NewTek Video Toaster Demo Reel

(youtube.com)

13 points | by shrubble 19 hours ago ago

3 comments

  • LocalH 15 hours ago ago

    I had this tape back in the day. Unfortunately, I no longer have it, or I'd make a much improved digitization of it (why do people capture NTSC video and deinterlace it to 29.97fps? That instantly destroys half of the motion fluidity for the portions of the video that treat fields as individual frames, which if I remember correctly was a good amount of this tape). Also, the video levels are all out of whack, the black level is way too high.

    It would help if YouTube would allow support for 480p60 (and the related 480p59.94), so as not to have to upscale the video to gain access to 60fps (the only way to do that with high fidelity and accuracy to the original video is to nearest-neighbor scale to 960 or 1920 lines, do an interpolated scale to double or quad width, then pad with black to 1080p or 2160p, depending on whether you are fine with 1080p or want the potential additional bitrate available to 4K videos).

    Edit: I found a much better preservation of the video here - https://youtu.be/PpNXVctR9G0

    If a mod could switch out the URL that'd be much appreciated

  • fleventynine 17 hours ago ago

    Even more interesting, the developer manual:

    https://discreetfx.com/documents/NewTekVideoToasterDeveloper...

    I remember using this thing when I was a kid, trying to figure out how all the switching effects worked, so stumbling on this manual many years later was really satisfying...

  • shrubble 19 hours ago ago

    The Video Toaster had a simple setup in the days before digital - whatever you fed into Input 1 became the reference timing source and everything else got genlock'ed to it. This worked well enough for even TV broadcast needs, allowing public access and smaller TV stations to start using it.