The Apple Computer Inc Macintosh has long fascinated the television production equipment world, because it means that many of the functions that previously required specialised equipment costing $500,000 or be achieved with a specially equipped Macintosh for a tenth of that price. Commodore International Ltd’s Amiga has many of the features that attracted the television industry to the Macintosh and is even cheaper, and now a Topeka, Kansas company has moved to make the Amiga the latest star of the small screen. Newtek Inc didn’t want to give away what it was doing, so it dubbed its development the Video Toaster, and now that it’s available as a product, the bizarre name has stuck. According to the New York Times, it consists of one multi-media expansion board – for which the company had to design its own four-chip RISC set – and eight floppy disks of software and brings a low cost solution to the problem of manipulating video for special effects, captioning and creating animation that looks three-dimensional. Aimed primarily at independent film makers and producers of business, promotional and educational videos, the Video Toaster costs just $1,600 on top of the cost of the Amiga. The main attraction is the number of different facilities – all separately available at a greater cost – that it combines in a single package, features like the ability to cut and fade between different video sources, and a digital video program that enables 132 different special effects to be created. The three-dimensional animation program enables things like zooming logos to be created, and it has a character generator, and a frame grabber for freezing and storing individual frames. The Video Toaster is cheap enough that it can be it is being sold by Amiga distributors, and according to the Times, some observers believe it could do for the Amiga in the US what desktop publishing did for the Mac. All of which suggests that in a year or two, aspiring pop and rock groups won’t be able to get by with a demonstration audio tape to land that recording contract – they’ll have to create their own promotional video.
