were exaggerating east and west about all kinds of stuff. German magazines were a lot more sober.

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by kolla

I think the source of such misinformation often was British Amiga magazines, as they were exaggerating east and west about all kinds of stuff. German magazines were a lot more sober.

I do not know british magazines too much

In the german magazines I read noone ever claimed that amiga "dominated" the desktop video market. It was a low cost alternative to much more expensive solutions on other platforms and it was partly used for professional work, expecially in combination with (expensive) special hardware like those from NewTek (expecially in the 80s)

[roondar]

Originally Posted by kolla

Oh really, so all you have been posting has been off topic since the very start. Good to know.

*plonk* as we used to say back in the days.

It's funny what a day off and rereading a thread can do.

You're right, I did initially state video editing in my posts, I actually thought I didn't but I did. This is indeed wrong, the Amiga was not a powerhouse editing tool.

My apologies. I intended to write about the use of Video Toasters/Lightwave as effects/render tools and the use of Amiga's as handy PAL/NTSC compatible outputs for animations and stills, but ended up not doing so. Live and learn I guess.

As for the rest of my eventually overheated comments, I guess I felt that the use the Amiga did get was worth a different qualifier than you did. Oh well, subjectiveness at work and maybe I did/do feel that there was a bigger role for the system than there really was.

[Amigo79]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I think this is your problem. No-one has said that the Amiga had any dominant position in video editing. The Video Toaster was not used for video editing. It was not a non-linear editing solution because non-linear editing was not possible outside of laboratories when it was made.

Let go of the editing argument.

with the flyer the toaster became a non linear editing system

Also I said the sense of my post is expanded to the entire movie production,
not only the editing.

And also,YES,a lot of amiga fan boy on bbs,magazines said amiga was the dominator of video market

[Amigo79]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

I do not know british magazines too much

It was a low cost alternative to much more expensive solutions on other platforms and it was partly used for professional work, expecially in combination with (expensive) special hardware like those from NewTek (expecially in the 80s)

exactly what I think

[Amigo79]

@Amigo79

You are joining an amiga forum in 2018 just to moan about someone who said something wrong or at least too enthusiastic to you in the 90s and made you looking silly?

On amiga websites online in 2018 there is written that TERMINATOR 2 MORPH SCENES was did with amiga...........

Also,that is not somoneone,but there was lots of people saying that "movies are did with the amiga"

[Foebane]

To be honest, in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, when Spock is having his memory tested on a three-screen transparent screen computer on Vulcan, I always thought that plain OCS/ECS Amiga graphics were used to portray the computer's visuals in the questions it asked Spock. Unfortunately, it turns out that may not have been the case, but I thought so because the graphics certainly have an Amiga "look" to them, but I can't find any info verifying that.

And even more bad news about that movie and the Amiga, as an Amiga was originally meant to be used by Scotty as he shows the 20th century plastics company boss how to manufacture "transparent aluminium", but Commodore refused to loan an Amiga for use in the movie unless the studio bought it, and Apple were happy to do so, so the famous "hello computer" line was directed at an Apple Mac instead.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Foebane

To be honest, in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, when Spock is having his memory tested on a three-screen transparent screen computer on Vulcan, I always thought that plain OCS/ECS Amiga graphics were used to portray the computer's visuals in the questions it asked Spock. Unfortunately, it turns out that may not have been the case, but I thought so because the graphics certainly have an Amiga "look" to them, but I can't find any info verifying that.

Cheer up, it may still be one... Just because you can't find the info now doesn't mean it isn't one. Obviously, it also doesn't mean you can prove it is one. So it's bit like a Schrodinger's Amiga - it's state unknown until we can know for sure

Or in short: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

(incidentally, I always thought it looked really Amiga OCS like as well, but we'll probably never know for sure now)

[Amigo79]

To prove I am not a troll,here an evidence that amiga has been used for seaquest.

I was exalted when I seen a screenshot of this on an amiga magazine.

The intro of commodore amiga for seaquest!

[ Show youtube player ]

a thread of this forum
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=32509

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Amigo79

with the flyer the toaster became a non linear editing system

Also I said the sense of my post is expanded to the entire movie production,
not only the editing.

And also,YES,a lot of amiga fan boy on bbs,magazines said amiga was the dominator of video market

I think this is why you have to look at all the steps of video production. The most important step is digital video production as I wrote. Even movies that were digitally mastered in some way, always had to be output to analog film because the theaters had no way of showing a digital movie until a decade ago.

Also, a new school of digital film workers had to become professional. It seems The Phantom Menace in 1999 is the first movie that broke with the old processes in a major way.

You can still show a movie clip on a computer, and this happened earlier as we all know.

Some movie formats were established from earlier Multimedia clip formats. Quicktime is AFAIK the only format that has been long-lived and kept its name. But there were many formats, and now we watch descendants of the work of MPEG.

I would say that there is some weight behind the argument that Amiga dominated Multimedia. It was certainly a pioneer, with many innovations before other major companies. Mac was not on the forefront here. PC became a Multimedia platform with the release of Windows 95, before this MM on PC was an expensive curiosity that simply didn't work well at all for consumers.

Amiga was pretty much alone in TV broadcasting, titling, and FX. Sure, the big studios had already bought much more expensive systems, but Amiga would have had some years of greatness here in all NTSC countries. The reason was that no other platform worked directly with the NTSC signal frequencies. Steve Wozniaks understood this and mentions in a BYTE magazine how he would like to build a similar system to the Amiga, but just for video. I'll see if I can find the article.

As mentioned you can render on anything, so no domination there, although there were mature 3D packages on Amiga quite early.

I think desktop video editing as we know it started growing in 1994 and was relatively mature 5 years later. This should mean that Amiga lost that race. Even for big studios, where they were 5 years before Desktop, limits of processing, storage and above all output of film resolution frames would reduce this to two years, I think. (This is speculation from comparing SGI to Screamer.)

Among all these reasons and observations, I would say that Amiga did largely not succeed in the professional domain, because professionals also have to "get it". I think for TV production, a lot of professionals did get it and it's there it can claim success.

I suppose it could be untrue that the clips for those TV series were done on Amiga. But it could also be true that many more clips, intros and titling everyone's seen on American TV channels were done on Amiga than even us Amiga fans can find mentions of in computer magazines.

[Amigo79]

thanks

[nexus]

well i have a room full of amiga's from berkeley california that were used for video production through 80's/90's
http://www.eastbaymediacenter.org/eq...%20sales.shtml
10@ Amiga 2000
1@ Amiga 2500
1@ Amiga 4000
2@ Amiga 1000
1@ Amiga 500
Amiga facility, training and editing in the '80's -'90's
http://www.eastbaymediacenter.org/history.shtml
some were also owned by maxis guessing they were dev units for simcity as they have the orgnal maxis logo barcode sticker on the back
anyway all but the a1000's had video toasters
they still have whats on the HDD's just havent went through them all yet
few i have they have all kinds of soft used for this stuff and still projects saved from when last used

also about every news channel used amigas here how you can still find them fully loaded a4000t etc etc
also old cable program guides were using them as character generators like the alphagen magicbox

[Amigo79]

nice,thanks

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Amigo79

with the flyer the toaster became a non linear editing system

Yes, and it was not the only NLE solution on the Amiga. We also had VLab Motion/DraCoMotion and DPS Personal Animation Recorder. Nevertheless, that was a field in which the Amiga received a lot of competition from other makes since there is no obvious advantage in the Amiga architecture for that use case; any computer is basically just the environment used to control your capture and video processing cards which do the heavy lifting.

Originally Posted by Amigo79

Also I said the sense of my post is expanded to the entire movie production, not only the editing.

The Amiga's role in movie production was quite small. Movies are made on celluloid and have much higher resolution demands than broadcast PAL/NTSC. It was mainly used for 3D work (Disney's Aladdin comes to mind), and only as long as Amiga performance was good enough.

Originally Posted by Amigo79

And also,YES,a lot of amiga fan boy on bbs,magazines said amiga was the dominator of video market

They do have a case. There was no cheaper machine with genlock capabilities. If you had a small video production firm, you probably had an Amiga. If you had a larger video production firm, you might still have an Amiga as part of your machine park. If you had a local TV station, you most probably had one or several Amigas for titling, effects, logos etc. If you had a bigger TV station, you probably had several for specific studios or programmes in addition to your Quantel Paintboxes and so forth. If you were an anime fansubber, you used an Amiga. If you wanted to add effects and titles to your home movies, you used an Amiga. If you ran a presentation system, you used an Amiga with Scala or any number of smaller OEM solutions.

So I think it makes sense to declare the Amiga the dominating force in desktop video until the mid-nineties, at least.

[Retro1234]

They were still used in India untill fairly recently with genlock on TV.

The fact they had composite output probably made genlock stuff easier than most other computers.

And the. Fact a company went to the trouble to produce a series of Clones -Draco just for this purpose shows it was used.

Probably mostly in America but who knows what for????

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

However the Amigas multi-tasking OS does mean that the Amiga is still perfectly usable in many respects as a desktop computer to this day. I'm not sure the same could be said of a PC running DOS or early versions of windows.

Come off it... Perfectably usable for what?


The Amiga fails miserably at most tasks modern PC's are used for.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Come off it... Perfectably usable for what?


The Amiga fails miserably at most tasks modern PC's are used for.

You are using it wrong!

[d4rk3lf]

@Amigo79

First of all, how can anybody makes you feel less love for Amiga, because they give you a false facts? That's a completely strange feeling to me. If I love something, it's because it is, for what it is... I cant feel less love, and would only blame myself if I get that feel...

Second, what do you mean by non linear video editing? That was not existing at the time, as Photon says. Much much later, TV station switched to editing on computer, because the speed and HD's of the computers were impossible to use, except for the intro's of the TV shows, that was transfered back on tape.
In Serbia, all TV stations transitioned from analog to digital editing around at 2000-2002 (I was an editor on TV station at that time, so I know...).. Maybe other, more advanced countries, transitioned year or 2 earlier, but in the 90's, there were no such thing like digital editing (as far as I know). All major stuff were edited analog, and even there's some effects, or stuff... you do it on the computer, and bring it back to analog.

Now listen... there were some program on Amiga, that was like predecessor of digital editing, and it's name is: Skala.
Maybe your friend (that hurts you so much) in the 90's thought on that.
It was heavily used by the TV stations, because it allowed making images with pictures and text, and playing them at equal interval (with some transitions in between), and even text could be animated, if my memory serves me well.
So, for TV station, all you had to have is one Amiga 500, to place animated text anywhere on the screen, ad lot's of other stuff.

As for the effects:
I've also heard that Amiga was used in Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park, but don't forget that it was used for famous Michael Jackson song: Black and White (morphing at the end). I can't confirm that 100%, and I am lazy to google right now, but I've read several times about it
As for Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park... not sure where Amiga was used in those films, but common sense says that Amiga was already lacking in 3D at that time, but was perfect for 2D stuff, so my guess is that morphing scenes (that was 2D basically) were done with Amiga... so... much more in T2, then in JP.

Also, Iv'e heard that The Abyss movie was pretty much complete done with Amiga (even 3D stuff)

[kolla]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Second, what do you mean by non linear video editing? That was not existing at the time, as Photon says.

Yes it existed, do some research.

And is SCALA, not "Skala", I know, because I am Norwegian, lol

Also, Iv'e heard that The Abyss movie was pretty much complete done with Amiga (even 3D stuff)

So you did, huh? And now you are spreading that rumour around? Have you checked?

Have you seen the documentary?
[ Show youtube player ]

Have you done some research?
https://www.ilm.com/vfx/the-abyss/

Thank you so much for demonstrating exactly why Amigo79 made this thread... because of people like you, who "heard" things.