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From: mark@calvin..westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Video Toaster
Keywords: What's the bare bones set up?
Message-ID: <61439@masscomp.ccur.com>
Date: 19 Nov 90 17:43:31 GMT
References: <61899@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Sender: news@masscomp.ccur.com
Reply-To: mark@calvin.westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson)
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corp. Westford MA.
Lines: 36

In article <61899@unix.cis.pitt.edu> jcfst@unix.cis.pitt.edu (John C. Fossum) writes:
>
>     After talking to a local amiga dealer, he told me that the minimum
>cost for a Video Toaster set up is $6000! This includes an 80 meg hard
>drive, and an accelerator board. This price does not include the price
>of an A2000. What is the bar bones set up for just using the frame
>grabber and genlock capabilities of the Toaster? I'm not interested (yet)
>in the 24-bit 3-D rendering part of the package, just the genlock and
>framegrabber. Also, is there any video products (ie. camcorders or
>VCR's) that have built in Time Based Controllers?

Absolute bare bones is a 2000 with 3M ram and 5M off free disk space.
Toaster documentation will tell you that 5M of ram is needed, but I
got it to work with three. In this setup, you will be able to use the
Toaster as a genlock and pobably a frame grabber. However, the Toaster
grabs 8 consecutive frames (or is it fields) to maintain full color
fidelity, which can be very jumpy if your target is not still. A gadget
in the software allows you to remove this jumping, but you will need
5M ram to do it. For Lightwave, you can run without an accellerater
but I couldn't imagine doing it. 3M ram will allow rendering only the
simplest objects. With 5M, a reasonably complex scene can be rendered
provided you don't go crazy with image surface maps (you also may not
be able to do anti-aliasing). Note that a full screen sized 24bit surface
map will chew up 1M by itself. Toaster Paint is also very difficult to
use with only 5M. 7M is a pretty comfortable working environment and
ofcourse 9M is great! If you plan on a lot of frame grabbing, get a big disk.
I currently have 380M on line. As for VCRs with TBCs, there are a few
currently available but I don't know the model numbers off hand. NewTek
can give you some info if you give them a ring. Be forwarned that their
phone is pretty busy these days.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Mark Thompson                                                           |
|  mark@westford.ccur.com                                                  |
|  ...!{decvax,uunet}!masscomp!mark   Designing high performance graphics  |
|  (508)392-2480                      engines today for a better tomorrow. |
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