Building a Video Toaster. No, not that one
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- I didn't really have a plan in mind when I started shooting this, so... yeah! Hope you enjoy this mess of a video.
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Late breaking updates!
1)
Regarding the VGA cable wiring, I wanted to clarify that I don't think Newtek screwed up here, they were just in a bind. VGA was the only non proprietary cable you could readily obtain in this era that could handle high quality analog signals - their desire to not make customers depend on them for replacements was valid and probably very appreciated.
but what happens if someone plugs a monitor into the VT card by accident? well, if +10V is on one of the color lines, you might blow out the input amplifier. same for the EDID pin, H/V sync, etc. So the only safe place to put it is a ground pin, because the chances of blowing up _the customer's monitor_ that way are negligible. maybe newtek even current-limited the 10V rail, anticipating this exact scenario, in which case hey, there's really no problem - but even if shorting it out kills the card, at least that's _their device_ that blew up, due to _their decision_ to "misuse" a common connector. that's the right call, because newtek could say "send it back and we'll fix it at our cost," but they _couldn't_ commit to reimburse customers for damaged high-end monitors, it's just not practical.
2)
Regarding the power supply for the breakout box, I overthought things completely. The original VTNT card doesn't have a power input... because it has no BoB connection! You have to add a daughterboard with two more plugs, and while I knew that, I'd never seen one, so it didn't occur to me - the power input is on the daughterboard! So there's really no mystery there.
I think pin 9 (+5V) would have been a more sensible option, in the hopes that things connected to it might be more tolerant than to a short. Even better if they switched their system to actually use 5V instead of 10V. (If they had a few bits and bobs that *really* needed the higher voltage for signalling they could have use a buck converter or similar)
Wikipedia also shows precedent for overvolting this line (the PS55 used +12V), but it is already specced up to 1A at 5V. 5W seems sufficient to run some LEDs, etc. on the break-out box?
Even in the 90s it was pretty common that junk cables would do stupid things like short all the grounds together. So I really feel if they were going to go through the trouble to mention in the manual that a standard vga cable works they should have mentioned needing separate grounds.
@@TheGodOfAllThatWas Yeah that was my take as well, I'm positive this thing was going on even then, so they really owed people a warning
I love learning about things I had no idea about lol.
@@CathodeRayDude I don’t think I have my original cable but I think the one that did come with the toaster cards and the breakout box actually had a few pins missing which would explain a lot
I remember going to a club in the mid 90's with some friends, and not being much of a clubber, I was more interested in their video system. They had fixed cameras, and then people walking through the crowd with cameras and they would do all these psychedelic effects, and all these crazy transitions. I knew about the Video Toaster, so I managed to work my way back to the little production room where the guy doing all the mixing was working, and that's what they were using. I bought him a couple drinks and spent a chunk of the evening learning about how he did what he did while my friends did what they did.
Was this club in East London, South Africa by any chance?
Dudes from Ohio so probably not@@serpentza
@@serpentzastrange to see you here
Watched this whole thing and would 100% watch a "weird stuff I got on eBay" series of shorter, off the cuff videos
I exactly know that feeling you describe in the first 3 minutes :D
I built a 2 meter parabolic dish radio telescope in my front lawn to do hydrogen line observations an it is all great fun and stuff, until you realize there is pretty much just a handful of people in the world you can share that stuff with and suddenly it starts to feel weird.
You'd be surprised how many people would be interested! Sounds interesting to me!
I’d be the guy putting up a tent on your front lawn just to geek out on the thing :)
Holy crap please talk to me about all of that
THANK GOD!!! I've literally been sitting on a bucket in a mechanical room doom scrolling for the last six hours
sounds rough, brother.
@@supernoob17 I get off in a little over an hour. I could literally be at home smoking a blunt right now and my boss would never notice.
mechanical doom scrolling
@@nbarrager smoking this next bowl in your honor, man.
@@supernoob17 we're on the way back to the shop, thirty more minutes!
That bit about EDID compatibility is interesting... I used to have a Logitech racing wheel and pedals, but the cable connecting the pedals to the wheel broke. It was just a DSUB connector, same form factor that VGA uses, so I figured I could splice together a VGA cable. I could never get it to work though, even after I triple-checked the pinout. Turned out, after dissecting the connector, that two of the pins were linked together with a wire! Which shouldn't have been a thing!
i love videos like this! i'd kill for more casual vids in between all the big ones!
Hey, don’t do murder. Not cool.
@@mikewifak Or at least do it at bohemian grove when they are in session.
100%. Could listen to CRD talk all day
same!
Fun fact: That CG dance animation clip @40:30 was created by Dick Van Dyke, who was an avid Lightwave/Toaster user.
The VT[4] was my college career at our university student TV station. Hacked the software to build it into a flypack to do mobile sports productions for the station. Our school's basketball games were covered by us with this setup with 3 cams. I built custom scoreboard graphics controls to do time and scores via a multi button gaming keypad, replay via a shuttle control using the ddr functions. The thing was barely capable of cutting the live video, doing graphics, and replay in one machine, but we put live sports on our student station without bothering the media department for their truck. Learned more putting that system together than all the years studying TV production at the university. Been engineering TV trucks for major productions for nearly 20 years now. Thanks NewTek.
@54:30 This is why we hoard old equipment. When something breaks it just gets put onto the long term healing slab while one takes the needed time to learn to fix it. This happened to me, now I do component level medical equipment repair because of what I learned across the years.
I'm a 40+yo dude and I'm having a blast watching a kid so enthusiastic about the obsolete tech I used to work with 20y ago. At 14 I was dreaming about video toasters and eng betacams, went to trade school at 16 for 3yr learning about NTSC and SMPTE broadcast analog just to land in the industry in the big transition from analog to digibeta SD to HD.
1 minute old CRD, good timing. Just long enough to watch before bed.
Also, the bit about wanting someone to talk to / discuss with a topic you're incredibly interested in - I feel that one. Thankfully, I've found a few photo communities which scratch that itch for me.
work grave yards or not in the west ?
@@truevudderhutz3482 Yurop!
Same. It's one of the more challenging side-effects of ADD and ADHD, which is hyperfixation. So you find a topic that interests you, research everything about it for days to years, and then you're just so packed full of excitement and knowledge about a topic with no real outlet for it because most people don't care enough about niche topics.
Are you saying you watch these videos to get sleepy for bed?
@@nickbrockelman No, I am not saying that at all?
Oh man this brings back soooo many memories!!! I can tell you that you are 100% correct that NDI has it's roots in iVGA. The weirdness with the really early Windows products mostly relates to trying to keep the company going by selling ANYTHING we could between when Commodore went bankrupt and stopped selling Amigas and when we had an actually viable PC based system. It was Lightwave keeping the lights on while we frantically tried to get Windows NT to do real-time processing for video (which wasn't easy!).
It’s still not that easy today seemingly! Even today in the theatre world there’s no (or at least nothing that’s got a free version, there might be a paid program) complete PC alternative to QLab on Mac.
Holy crap, this is the complete package! I was suffering through rotoscoping by importing frames into Photoshop in timeline view, but this seems like it’d be better. Not to mention the 3D animation, and the live editing is wild! I would’ve loved to use that on Justin TV or Livestream, which is the main one I used back then.
That thing about the VGA cable really is exceptionally poor, all down to cost-cutting. I kinda want to test my own cables but I don’t have much of a real reason to so I’ll probably forget. You experienced such an emotional roller coaster, the despair of defeat turned last minute into the ecstasy of victory (and scientific discovery)!
Honestly this was a nice throwback to your old stuff, I know you’ve said before your standards are too high for it but as far as I’m concerned if it lets you talk about more stuff I’m all for mixing these in.
And I’ve definitely been that person, probably the weirdest one for me was numbers stations, but definitely pre-film photography and stop motion animation and all sorts of other things were at one time or another.
I'm so glad you enjoyed this, I was worried people wouldn't be into it, haha. I've always wanted to release the odd roughcut... maybe this'll be a thing I do more often now!
Hear hear!
@@CathodeRayDude Give it to me ROUGH. Wait... Ummmm... I feel SCSI after that statement.
I'm so happy to see a full VT[5] setup again - I spent about a year and a half out of college working for a non-profit that ran the local access station (with a whopping TWO channels on the cable provider).
We were fortunate to have received a good deal of late 00's Macs and DV prosumer gear, plus an old news set and three whole Panasonic full pedestal cameras with CCU's from the local TV station (KFTY) who were being wound down. We had the full VT[5] setup plus lots of goodies in the studio, plus another road case VT unit that did live-to-tape most of the time. (I think we used it once as a backup when the studio machine was broken.)
I can say that as long as you didn't do anything too wild, the VT software and hardware would gladly do their duty. We never did much more than lower-thirds, titling, greenscreen, and the occasional canned sequences, with any sound usually done outboard via a Behringer 4 or 8-channel mixer. It was always a case of trying to get cheap camera operators (usually highschool AV kids) and managing to run whatever long feeds we could up and over/under whatever cramped space we were set up. (Highschool football games always tested the limits of patience, cable length, and sheer luck!) My favorite shoot we ever did was a local musical production in the community theater that was still very much set up as a single-screen cinema. (They basically just knocked down the walls of the projection booth, making it open-air and added some light rigging and a deeper stage.) We got the golden opportunity of a do-over on that one because of some recording issue I think, and while we barely made our money back, I was proud of my camera direction and tech work for the final product.
This is all to say, I'm glad you're getting to play with all this stuff without the specter of tenuous employment and a rotating mystery crew to wrangle!
I just came down with covid and everything feels like too much energy, but laying down to watch an hour of CRD is just what I needed :)
I'm so sorry, I hope you feel better soon. I'm glad I can help in any way!
@@CathodeRayDude Keep being you, wonderful person!
Totally addicted to your content! You’re the only channel where I see an hour (or more) long video posted and just sit down to watch the entire thing. I have a similar thirst for random technological facts and niche interests that perfectly matches with your style of content. It’s so exciting because I never know what you will find and demonstrate and teach me about, next! Keep doing what you’re doing please. Also, please try not to put yourself down about what you’re passionate about. Be proud you’re you and that you have hundreds of thousands of people who’ve decided they like you enough to watch your videos for many, many hours! And that you figured out how to make money with your hobby/passion! I envy you!! Too bad I’m super poor, because I’d kill to have access to your patreon videos! Once I get another job and don’t literally have -$100 in my checking (lol fml), I will try to get in on that!!
Thank you for your dedication to excellent and exciting content for us fellow nerds with a thirst for knowledge (compliment)! Your genius and speech fluidity and style are addictive. You are awesome!!! 👏👍
I'm so happy for you that the VGA cable didn't manage to free the magic smoke and end the life of a vintage piece of equipment!
I mean, 10 V to ground... When I'm working on electronics, hardware tends to expire when I look at it the wrong way. 🥴
Yes, it was fairly bad design in retrospect. If you're going to repurpose a standard connector, arrange your pinout such that you're not putting voltage on pins that would be ground in the original design.
I got very good at finding the old hardware at my previous R&D lab workplace. The magic smoke smells a bit like burning nickles. Metallic, acrid, and vaguely burning. I was the one that put the halt on an old HP server because the PSU decided to release its magic smoke. All four of them. So it was limping along, barely able to run and threatening to turn into an electrical fire before I found it entirely based on smell.
Lol this was all the rage when I was growing up, I even had an amiga 3000 tower but used it to learn lightwave 3d which led me to having a career in the VFX industry. Loved the toaster though, a great device, it had its quirks but man it really leveled the playing field as far as being an independent content creator.
I've been told the original Amiga toaster was used for the music video for the pet shop boys "go west" song, using Lightwave 3D. I've been eyeing one just to see if I could make visuals as unhinged and acid like as that video with authentic hardware.
That second Antec is a classic too! The only problem with mine was the USB ports plastic on the front of the case literally crumbled. I went onto Amazon and picked up a new pair of USB ports for the front of the case. It makes for a nice local server case with the 7 hard drive locations too.
I lost my shit when I saw it. I'm still using mine! with room cut in the top for a 280MM radiator.
I also broke my front USB ports. Got in touch with Antec and they sent me one with USB 3.0 ports meant for the 302, but it's a direct replacement and works perfectly.
Man.. you are speaking my language. Huge fan of the Toasted and NewTek. If you haven’t seen the original VHS tapes of their demo you’re missing out. Kiki Stockhammer! Capernicus! Chess Pieces!
This was a wild ride with some cool tech I didn't know existed! And I'm liking this rough cuts format.
This is like some kind of crazy cross-over between my old job and my current one.
In my old job, we sold touch screen kiosks that were powered by those little shuttle PCs. Basically my job was to build up the shuttle PC, shove the software image onto the drive, and drive it out to the customer for installation or to replace their failed machine. And as you saw, some of these ran 24x7, so they failed pretty quickly and frequently. It took a while for them to find a model that was more reliable, and eventually they designed a new kiosk that had a standard mATX motherboard integrated directly into it, rather than an entire shuttle PC.
My current job is at a television network. I was originally hired as an engineering trainee, so I worked on the professional version of this stuff that a real television network uses. The end result was kind-of similar to this, but less software and more hardware boxes connected together in complexly complicated ways. The VT experience is analogous to how things work in a real TV studio because the VT software was designed to emulate that experience. In our studio it's possible to do as you suggested, ingest the footage into an edit workstation, cut it together into a package, and the studio control room could then take that edit workstation as a source into the preview input and switch it to the studio program output to play it to air live. No need to render the package to the playout server or anything. The vision switcher even has control over the playback of the edit workstation from the control room, so it's cued at the beginning of the package and it begins playing on the edit workstation as soon as it's switched to the program output. They've even used that as a DR scenario when the playout server died mid-broadcast, they just loaded up the packages into the edit workstations, package 1 on edit 1, package 2 on edit 2; cue edit 1, presenter introduces the package and they switch to edit 1 to play it out, cue presenter and switch for package 2 intro, cue edit 2 and switch, load up package 3 on edit 1 while that's playing, rinse and repeat. It's a lot of manual work, but it saved their bacon on more than one occasion. I've seen our competitors have similar issues and have to crash out of their live broadcast half way through and start the next show early because they couldn't do the broadcast without being able to play rendered packages from their playout server!
Now I'm a network engineer, and for the last couple of weeks I've been building the data centre that runs our new studio. Things have moved on a bit from the days of piping analogue or digital video signals between boxes over coaxial cables. These days it's purely streaming video transported over an Ethernet network via multicast streaming video. Basically it does everything the old system does and more. Now you can even remotely control the cameras robotically from the control room. And you can automate that control, so you can run an entire live broadcast with just one or two people in the control room. We've actually got two control rooms, one for automated production, and the other for manual. This allows them to switch from an automated production to a manual one (or vice-versa) seamlessly, without having to shut down the broadcast to reconfigure the control room. It also allows them to start out as an automated production, then if they get breaking news they can drag extra crew into the manual control room and switch to manual in a matter of seconds. No more having to quickly swap over the team in the control room in a commercial break to roll into the next live program in the same studio (the old studio had two standing sets so they could run from one live show to the next pretty much seamlessly; the new one probably has enough room for half a dozen of the same sized sets, possibly even a studio audience set plus a few other standing sets). They can run the show manually for all but the end, programming the final segment for automated control, so the next team can come in and set up the manual control room for the next show with more than a couple of minutes to get it running. Pure luxury!
But it's now the network engineer's problem to make it work instead of a broadcast engineer (or rather, team of broadcast engineers), which is what's been making my life miserable for the last few weeks.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. My book is out on the 30th of Februnever, so if this interested you, you can find a lot more if you simply fall into an interdimensional vortex and pop out in a universe where that book actually exists.
I watch your videos precisely for the huge information dump on niche topics, scratching the same itch you have talking about them. So keep them along and don't restrict yourself too much on the level of details you go into ;)
Also really like the vlog/train of throughts style of video, so don't hesitate to publish more of them !
bless this toasty mess
Yes
Dude, you're too hard on yourself, this video was awesome! Your channel has become one of my favourites, up there with Technology Connections.
BTW, don't worry about 'bricking' the FPGA, FPGAs are designed to power up 'blank', so any 'firmware' (actually, usually called bitfile) upload is safe to interrupt, all that will occur is the FPGA will remain unconfigured. Restart the upload and you'll be fine.
The problem is that however Newtek designed these, they don't do that. Multiple threads on their forums full of dire warnings that the cards will brick randomly during updates.
The FPGA itself will be fine, but depending where the bitstream is stored and if they did double-buffering and integrity checking before flipping the bootstrap location, you might need a chip clip or JTAG connector to fix it. The FPGAs I could see look like Altera MAX, some of which have internal flash, which could potentially be a PITA to recover from.
In middle school (6th-8th grade) I was part of the video club and learned to use a tricaster to switch/livestream the "student news". This was 2009 so I am amazed to learn I was using something so new as it already felt dated.. The green screen capabilities were horrid.. No matter how much we tweaked the lighting, chroma key, and other settings we were left with a meh picture.
my middle school had a tricaster as well and it was the most unreliable piece of trash I have ever used. maybe it was just ours. and yeah the software felt dated even when new
@pcefulpolarbear OH ya, it was terrible and had many weird issues, but it was still fun as we weren't doing a serious production.
It's reassuring to know we all ask our pets the exact same question. Some day, in the distance future, we will get an answer, and we will finally learn who is the good cat.
Dude, you put enough effort into your videos that I think we'd all totally understand if you hadn't posted anything at all and wanted to take a rain check. Thank you for sharing this with us.
One of the most fascinating videos on this topic I have come across. Personally love the format of discovery, testing, banging head against the wall, and success. Learned a lot about this topic and is right in line with many of the passion tech projects I get myself into with the really old Digidesign, Avid, Radius audio, and production video editing systems. It is amazingly hard to refind a lot of this information today because it was pre-internet and most of its utility died off before it could even be put on a page. Thanks for saving and publishing this information for posterity!
Hey there again! I swear you're making video on all the stuff I've worked with! I used to use the tricaster back when I worked in local government television. The Tricaster was a great machine. I had a lot of great "aha" moments working with that thing updating the graphics for the station, specifically learning how to do graphic transitions using motion png sequences (I think?) and timing it to a cut or fade (I couldn't get an alpha channel png sequence to work). I remember when I first had to boot into the backend windows UI to do a software update, I was mindblown that it was basically just a PC. It kind of made me think that building my own switcher was possible. I pushed that thing to it's limits, running livestreaming to 2 different destinations, running graphics on the tv's in the studio, doing custom graphic transtions, video playback, multiple levels of overlays, while switching between cameras, and doing picture in picture.
You can see it in action with this cringe stream we did for the county parade, it hung in the transition right at the beginning but once the stuff is fresh in memory it runs great. (I think we were doing point to point streaming from the wifi from the bank there so the field cam is pretty choppy)
ua-cam.com/users/liveRVLuNsdBxs8?feature=share
It's so delightful that Newtek made this whole series of devices because, although I've been told they often crashed or just got "confused" and had to be reloaded or reset, just as often I've been told that they did a remarkably good job despite just being a program on a PC!
@@CathodeRayDude It only really crashed when I was screwing around, making changes, or leaving it on for too long. I don't think these things could manage their memory very well. Generally the rule was to put all your graphics and video in and get it set up, reboot, then play everything once and you would have no problems when you're live. I still can't believe they did all that for a fraction of the price of similar grass valley devices. Now blackmagic is like the saving grace for indie and low budget production. I do wish I got a little more involved in the virtual sets and some of those more advanced features on it though.
@@CathodeRayDude would you have any interest in borrowing my Blackmagic Production Studio 4k for a few months? It's been sitting on my shelf for a year now.
@@RedRamzor That could be rad! Does it have a physical control surface or is it just software controlled? Might wanna email me to discuss further - cathoderaydude at gmail
It's kind of amazing how one person just messing around because they think it's cool can _still_ discover new things about this classic equipment that either nobody knows or at least nobody thought to actually make a note of and put out there.
You are the promise of the old Internet in human form.
Thank you for seeing the good in things, even through what could seem to be disaster at the time. I appreciate you for not being like Franlab who seems to always be looking for the nearest correctable disaster to nose dive into as mach 3.
I like to think your description of their choice to use a GND pin for 10v is pretty solid, and I think you're right that they designed the power circuitry in such a way that shorting the rail does not destroy the circuitry. This is clearly a premium product so details like this make sense and only cost a few more cents in parts. As for the FPGA, I believe a lot of them are a like RAM, when the power is off they lose their contents, and have to be 'programmed' on each power on. So you can't really brick them. There is often a secondary microcontroller and flash chip with a VHDL ROM. The microcontroller loads the ROM onto the FPGA during system boot up. And changing the core just means updating the ROM chip. There was an FPGA handheld games system that had multiple game system cores on flash for better than emulation performance. Its Saturday night, and I am writing this from pieced together memories so, you know, find a pinch of salt, fitting for a messy GoPro phone cam kinda video!
About a decade ago, I used to work at an it recycler/refurbisher.
I know for a fact that i've scrapped about a hundred of those older looking cards. I spent about 4 hours trying to identify what they were.
The weird socket on top and the backwards facing ram with the fpga chip. no labels, nothin.
2 vga and 2 phono jacks iirc.
Was from an older big tech company's lot of replaced hardware. (hint hint)
Couldn't list for sale if we didn't know what it was.
RIP my man.
Yep, that's exactly what I figured happened to these. And why not? Newtek's fault for not labeling them!
OMG!! That is a SICK AJJ shirt!! Also, incredibly dope video subject I've wanted to know more about this for years, it just never got enough of my emotional energy for me to really deep dive into it 😭. Keep up the amazing work, I love ramble stuff like this is fucks 🖤
the cat needs its own channel
I wouldn’t be mad to see more “Rough Cuts.” Totally watchable.
I was thinking the same thing. After his warning at the beginning about how bad this might be I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it! Definitely want more of these!!
i love the videos where i have no clue what he's talking about cause it makes it easier to fall asleep too. this channel runs double duty as tech geek content and makeshift ASMR
it's so weird that this is a compliment. we live in strange times, yet i know exactly what you mean.
I remember years ago my friend and I were doing a title sequence for a local access TV show. If you remember local access TV you have an idea of the timeline, but it was late 8os or early 9os. We had a friend who was a broadcast news camera man who got us access to the news departments paint box video editing room. I was impressed with it .
Love this content! I commonly have grand ideas for a video project that usually becomes a jumbled mess of clips. However the way you took all this footage and still came out with an interesting, informative and entertaining video is really honestly inspiring.
Dude you could rock the classic goatee! Give it a whirl! Also VERY HAPPY Toaster PC is finally getting some love.
Love this format. Your scripted videos are perfection but this casual chat format is great also. You have such a deep knowledge and passion not just for the technology, but the cultural and economic conditions at the time a gadget was made. You have the heart of a historian, story teller, and anthropologist.
I've been binging your videos for the last few weeks, and I can't express how exciting it was to see that AJJ shirt. Love your work on this channel.
Now we need a modern Amiga Video Toaster breakdown using the switcher without a Flyer card (near impossible to get). Thanks for this great content
I love the AJJ shirt!!!! That was not something I expected to see watching this today!
Bless you. You know exactly what I needed after a long day of work. ❤️
Time to begin another EduQuest!
+10 internets for the Captain Picard impression. It was quite hypnotic.
What a roller coaster of emotions in this one! Honestly wasn't boring at all. I love seeing your passion for this tech.
I used to work at a local public-broadcast tv station who used tech like this, so it's a huge throwback to some of those memories.
Just getting to see Soba for a few moments at the beginning of the video makes it worth it enough to me. We have five ourselves, and they are our kids because unfortunately my plumbing is kinda crap I guess.
Shit, the beginning stuff about getting obsessed with information and digging for it and attempting to share it - hits so close to home. Like exactly. Anyhoo - thanks for all the content, it's endlessly endearing!
I'd love to see a long form video series on this. I watched from start to finish.
I love seeing you passionate about something dude. your excitement gets me excited
Thats one of the internet's greatest strengths, no matter how niche a subject matter you are into, no matter how rare an object you have, there's someone on the internet who is into the same thing, has the same thing or knows the knowledge you are missing.
Same mate, love that little thrill of discovery and cant wait to improve everyone else's life. Fascinating cludge!
Just enjoyed rewatching this and wanted to thank you again for putting content like this up for us. As rough as you say it was, I couldn’t pull myself away from watching the whole thing all the way through, even though I’ve ALREADY watched it before!
Your intelligence and wit and humor are engaging to say the least.
I actually used an Amiga Video Toaster a little bit. When I was in middle school I was one of the AV club nerds and our AV lab had a video toaster, we used it for school closed circuit stuff. It remains the only Commodore I've ever actually used.
This was cool to watch, and will undoubtedly be a great resource to anyone else who wants to get a VT system running!
I'll add, just because it might surprise you, that the TriCaster actually came out in 2005! The original TriCaster had just composite (in the form of RCA jacks) and S-Video, and NewTek actually never intended it to be used by TV stations or video production houses - the original marketing stuff painted the TriCaster as a "presentation system" for HR departments to make internal videos for shareholders, and other dumb shit like that. It was evident in the GUI too, which was incredibly dumbed down compared to later TriCasters, using language like "Live" and "Next" rather than Program and Preview. But it caught on so quickly in the TV market, probably to NewTek's surprise, that they very quickly updated the I/O and GUI to be more appropriate to the broadcast crowd. Your TriCaster Pro was the second model, introduced in 2006.
Huh! I've been going off of archived copies of their website, and I wonder if this first version was even mentioned on there. What you're describing sounds exactly like the Duo - but that seemed to appear along with the studio, pro, and so on. I wonder if IA has gaps, or if I just missed it. Thank you for the info, I'm now VERY curious to see this first-gen device, haha.
@@CathodeRayDude I have links for you, but looks like I can't post them here. I'll DM you on Twitter.
@@CathodeRayDude what became known as the TC100 was the first version. Duo came out in 2008 as an even more stripped down version for education. I think the name was DUO because it could not do the projector about (TriCaster originally meaning recording, streaming and projector output - like themaritime girl says, it was all about being a presentation system).
@@thisiscentralcontrol Oh wow, is that where the name came from? That's wild. Anyway, I'd actually been investigating since her original comment and had come to the conclusion that the TC100 was the first model, then bought the only one on ebay since I wanted to see exactly what they changed in the software, haha. I'm sure I'm going to have to recap the thing even more aggressively than the Pro!
The pre-ramble in the first 4 minutes is too relatable for me. Getting extremely interested in something and just seeing it disappear after like two years and wandering around for a while until you find something new to obsess about. Over time you just keep looking for information until in the end you'll just grab something and feel like you could talk about it for hours, switching topics left and right and enjoying every second of it even if you generally hate talking about things. And it's never something that's like everyone's interest. Hell, I had an obsession like that with plain cold war era residential buildings, and for the past couple of weeks the photography bug has bitten me again. I think I have ADHD. I'm not diagnosed but if I were it would probably explain a lot of things I do.
Glad to hear you managed to get it working in the end! 🇬🇧
That's a beautiful circuit board.
I wish I had this in my early 20's
thorough presentation, remarkable dedication and inspiring enthusiasm.
Before I continue watching, I just wanted to say I started reciting 'one incredibly unbroken sentence...' with you.
Obscure fascinations with tech or photography or whatever is why we are all here watching your videos. You do you, we will watch and interact, because we understand :)
Love your work, you are truly talented!
(mid 1990's) We had an issue with PCI bus voltage for a NIC. System we took out had an ISA 3c509. New system had a PCI 3c905. Customer complained of drops in connectivity and sometimes unable to log in. We had to borrow some high-tech gear and found the cat3 network cable was over 300ft. Apparently the 5v ISA bus had enough current to push the bits, but the 3.3v bus with it's circuits to pull it up to 5v didn't have the current capacity. The customer ended up putting a hub along the run to make up for the length. I ended up with 10 new 3C905s from the 3Com rep for testing.
Convinced my high school to upgrade from an old Amiga VT2000 to a VT[4] circa 2002. I had submitted 3 proposals to re-equip the TV service (which did televised morning announcements and whatnot) hoping to get the middle (25k) budget and to my surprise they went with my over the top 50k budget.
This included a completely fully equipped VT[4] with an absolutely absurd internal SCSI array for the uncompressed video capture. I forget the name of the integrator that was selling turnkey systems but I don’t think they’d ever expected anyone to select actually all the options. The resultant tower needed to have two power supplies in some bonkers config to power all the drives. I’m told, after I graduated, a teacher who thought he knew better attempted to simplify the power situation and there was uh, a small fire.
The VT[4] was great though. It was a very competent switcher, and whatever it did to automatically time base correct seemed miraculous coming from the VT2000. The non-linear editor was honestly super capable and easy to use, and it even came with a Motion Graphics/animation program called, I believe, Rhino - which needed a dongle leading to many chidish jokes about inserting the dongle - but that program Apple would later purchase and refactor into a product they called “Motion” for Final Cut Studio.
I want to say the machine had dual Xeon processors and ran windows 2000 - it was absurdly fast for the day, and honestly I wouldn’t touch a more capable editing machine until I got a Mac Pro via employee discount in 2008.
Now, I was 17 and incredibly naive but - it just felt like this thing did the impossible at the time. Thanks for sharing the modern impressions.
Those coax ribbon cables are a trip!
Holy hell that is awesome information, I could talk video production and tricasters for days!
that was an absolute emotional rollercoaster bud
im glad i waited in line for it
I could watch a video of you explaining anything and it would be entertaining. Computers, software, sandwiches, whatever.
In the house I grew up in, Storer Cable (and Dimension and COX after buyouts) used an Amiga with toaster for their cable guide channel. Once in a while, when the power failed, you would see an Amiga Kickstart animation on the screen.
Actually the phone shooting is better than GoPro. Less computer fan noise, clearer view of the computer screen. Just a tad more shaky.
Cheers! Love your content I as far as I can tell, you as a person!
Thank you for this! I didn't know about this product at all, but I'm all about it.
tbh theres not a single thing you talk about that i find boring at any moment tbh, this was super interesting and relatable, stuff not being what u expect it to be and all messy with no info online and having to question the most basics of things is my daily life lmao, glad u got it all working tbh it looks so cool and feature packed, wish i had money for one of these rip
Just chiming in to say that this held my attention for the entire hour and 2 minutes. I thought it was quite interesting.
I knew a guy who once worked at NewTek, or so he said. I had no reason to doubt him! He showed me a prototype for what was pretty much an Amiga 500 on an ISA card. Presumably for using a Video Toaster on a PC. I'm guessing it was part of their initial attempts at expanding into the PC market. I'm also guessing that plan was scrapped when Commodore went bye-bye.
I learned about it first from your channel a while back but now that I know what it is I've heard it everywhere. Redlettermedia, and dozens of other channels. And people in real life
Ngl i dont mind this "less-professional" content at all!
Love the production quality on your usual videos, but this just takes me back to the typical obscure tech content i loved since years :3
Your videos are mesmerizing…. 💜
Great video. Love the unrehearsed content. Lots of useful and interesting information. Your unique ability for unscripted fluent speech unequalled. Thanks.
A new CRD video - I call that a win
Love videos like these! Things don't need fancy editing and script.
Valuable information is key.
Thanks CRD!!!
I love the Picard reference... This is how I know you are one of my kind of people.
the rawness level is great. It gets to a point faster and it shows part of the dive into the unknown :D. Will store for watching later tonight!
@CRD 54:57 A New Hope. This is the face of someone feeding their tech obsession 'til it consumes them lol. Is that 2 days without sleep showing in those raccoon eye rings? Much respect for sharing your passion and taking it to the extreme!
It was what I was looking for. Very easy to follow the steps. It works!
Great video, I enjoyed the troubleshooting and you demonstrating your editing knowledge.
I used VT for a public access TV show in Spokane. At school we had Video Spigot on Mac (it sucked...it was just an intake device, really, so mostly we just used it to rip anime LDs). Video Toaster was really cool. And yes, I was a sucker for the cheesy 90s effects.
I'm going to be honest I'd watch a "rough video" about the phone book if it was on this channel. I haven't even started watching this yet and I'm sure it's going to be great. You're awesome and problems happen. No biggie.
This video feels extremely personable.. like I'm sitting across the table from you. I dig it.
I wanted an Amiga Toaster since I was a kid.
Never got one.
It would be wonderful to see a demonstration.
I love the fact that the GoPro can't handle the level of passion involved in a CRD (rant) video. Being an Amiga owner, the toaster thing was always interesting but at some point I decided to not learn about it. Now many years later I'll probably spend way too much time actually understanding it. Cheers.
Love it when a build comes together! So happy for you brutha 🤗
Oof, I felt that pain... Glad it worked out the way it did and could serve as a warning for others, though...
love your Picard impression with the talking and talking! think I'll watch that episode tonight now. Cool video as well (Back in the 90's I was an Amiga fanboy and drooled over the Toaster in mags)
Dude! What an excellent video! Thank you for saving this history.
I think I am watching this a second time. Love content like this just rambling on about stuff I am passionate about. I love the toaster and will have the original one one day in my dream Amiga. I work in broadcasting and probably cuse as a kid a local weatherman I met gave me a tour of the studios and crawl all over the hardware when I was a kid. It was right around the time the toaster came out so imagine even green screen live and all was pretty hot stuff. Later took a class and it was on amigas and there were some toasters. But me an Amiga or having one is a sad story. Now I only do radio as a job but while I haven't got a use for it I will have one. Well unless I do youtube then I will totally use the toaster for it even if (or specifically because) it's not super duper HD.
New Channel: Cathode Ray Dude does Weird Stuff. I'd watch it.
This whole video rules. Soba is awesome. I wish it was more accessible to mess with HDMI video like the toaster could, but I guess I’ll keep my eye out for newer tricasters and that sweet Godzilla shirt