Truth about amiga in video editing

[kolla]

Originally Posted by hansel75

Then he posts things like "I know that was Macintosh+Avid card to dominate video editing", and "Amiga did NOT dominated the scene of video editing" without any facts/links whatsoever to backup his claims!

Fact is that Video Toaster was NTSC only, which very much limits how dominating Video Toaster could be in video editing.

[Amigo79]

I thank all users for their answers.

Originally Posted by hansel75

Probably because Amigo69 has come into an Amiga group and not introduced himself properly,.........
.......Also stating things like "I was an Amiga fan" gives the feeling he is not an Amiga fan anymore, so why join an Amiga group to post Anti Amiga statements then?, unless he is trolling that is.

.

Excuse me for the error.

I am Italian,I am 39 years old,I studied Electronic and telecomunications,(but not the university)
I live in La Spezia.

I am an amiga fan still now because
Amiga1200 was the only solution in its price range.
and I was happy of running octamed with paula sound,super stardust 3d tunnel sequence,
universe with his wonderful colors,and watch aga ham8 pictures and watch demos.


I say I WAS an amiga fan because I am no more a FANATIC Amiga fan.


I did this post because fanatics damaged my amiga passion.
They said me PC had no multitasking,and Like a fool I told everywhere that pc had no multitasking
damaging myself.

They said me Amiga had a LOT of coprocessors and an exotic architecture,
,when the coprocessors are three,and the calculation
are ever made by a normal motorola 680x0.

They said me amiga dominated in graphic.

The commodore 64 in 1982 had 16 colors,the vga in 1987-88 256 colors,I dont wonder the amiga 1000 in 1985 had 32 colors.

In 1987 there was the macintosh II,professionals used it.
The atari ST with cubase was used more than amiga in music.

[kolla]

@Amigo79

I hear you, there are way too many people in the Amiga community that are how you describe, some of them even go out of their way editing wikipedia articles to fit their fictive conception of history.

[roondar]

@Amiga79
Well, it's never fun when fanatics try to make you believe weird stuff, but that doesn't mean that everything you where told was wrong.

Originally Posted by Amigo79

I thank all users for their answers.
I did this post because fanatics damaged my amiga passion.
They said me PC had no multitasking,and Like a fool I told everywhere that pc had no multitasking
damaging myself.

From a practical standpoint, those people where in fact right. Multitasking on the PC was not the standard. Single tasking was.

Now, there where a few options (OS/2, Unix & Linux), but those had a tiny market during the 'Amiga years'. So yes, the PC did have multitasking ability, but almost no one had the software that unlocked it.

Almost all PC's ran DOS or DOS/Windows 3.x during the 1980's-mid 1990's. Which could not multitask.

Contrast this with the Amiga, which all had multitasking from day one.

They said me Amiga had a LOT of coprocessors and an exotic architecture,
,when the coprocessors are three,and the calculation
are ever made by a normal motorola 680x0.

The Amiga really does have a rather exotic architecture. Even though it only has 3 coprocessors and uses a 68000. The amount of custom chips or what processor is used doesn't define whether or not something is exotic.

One of the ways you can tell it's exotic is that it's not so easy to port something to or from the Amiga to another system (from the same timeperiod).

Not sure what to add here!?

They said me amiga dominated in graphic.

The commodore 64 in 1982 had 16 colors,the vga in 1987-88 256 colors,I dont wonder the amiga 1000 in 1985 had 32 colors.

Well, it kinda did. It could display 32 colours, but also 64 and 4096 straight out of the box. No extra hardware required. It had dual layered graphics when no other computer had it.

Not only that but the earlier 8-bit computers such as the C64 where far more limited in how they could display their colours. Compared to those computer and what people actually had in their PC's, the Amiga was miles better.

I mean, just check out how many Amiga painting/animation programs existed back in the day. Even though the PC dominated the market. This happened because you could do very good graphics on the Amiga very easily.

That's not to say there where no other platforms that did graphics well. But the Amiga graphics market was quite big really.

--
It really all depends on how you define dominate.

If you mean it to be: the Amiga was the best possible computer for graphics in 1985-1987, then no - it wasn't. If you mean it to be: the Amiga made high quality computer graphics available to a very large audience, then yes - it did.

In 1987 there was the macintosh II,professionals used it.
The atari ST with cubase was used more than amiga in music.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the Mac II thing - I'm pretty sure there where far better things than either the Mac II or the Amiga for graphics back in 1987.

After all, there where 24 bit graphics cards as early as 1985. So a mere 256 colours (from the Mac II) was not going to cut it for professional graphics.

My point here being that looking at the professional market is disingenuous at best, because neither the PC, nor the Atari, nor the Amiga, nor the Mac where used there in great quantities back in 1987.

[Amigo79]

[ Show youtube player ]

Its not good as Amiga,but there is multitasking in 1985 on windows 1.0

Its cooperative,non pre emptive,but for the user there is multitasking

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Amigo79

[ Show youtube player ]

Its not good as Amiga,but there is multitasking in 1985 on windows 1.0

Its cooperative,non pre emptive,but for the user there is multitasking

Fair enough, there is cooperative multitasking in Windows 1.0.

It's severely limited (no matter how much memory you have, a maximum of 640KB can be used for multitasking processes and the entire Windows environment/GUI together) and doesn't work all that well, but yes it technically exists.

However, from a user perspective (at least, as far as I experienced it) there is no real multitasking at all under Windows*. It's all nice to have a few desktop widgets like a clock running 'multitasking', but the vast majority of PC applications I saw or used back then where either plain DOS or didn't actually multitask under Windows.

I certainly never experienced it as multitasking - most applications I saw under Windows barely supported you switching between them, let alone run together. It sure was great fun when you print out that document you wrote and the whole 'multitasking' computer stops you doing anything else until the printing is done.

Now, to be fair, Amiga multitasking has it's own set of problems - but it actually did multitask without jumping through hoops and praying the developer allowed it.

*) prior to Windows 95/NT anyway. Which is, incidently, when Microsoft made huge marketing campaigns about how it was now finally possible to multitask under Windows.

[Nosferax]

Multitasking was nice, but it was overrated and crippled without the concept of memory protection and sandboxing. A single ill behaved application could crash the whole system. This was true of both amiga and pc multitasking back in the days. But the Amiga was really the first home computer who made a real use of it and sold itself as a multitasking platform.

As for video editing, all the TV broadcasters here used amigas in their studio for genlock and other functions. A friend of mine use to work for Radio-Canada (french counterpart to the CBC) and used A2000 and A4000 in the early 90's before moving to Avid system later on.

And for those complaining about the fact that the Toaster was NTSC... I don't want to be rude but in the 80's and early 90's the biggest TV market was the USA, not Norway... And I don't think the situation as changes all that much since back then. I can count on the fingers of one hand the time I've watched some TV serie from the Scandinavian countries and the was on PBS, not a mainstream TV channel.

[drHirudo]

The Amiga was strong in the video market in 1994, that's why the Draco was created when C= went bankrupt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DraCo
Edit: Additional reference about MovieShop - https://forums.creativecow.net/docs/...867618&pview=t

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

As for video editing, all the TV broadcasters here used amigas in their studio for genlock and other functions.

Yes, that's what I was saying, Amiga was use a lot more for that than for actual video editing.

Anyways, this should be really simple to solve, just a matter of asking NewTek about how many Amiga toaster/flyer systems they sold.

[Nosferax]

Originally Posted by kolla

Yes, that's what I was saying, Amiga was use a lot more for that than for actual video editing.

Anyways, this should be really simple to solve, just a matter of asking NewTek about how many Amiga toaster/flyer systems they sold.

Don't wait for us, go for it and ask!

Joke aside, keep in mind that it was the begining of computer video editing, not a well established market. It was the star of the transition from analog editing deck to computer editing. The Amiga started the ball rolling.

[Amigo79]

I remember the draco I was 15 16 years old

[roondar]

Originally Posted by kolla

Yes, that's what I was saying, Amiga was use a lot more for that than for actual video editing.

Anyways, this should be really simple to solve, just a matter of asking NewTek about how many Amiga toaster/flyer systems they sold.

Well, I don't know how many they sold in total, but Wired does have a 1994 article about the toaster on their site that claims they sold 60.000 of them by the end of 1993.

https://www.wired.com/1994/05/flying-toasters/

[saimon69]

Hey Amigo79, i did some extra work for a local video service (PubliService, Marotta,Italy) around 1993/1994 when i was younger, together with a friend of mine, that was doing commercials and show opening animations (2D and 3D) using Amiga for local TVs - i was providing musics for the aforementioned using Protracker. Now, referring at what was my local experience in europe around half 90s and therefore no Toaster around: Amiga dominance was in my opinion a "de facto" one, helped by the RGB output, the ease to use genlocks and the availability of "parallel" software (but the official one was less priced too compared to PC and MACs); of course big names wanted not just something that did just work like Amigas but also had influences from what the work environment was; if the owner was more print oriented and the video service was a Mac Shop then you will see them using Macs, if the place was sold to PC you will see used programs like 3D studio and such but at the end the low cost of Amiga and high quality of output was indeed regarded, there were some around (if you remember Massimo Tarabella was working at Mediaset and using Lightwave for openings and commercials too) - maybe even behind the shiny PCs - and as such you did see lot of small local channels using Scala until HD and digital came out, and maybe still they use it now.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

Multitasking was nice, but it was overrated and crippled without the concept of memory protection and sandboxing. A single ill behaved application could crash the whole system.

Nonsense. It just meant that programmers couldn't get away with producing buggy code that trashed memory.

In the early days there was a lot of buggy code which deserved criticism. My first Amiga was an A1000 with kickstart 1.1. That system was not very stable, but with Kickstart 1.3 it was much better. In 1991 I got an A3000, which had an MMU so I could run Enforcer. I then implemented a policy of zero tolerance towards buggy apps - any program which brought up Enforcer hits and couldn't be fixed was dumped, even if the hits were 'benign'.

With tools such as Enforcer and Mungwall it is easy to find and fix buggy code, as well as provide some system protection. Today there is no excuse for releasing apps that cause Gurus or trash memory!

I often run my Amiga 1200 for many hours or even days at a time, typically playing music in the background while I program and debug machine code, browse the Internet etc. Crashes are extremely rare, and only occur when I do something stupid (like accidentally running two debugging sessions at the same time and then quitting both of them. Monam doesn't like this). You can't shut down a stuck program, but you can lower its priority so it uses no CPU time - and to free up resources you just do a quick reboot.

My PC takes over a minute to boot up to a usable state, and even longer to start the network. While individual apps don't generally crash the system they can slow it down, lock files, make the desktop unresponsive etc. And of course I still loose whatever I was working on. A stuck app can be closed down with Task Manager, but this can take quite a while if the program is hogging the CPU. Sometimes a program will refuse to quit when shutting the machine down, so the machine hangs for several minutes or even refuses to turn off (unlike Amiga you can't just turn the power off, unless you don't mind temporary files cluttering up your hard drive). All this means that memory protection is more valuable in Windows because rebooting is not something you want to do often.

Memory protection and sandboxing is virtually essential for a multi-user operating system, but it should not be needed in a personal computer. In fact it often just gets in the way, making life harder for the user and more complicated for programmers. It doesn't make ill behaved applications run any better either - trashing memory that doesn't belong to you is still unacceptable! If the Amiga had full memory protection it would have been slower and more resource-hungry, which would have made it more expensive and/or less attractive for the 'home' market and so probably would have flopped. Macs didn't have it either, but nobody complained because Mac programs were well written and didn't crash.

The PC had to run in protected mode just to access enough RAM to run Windows properly, then they used it to create virtual memory on the hard drive (which causes a huge performance hit even in modern systems). Far from crippling the Amiga, not having memory protection allowed it to do more with less. OTOH PC's were crippled without it - compare the performance of an 8MHz 8086 running Windows 3.x to a similarly equipped Amiga 500.

And true preemptive multitasking certainly isn't 'overrated'. The Amiga does it particularly well, and compared to other popular platforms of the day its advantages were clear. Nobody who ran a Mac or PC could deny that the Amiga was much better at actually running multiple apps at the same time, as opposed to just switching between them. Windows 95 was the first popular OS to rival the Amiga's multitasking, but it needed far more resources and still wasn't as smooth. Then to improve multimedia performance they bypassed most of the OS and Hello system crash!

[Nosferax]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Nonsense. It just meant that programmers couldn't get away with producing buggy code that trashed memory.

In the early days there was a lot of buggy code which deserved criticism. My first Amiga was an A1000 with kickstart 1.1. That system was not very stable, but with Kickstart 1.3 it was much better. In 1991 I got an A3000, which had an MMU so I could run Enforcer. I then implemented a policy of zero tolerance towards buggy apps - any program which brought up Enforcer hits and couldn't be fixed was dumped, even if the hits were 'benign'.

With tools such as Enforcer and Mungwall it is easy to find and fix buggy code, as well as provide some system protection. Today there is no excuse for releasing apps that cause Gurus or trash memory!

I often run my Amiga 1200 for many hours or even days at a time, typically playing music in the background while I program and debug machine code, browse the Internet etc. Crashes are extremely rare, and only occur when I do something stupid (like accidentally running two debugging sessions at the same time and then quitting both of them. Monam doesn't like this). You can't shut down a stuck program, but you can lower its priority so it uses no CPU time - and to free up resources you just do a quick reboot.

My PC takes over a minute to boot up to a usable state, and even longer to start the network. While individual apps don't generally crash the system they can slow it down, lock files, make the desktop unresponsive etc. And of course I still loose whatever I was working on. A stuck app can be closed down with Task Manager, but this can take quite a while if the program is hogging the CPU. Sometimes a program will refuse to quit when shutting the machine down, so the machine hangs for several minutes or even refuses to turn off (unlike Amiga you can't just turn the power off, unless you don't mind temporary files cluttering up your hard drive). All this means that memory protection is more valuable in Windows because rebooting is not something you want to do often.

Memory protection and sandboxing is virtually essential for a multi-user operating system, but it should not be needed in a personal computer. In fact it often just gets in the way, making life harder for the user and more complicated for programmers. It doesn't make ill behaved applications run any better either - trashing memory that doesn't belong to you is still unacceptable! If the Amiga had full memory protection it would have been slower and more resource-hungry, which would have made it more expensive and/or less attractive for the 'home' market and so probably would have flopped. Macs didn't have it either, but nobody complained because Mac programs were well written and didn't crash.

The PC had to run in protected mode just to access enough RAM to run Windows properly, then they used it to create virtual memory on the hard drive (which causes a huge performance hit even in modern systems). Far from crippling the Amiga, not having memory protection allowed it to do more with less. OTOH PC's were crippled without it - compare the performance of an 8MHz 8086 running Windows 3.x to a similarly equipped Amiga 500.

And true preemptive multitasking certainly isn't 'overrated'. The Amiga does it particularly well, and compared to other popular platforms of the day its advantages were clear. Nobody who ran a Mac or PC could deny that the Amiga was much better at actually running multiple apps at the same time, as opposed to just switching between them. Windows 95 was the first popular OS to rival the Amiga's multitasking, but it needed far more resources and still wasn't as smooth. Then to improve multimedia performance they bypassed most of the OS and Hello system crash!

It was overrated for the masses who for the most part ran one bootable application/game at a time, and this applies to all plateform at the time. The workflow was different back then. And compared to the other popular systems of that era, it didn't helped it all that much and multitasking wasn't really all that important to the end users as they jumped ship to the PC and DOS.

The Amiga was my favorite computer but in the North American market its goose was cooked as soon as the cheap PC clone system came down in price which was about 1988/89 in Canada. Friends and fellow students started selling their A500 and A2000 to buy PC for school, work and games. They didn't invest in the A600 or the A3000 and I never saw an AGA machine in the wild or at a store here, only in magazine.

I know that the situation, marketwise, was different in europe, but the fact is that Commodore couldn't survive without the lucrative US market and multitasking wasn't selling Amiga in the US.

[Amigo79]

I thank again all users for the answer

Originally Posted by saimon69

Hey Amigo79, i did some extra work for a local video service (PubliService, Marotta,Italy) around 1993/1994 when i was younger, together with a friend of mine, that was doing commercials and show opening animations (2D and 3D) using Amiga for local TVs - i was providing musics for the aforementioned using Protracker. Now, referring at what was my local experience in europe around half 90s and therefore no Toaster around: Amiga dominance was in my opinion a "de facto" one, helped by the RGB output, the ease to use genlocks and the availability of "parallel" software (but the official one was less priced too compared to PC and MACs); of course big names wanted not just something that did just work like Amigas but also had influences from what the work environment was; if the owner was more print oriented and the video service was a Mac Shop then you will see them using Macs, if the place was sold to PC you will see used programs like 3D studio and such but at the end the low cost of Amiga and high quality of output was indeed regarded, there were some around (if you remember Massimo Tarabella was working at Mediaset and using Lightwave for openings and commercials too) - maybe even behind the shiny PCs - and as such you did see lot of small local channels using Scala until HD and digital came out, and maybe still they use it now.

Thanks very much for the answer.
But if you talk about genlocks,then it is not all digital,non linear video editing

Non linear video editing was for Macs with avid
and low cost video editing with genlocks was for the amiga?

Then is not true that the amiga was used for the best tv series.


When I was young I read on a magazine about the amiga in mediaset
for some opening,but I think as star trek this was another special case.

I have the doubt that in 99% high professionals studios there was pc or mac or sgi,and that the 1% amiga is reported as example of the great amiga domination in the video editing.

Also I am Italian.Ciao.

[kolla]

Amiga was used initially in a few shows, like Babylon 5, but not as much for video editing as it was used for 3D modelling and CGI animation (the pilot and large parts of season 1).

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Amigo79

Then is not true that the amiga was used for the best tv series.

For a large percentage here, if something was made on Amiga, that in itself made it the best TV series or whatever, lol.

[Amigo79]

If they used amiga,was for lightwave,right?
Not for a particular amiga power?

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

It was overrated for the masses who for the most part ran one bootable application/game at a time, and this applies to all plateform at the time. The workflow was different back then. And compared to the other popular systems of that era, it didn't helped it all that much and multitasking wasn't really all that important to the end users as they jumped ship to the PC and DOS.

I'd suggest that it was nothing whatsever to do with whether or not the Amiga or PC were multi-tasking that made people upgrade. It was that the Amiga was a dead end line of computers and wasn't up to the task of running the latest games.


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.