Back in 1990, a revolution began in the PC industry as the Video Toaster began shipping for the first time. The Video Toaster was an unusual name describing the marriage of hardware and software into a system that gave Amiga users the ability to create desktop video production.

In recent days, NewTek has released a completely re-engineered upgrade of the Video Toaster, version 2, which was announced at NAB in April. Among the many updates, it offers many software based upgrades, such as the ability to work with both NTSC and PAL video sources.

Paul Lara, Product Manager for NewTek, gave me the inside scoop on the new version. He said: “The Video Toaster is a hardware and software solution, hardware in that it is a ¾ length 32 bit PCI card, but all that card does is to get video in and out of the computer. It is simply a capture card. All of the magic that is happening within the Video Toaster is done in CPU. It is software based and runs on Windows 2000."

“When the Video Toaster first came out, personal computers weren't fast enough to play video at all, so they had to rely on a lot of custom chips and proprietary hardware to make it happen. But now, an off the shelf Pentium 4 computer running Windows 2000 is powerful enough to play uncompressed video. The advantage for the end user is that the Video Toaster is software based, so we can make changes pretty quickly. We just write new code and ship it.”

Nathan: Is the capture card proprietary or are there other cards that one can use?

Paul: “No, it is a proprietary card. Essentially, the Video Toaster is a TV Studio in a box. Everything that you would expect to find in a TV studio is now sitting on your desktop, ready to go. You have live switching, live chromakeying, hundreds of real-time transitions, both 2D and 3D effects and painting, layering and compositing with a NewTek package called Aura, which is a video paint package. The Video Toaster also comes bundled with Lightwave Express, for creating 3D models and then animating them. It also comes with Speed Razor 4.8 for non-linear editing and Toaster Edit, our own non-linear editor.”