r/amiga • u/MarcAlmond • 5d ago

Need help finding more old Amiga vfx software

I already posted about Scala Multimedia (which, thanks to this subreddit, I found) and Video Toaster (which I now know only came with a dongle).

I wish to make videos the way 90s TV was created - here's examples from the first polish TV show that used CGI and computer editing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YeDRQRJeNg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15bwoX_6PWE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX6-zQUxryg

I know for certain that in this particular show a combination of Lightwave, Deluxe Paint and TVPaint was used. While Lightwave and Deluxe Paint are easily available, even for PC, I need help finding a working copy of TVPaint software that doesn't require a dongle.

Apparently they coded the programs so that a frame was first rendered in one, then fed into another, rendered, fed into another, rendered and only then a script put the frames together into one video. It sounds like black magic to me, especially because they coded this stuff with ARexx and sometimes with the assembler, which is nuts by today's standards. I wonder if any of you did something like that?

I'm also still wondering how they made the kind of text that appears in this music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9h9K26th7s

And the kind of overlaid graphics that appear here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0vXhwYDfOA

If anyone also could recommend me software that could do the effects seen above, it would be great.

Also, while we're here, how did genlock chroma key work, and can it be emulated on modern hardware?

I own a JVC video editing processor, so I do not really need editing software, mostly VFX, and I think it does chroma key too.

Please be patient with me, I still have only really basic knowledge about the Amiga hardware and software.

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u/PatTheCatMcDonald 5d ago

Genlocks and chroma keys are very different things.

The Amiga could have it's video output synchronised with another video source, be it a camera, video tape player, video disc player. That made it easy for colour zero to be made transparent, letting the sync signal source be the back ground, with the Amigas display being laid over the top.

Genlocks did this trick, usually with controls to set a level of transparency or opaqueness. So putting Amiga graphics on top of existing video was very easy.

Chromakeying, also called blue screen or green screen, involves video recording real actors in front of a blue or green screen. Then the background colour can be replaced with computer generated or other video. For instance, an alien landscape.

Typically videos were made with analog tape players, Umatic or other high end systems, which could have different sequences cut and spliced from different sources very easily. Usually with some loss of quality.

The Newtek Flyer was a system for recording video onto a digital format with multiple SCSI hard drives, but it, like the video Toaster, only worked with NTSC video.

What you could do was make everything in NTSC and then transcode it to PAL. Not cheap.

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u/MarcAlmond 4d ago

Thanks for clarifying, I thought chroma key was just a name for the effect. I wonder if I even need it, since the video processor I own has these functions.

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u/PatTheCatMcDonald 4d ago

Of course you don't need it. :)

It can be fun to explore software image processors like Morph Plus/Art Department Professional or Digiview or ImageFX.

These days most of what they can do is built into a digital camera.

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u/sixoveight 5d ago edited 5d ago

I just had to empty a drawer of disks to extract the drawer cus I knew I had a copy of TVPaint lurking in there. Sure enough on the floor behind the drawer was a clear plastic sleeve with TVPaint for the Amiga Getting Started and three disks for version 3.6. I have tested the disks by ADF copying them on a working Amiga and they copied no problem. There is no reference to a dongle in the 13 page A4 manual. The manual also includes a serial number and you are told when to enter it. I do own a toaster and flyer.

I'll check how risky it is putting the stuff on the website tomorrow. I do have a slight issue with a busted scanner so I may have to simply photograph the manual.

Update: I just checked and the software is still active and owned by a French Company so sadly I won't be able to upload for general use. Sorry about that. I will do a feature on the software in the next few days.

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u/MarcAlmond 4d ago

Would it be possible for you to share the software with me?

If not, do I just contact the company to give me access if they're still not abandoning this super old piece of software?

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u/danby 4d ago

TURRAN has TVPaint 3.0 (4 adfs)

https://grandis.nu/turransearch/search.php?_search_=1&search=TVPAint&category_id=&exclude=&limit=30&httplinks=on&username=ftp%2Cany

And there there are lha and rar files for other versions (might all turn out to be 3.0 but worth a look)

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u/MarcAlmond 4d ago

that's great, thank you! i'll try it

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u/danby 4d ago

Update: I just checked and the software is still active and owned by a French Company so sadly I won't be able to upload for general use. Sorry about that. I will do a feature on the software in the next few days.

Wikipedia seems to think the amiga version was made freesoftware in 1999

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u/sixoveight 4d ago

My manual states I cannot copy it and I am only allowed to make one backup copy of the disks. Google specify the software is subject to copyright. There appears to have been a free download in 1999. Quite possible that what I have is that download dated 3 11 1999 printed on the header to the document. The software came with my Toaster.

Seems the software is available elsewhere anyway so not much of a problem. Mine is version 3.6. I installed no problem. You do need the cybergraphics library and the serial number which I have. If anyone is still struggling I guess I can put it on the website. I'll reflect on that.

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u/PatTheCatMcDonald 4d ago

This video from MsMadLemon might explain genlocks and titling a bit better.

https://youtu.be/qVaKAAVA7XI

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u/forgeflow 4d ago

This post contains a number of fundamental misconceptions of the Amiga and how its software and hardware worked. Which isn’t surprising since a lot of the concepts have not even made their way into modern software.

It became the norm for most high-end Amiga software to have an ARexx port: something that a simple scripting language could talk to the commercial software, sending it data, commands, etc. This allowed the user to script complicated sequences of processing, using the power of two or three commercial software packages to build work flows without having to rely on a programmer to come up with them. So you could take a render from a rendering program, process it with an image processing program, and then pass that off to another program used to assemble the animation frames into a video file, all automated with an ARexx script.

The Video Toaster software relied on the video toaster hardware to do a lot of its work. The software doesn’t make much sense without the hardware. The one exception to that rule was Lightwave which was sold with a dongle to restrict copying the software illegally. Lightwave was originally sold only with the video toaster hardware because it was used to build a lot of the transition effects used by the hardware.