![]() ![]() Jenison favored slow growth and sticking with the Amiga, while Montgomery wanted to branch out and make it available on other platforms. As Commodore floundered in the late 1990s, NewTek struggled as well, with conflicts between the two leaders Tim Jenison and Paul Montgomery stalling the growth of the company. Despite being one of the main reasons that people bought Amiga computers, NewTek had a difficult relationship with Commodore, the company that produced the Amiga. The Toaster had had an achilles heel, though. Actor Wil Wheaton (then just off Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before his current geek god incarnation) ended up working for the company in Topeka, Kansas, working as a quality tester and product evangelist for a time, before he decided to return to acting. This version received enthusiastic endorsements from users like Penn Jilette and Tony Hawke, not because they were paid to endorse it, but because they were Toaster users themselves. The Toaster continued to be a popular product through the 1990s, and an updated version released in 1994 added more features, using the dedicated video slot of the recently released Amiga 4000 computer. Big networks liked the speed as well: NBC used it to produce promos for their 1991 season. #LIGHTWAVE 3D DONGLE PROFESSIONAL#In particular, the growing number of cable TV networks loved it: although it lacked some of the polish of the professional tools that the networks used, it was cheap and could be operated by one person, keeping the staff costs down. ![]() Its combination of low price and powerful features created new opportunities for people who had previously had no access to video tools like this, and it quickly became a popular device to use, both on the fringes of the TV industry and in the mainstream. Not surprisingly, the Video Toaster proved to be a huge hit. The Revolution Video that Newtek used to promote the Video Toaster, completely created on the Video Toaster. It replaced many thousands of dollars of equipment: Newtek claimed at the time that the Toaster and Amiga combination (which cost about $4000) could replace hundreds of thousands of dollars of professional video equipment. That might sound simple to a modern computer user, but at the time it was revolutionary. When you tie this in with some custom circuits, you get a device that can produce a standard NTSC TV signal, ready for broadcast. This was due to a unique aspect of the Amiga computer: it ran at a frequency compatible with the US NTSC TV signal, which meant it could work with these signals easier than other computers. It could play back video files, so you could mix live video with pre-recorded video, all smoothly outputted to a video signal that could be fed straight into most TV stations. It could also tweak the video, adding color effects or zoom transitions that were beloved of 1980's news broadcasts. NewTek understood the potential of this home computer: when combined with some custom circuits, it could become a live video switcher, allowing the user to switch between several different cameras and overlay graphics on top of the live video. One of the things that made the Toaster possible was the Amiga computer. #LIGHTWAVE 3D DONGLE SOFTWARE#The origional Video Toaster and software installation disks / Amiga A good early history of NewTek was produced by Wired Magazine. Jenison founded NewTek, and Montogomery came onboard as a Vice President to produce the Toaster. Paul Montgomery was a California entrepreneur who was impressed by the Amiga, and who knew an electronic engineer called Brad Carvey (brother of the comedian Dana Carvey, who claimed that his brother Brad was the inspiration for the Garth character from Wayne’s World). Jenison had produced the first video capture device for the Amiga computer, called DigiView, and an accompanying paint program called DigiPaint. Launched in 1990, the Toaster was the brainchild of three people: Tim Jenison, Paul Montgomery and Brad Carvey. By doing this, our gadget set the stage for the cable TV and Internet broadcasting revolution: the Video Toaster. However, one gadget changed all that, making it possible to produce good-looking TV shows with multiple cameras, titles and special effects without a big network budget. Or at least it used to be : in the 1980s, it cost a small fortune to get the equipment to shoot and broadcast your own TV show that looked as good as the big networks. Television is a complicated, expensive business. ![]()
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