Viva Amiga!

Last July, the Sacramento Amiga Computer Club (SACC) hosted the AmiWest '98 show and Videomaker was on-hand amidst rumors and anticipation that the next generation of Amiga computers would be unveiled in a surprise announcement. In a pattern that's all too familiar to Amiga fans and followers, it didn't happen, and the ensuing event was pleasant but largely anticlimactic. No matter. Amiga users have lived through plenty of disappointment before. Although the rebirth of perhaps the favorite video editing system of all time is not yet complete, there is much room for hope. A new version of the operating system will soon be available for developers, a consumer version of the OS is on the near horizon, and it is practically guaranteed new hardware will be available by the end of 1999. For any videographer toiling on a Pentium-class editing system who ever wished, hoped or prayed that someday, somehow, Amiga would break from the ranks of cultish obscurity and back into the mainstream, take heart. The pieces are in place, and if everything goes as planned, that time is near.

Way back in the middle of the 1980s, a little-known computer company called Amiga set out to make the best game machine in the history of personal computers. Fortunately for Videomaker's readers, by making the best game machine in the personal computer realm, Amiga also made the most advanced multimedia computer available at the time. When it was released in the mid-'80s, the Amiga 1000, with a 7MHz chip, could capture full-frame, 30 frame-per-second video. By comparison, 200+MHz Intel/Windows computers still cannot capture full-frame video at 30fps without the help of a video capture card and a speedy hard drive.

When Amiga introduced the A1000 at the 1985 Comdex trade show, attendees were amazed at the 3D graphics, and the new machine quickly gained favor as THE multimedia computer. Commodore (makers of the Commodore 64) bought Amiga and began pushing the introduction of new models. By this time, the Amiga was gaining a fervent following, and many videographers discovered the amazing video editing power of the Amiga. In 1990, NewTek introduced the Video Toaster for the Amiga. The Video Toaster is a four-input video switcher (mixer) with a built-in character generator, special effects generator and Light Wave (a professional 3D animation program that is still being used to produce animation for network broadcast programs). The Video Toaster turned the Amiga into a broadcast- quality studio. Five years later, NewTek introduced the Toaster/Flyer, which was the Toaster with a hardware card that allowed for a complete nonlinear editing environment. However, things weren't all rosy for the Amiga crew.

NewTek's Toaster/Flyer should have been a landmark introduction that brought videographers to the Amiga system by the droves. Unfortunately, in 1993 (three years after the introduction of the Toaster, and two years before the Flyer), Commodore went bankrupt. There were many rumors and accusations concerning the demise of Commodore, but the consensus among old Amiga employees was that Commodore's mismanagement caused Amiga's demise. Part of the Commodore fire sale was the auctioning of Amiga to a German company called ESCOM in 1995. This effectively banished the Amiga to silicon obscurity on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The funny thing was that, although Amiga was dead as far as the mainstream American market was concerned, Amiga's popularity was still growing. This left the Amiga world in a state of flux where users had to rely upon each other to keep their machines running. If you wanted to connect your Amiga to the Internet, you had to write your own TCP/IP stack (the networking protocol used by the Internet). This is exactly what Holger Kruse, a German Amiga user, did. He wrote Miami, the Internet software for the Amiga. It is this type of can-do attitude and community esprit de Amiga that could finally lead to Amiga escaping from the "they're still using those?" realm to the mainstream. Of course, the NewTek Video Toaster/Flyer always kept the Amiga close to the heart of video editors.

The Toaster/Flyer allowed such a high-level of video editing power that many TV shows, such as Babylon 5, still use an Amiga. Never to be one to die easily, Amiga has been the most popular out-of-production computer on the market. It was this level of enthusiasm for a computer that wasn't on even in production anymore that helped influence Gateway Computers (yes, the same Gateway that sells Intel/Windows PCs in a black-and-white-cow colored box) to purchase Amiga in 1997.