Marlagram

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For instance, writer and showrunner Joe Michael Straczynski had received the green light to make his dream series, a science-fiction epic called Babylon 5. He hired Ron Thornton, whom he had worked with on Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, to handle the special effects. Thornton convinced Straczynski that this new Video Toaster could be used to make breakthrough visuals at one-third to two-thirds the cost of using traditional models.

Thornton’s team, Foundation Imaging, grew from five to 15 people to meet the demands of creating the special effects for Babylon 5. They networked a series of Amigas together to render the graphics for the pilot episode. Later, Pentium PCs and DEC Alpha workstations were used as a render farm for the Lightwave 3D effects. The move from models to computer graphics images seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time the industry was uncertain that CGI was up to the task. Star Trek, for example, waited until 1997, the sixth season of DS9 and the fourth season of Voyager, to transition over from shooting physical models. When they finally switched, they hired Foundation Imaging to help with the process. Babylon 5 was ultimately nominated for several Emmy awards, and the Video Toaster itself received an Emmy Award for technical achievement in 1993.
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To get the performance they needed on the software side, much of the 350,000 lines of code were written in 68000 assembly language. Finishing the Toaster took 15 engineers, three years
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The Video Toaster was released in December 1990 for an entry-level price of $2,399. It consisted of a large expansion card that plugged into an Amiga 2000 and a set of programs on eight floppy disks. The complete package, including the Amiga, could be purchased for less than $5,000.

For that money, an aspiring video editor received a four-input switcher, two 24-bit frame buffers, a chrominance keyer (for doing green or blue screen overlays), and an improved genlock. The software allowed video inputs to switch back and forth using a dazzling array of custom wipes and fades, including the squishing and flipping effect that Montgomery had originally wanted.

Bundled with the system was Toaster CG (a character generator to make titles), Toaster Paint (an updated DigiPaint for making static graphic overlays), Chroma F/X (for modifying the color balance of images), and the real kicker: Lightwave 3D, a full-featured 3D modeling and animation package written by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson.
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