I was so envious of my friend with an Amiga. It was lightyears ahead of my stupid 386.

I just found out about that movie today, that's what put me on the Video Toaster kick. I've got the DVD on order through work, looking forward to it!

I'm such a rube that last year when I was getting about a thousand dollars of freelance work a month on top of my day job, I dropped a couple hundred on an out of date Aja capture card, a prosumer S-VHS deck and the composite output/PSU for the old 1981 Sony tube camera I found a couple years back, specifically so I could approximate that kind of thing. Just today I had a conversation with a part time freelance voiceover guy I know about making some fake corporate promotional videos this fall, since the music I've been doing lately sounds like something out of one so it's just the next logical step.

I actually know a guy (a little bit) who used to be involved in some kind of high end video work back in the 80s and still does weird video art on a couple of top of the line 80s SGIs, but I don't think he'd be in to this kind of thing, the shitty 90s motion graphics are probably too close to home for someone who lived through it.

Also most of what people remember about the Video Toaster was really Lightwave 3D, which was an offline ray tracer that just happened to be bundled with the Toaster and didn't actually require it in any meaningful way, at least not for at least 95% of what it was used for in the real world (aside from the occasional compositing tricks, and that had nothing to do with Lightwave itself).

The Toaster also didn't really need anything specific to the Amiga; as I recall, it did all of its own processing and everything, and even the control signals came from the Amiga via data provided in the video overscan region.

Not me, I mostly associate it with those wipes that look like strippers.

0:39 - 0:49
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7O4xqRqhPY