I recently saved an A2000HD that was used professionally for this kind of work, the workbench install is just a work of art! everything is there and was bought when it was all new back in the day. It is stacked to the gills with stuff that would have been used for pro stuff like a Video Toaster, Opalvision, TBC and SMPTE, art tablet/pad, frame grabber, genlock etc. The original software installation I managed to image and save (the hard drive had a little corruption which I fixed). It was built to do real work. I need to finish some bits and get it all put back together and show everyone what it is like.
@@jason-vv6kv Haha It was actually the most ground breaking cinematography and CG of the day by far! I was and still am in the film production industry as a technician, you are quite blatantly wrong.
@@FuriousGriffin Oh good grief. I Never hinted the show was poor quality but for sure it could've looked better. And i base this on indirect statements from people involved with the show. And then there was DS9 and(ex-Foundaton staff) when they switched to CGI the comparison between B5 & DS9 in terms of ships, landscapes was obvious. Yeah it is ground breaking. PAramount poured out the money behind the fx. Said nothing untrue.
I like how your final shot of the Amiga was rendered in Blender, which also began on the Amiga. Not enough people know the story of how the Amiga, and really the Video Toaster & LightWave, gave us modern CGI. Bundling LightWave with the Toaster put 3D into the hands of people who never would have had the ability otherwise. Lastly, RIP to Ron Thornton. He as a good man and is sorely missed.
LOL. LightWave did NOT give us modern CGI. That title belongs to the twin high-end rendering programs SoftImage and Alias|Wavefront: Power Animator / Maya. Its comical that given even the fact that Amiga fans are still eulogising the Amiga more than thirty years after its launch and about 25 years after its death and it was a basic commodity device widely sold, aimed at consumers, and widely publicised and eulogised in the popular home computing press, somehow Amiga fans *still* appear to think it's some sort of secret. The problem isn't that other people don't know about the Amiga, it's that Amiga fans don't know about anything else.
Bear in mind that in the 90's there were 3 options: SGI, Amiga, and Mac. For low budget shows, a Mac Quadra running Electric Image and After Effects (before Adobe acquired it) was a doable solution. I myself used Macs for VFX on JAG and Earth II.
Did you really work on Earth II? Then: thank you very much, sir! It was and still is in my Top 5 shows of the 90s, and I'm so sad it seems to be completely forgotten.
@@ELEKTROSKANSEN Worked on the last 2 episodes, they were fx heavy and the regular team (half a dozen people) needed help. I did the bottomless pit which almost swallowed the heroes (you can't see it, lots of CG dust in front) and did the virtual maze in the last one. Tim Sassoon was the fx supervisor, he was an After Effects guru.
@@respectforkurt944 Can't recall how we exported, might have been Quicktime movs. We didn't use Avids, the CGI stuff went straight into After Effects for compositing with live action, rotoscoping, color grade. For the JAG stuff, we comped the cockpit shots, then shook them digitally to match what Bellisario did live action. All the good stuff - SGI workstations, Wavefront - was for the people working Crimson Tide. That was the big budget project.
ElectricImage was very serious tool. John Knoll used it on the first TV pilot with 3D space ships called Space Rangers before Babylon 5. I still get projects done with it from time to time.
Babylon 5 wowed me back in the mid-90s. While I know that we can do,far better with the same made-for-TV budgets to this day, those old B5 episodes still thrill me.
I remember getting really excited when I watched 'Signs and Portents' for the first time. The raiders attacking the station and the subsequent defence was so exciting to watch. And that was only mid Season 1.
I quickly learned a trick on Lightwave on the Amiga. The built in network rendering (called screamer net - great name) could actually be used to speed up rendering on a single Amiga. You could start Lightwave in batch mode and add it to the screamer net. I found the optimum setup was a single full on Lightwave with a GUI and two batch Lightwaves also running on the same Amiga.
Very cool. Jogs my memory a bit... I did'nt do it the same way, when I had enough RAM on my A1200 i Fired up 3 instances of LW and had them rendering separately to internal drive, external SCSI drive and Iomega ZIpdrives simultaneously. I was in a bit of a hurry back then..
Amiga fans always repeat the same ideas "Used in Many TV stations", "Became an *industry standard". What's interesting about that is, there are almost NO compelling or culturally important examples. There's Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. For something so allegedly ubiquitous in TV and cinema it's interesting its use has left almost no impression at all on culture.
@@vapourmile Well, those old enough, do remember Amigas in most if not all TV stations during the late 80s and 90s (even the big ones). I used them too. It was a tool that enabled you to do the job easily at a fraction of the expected price. As for cultural examples, I don't know what more should it be expected to do. Build the Parthenon?
@@vapourmile Here in Sweden pretty much all video studios had them since it had a native video signal that was easy to genlock onto any broadcast signal. Even the Swedish National Television had many of them. Back then you have to remember that everything was video/tv signals. In 2002 I went to study Computer/Video science. At that time, they all had moved over to PCs with Avid. I mentioned that I used Amiga to the handyman that worked there, and he opened up a storage space where they had 20 Amiga 4000 computers that were just collecting dust. Some of them were broken. He asked me if I wanted one, so we went through some of them and the first one that was working, I got and took home... and I got it for free. :)
Much of the best work on B5 was done by Foundation Imaging. Many of the shots in this package are by Netter Digital. Many fans would never notice the difference but I always felt that the Netter shots rarely captured the magic of the Foundation stuff. I think this is down to the artists. Ron Thornton’s ships and camera work always felt weighty and cinematic. When he left, the camera started behaving more like a ‘CGI’ camera and lighting and textures seemed to suffer and become less ‘real’. When you love a show as much as did B5, sometimes the smallest changes are thrown into stark relief. Great video by the way!!!🤓👍
VFX Geek After season 3 all CGI was moved ‘in house’ under Netter. This obviously saved money and helped see through the B5 story , which saw 2 seasons worth of story arc compressed into one (thanks to looming cancellation).🤓🤓
Wow! I never knew the Amiga was a trailblazer in VFX. I knew about Babylon 5. I remember how revolutionary its VFX were back when it came out. Some of these teams were only composed of 8 people?! Man, I wish I was in on the creative ground floor when stuff like this first happened. At the same time, it's great that I'm an adult in time where these things have become cheaper and a bit more within reach for more mortals like me. All thanks to the pioneering work of Amiga and the Babylon 5 VFX crew 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Top quality documentary guys, thanks so much for making this. Lots of great info. I didn't realize Amiga was used in all those films you listed at the end. Would love to know more about its role in them. Subbed. AMIGA4EVER!!!! -- AmigaBill
Yeah, some of those films were news to me, too. He said Amigas were used for pre-viz. But, yes, I'd love to know more about that. They were also used for Terminator II (probably pre-viz), and the first usage I can think of: Max Headroom. But, I'm sure you knew those already. Love your channel! Great to see you here! AMIGA4EVER!!!!
First time i saw this. Quite the rabbit hole. Lightwave, the 3D software with the most expensive dongle attached. Between myself at home, college and work I had the A500, A1000 (used Deluxe Paint on that, then Desert Strike during lunch), A2000, A3000 (really sweet), and ending with the A1200/040T ... With Lightwave, I first used on the Amiga testing the morphing, then later lens flares, swapped to PC when 5.0 came out, but was on DEC Alphas by then too. At the same time I was on Onyx Reality for real time TV work, porting LW assets over on to that. Last time I used LW was making quick assets that I converted and rendered out in VRay on 3DSMAX. At home I still use LW, but a really outdated version. I used it to guide the builders when I built my house... Really nice to see people have not forgotten this great combination of hardware and software that revolutionised the TV/VFX industry... and I feel so old...
Right on! Good to hear your history. I would argue that the VT went beyond *just* a dongle, even for folks who *only* wanted LW, since it allowed for near-24-bit composite NTSC output, which was very useful for viewing and even outputting renders to tape for final production, as it was far better than the native HAM6 output of the Amiga 2000. Although, on the 4000, HAM8 was close enough for viewing renders, the VT was significantly-enough better that you would want to use it for final production.
@@RetroDawn Absolutely! Yes, the VT was a game changer! Eventually, I spent more time in post though, so for us we rendered to cards like the PAR, and played out to digibeta decks. Also seem to recall painfully outputting frame by frame with TVPaint (on a 2000) or something in the years before that too..! ugh! :P
Nah, they were f'ed by own management. Chronically under invested and mismanaged. Story of A600 and A1200 released is really sad. They basically self imploded.
I remember it well. I owned a Amiga 1000, 3000 and a Amiga 4000T. All equipped with extra cards for video editing, sound enhancements etc. It was a shame when Commodore went down. It got me a job as a salesperson in a warehouse and I had to sell all those computers IBM-compatibles, Atari and Commodore. And I used my home computer to make demoanimations for our TV-screens to promote them all. Not thinkable on PCs then with their 16color graphic cards.... and of course, one of the biggest selling argument was that Amiga computers were used for Babylon5
@dothemathright 1111I believe that had Commodore had a true vision they could have adapted the hardware to meet or exceed the current competitive market space, the real magic of the Amiga was in the OS. The follow on Amiga projects, post Commodore used pc modular hardware and standard cpus to emulate the custom chips of the original Amigas. Competitive sales was a factor, but that was largely tied to the poor (to non existant) marketing that Commodore did for the Amiga platform. The Amiga could have been the premiere video and audio editing tool for all markets had development continued and the correct partnerships been made back then. IMHO.
Yes but video toaster was expensive, what crippled Amiga was that PC graphics were catching up, extremely quickly. The Amiga was less expensive but upgrades were expensive. A lot of software a where poorly coded. This made impossible to move program to better graphic cards that was able to use true color graphics.
The Amiga opened up the video production business to many people with small budgets. It was a game changer. The PC clone overtook them in the mid 90's,
It would be amazing if newtek releases amiga's lightwave for free to amiga community. With new accelerators as the vampire this software (lw 5) is still killer!
The accelerated Amigas in the early version of the 1st season of B5 and I think The Gathering was using a few CSA 40/4 Magnum SBC. It was because there was 0 wait-state SRAM on the board which meant the 68040 could access that memory super fast and that helped render times. However, I think due to the cost of the board, they ended up going with someone else later, and we never made larger SRAM for it (which would have been prohibitively expensive even for a studio).
I'm an artist and animator. I sent off for the free VIDEO TOASTER promo video cassette. Did anyone else? Anyone else remember this??? I was certain I'd save up all my money and make an animated short that would launch me into the big time...Or create something worthy enough to play on MTV'S LIQUID TELEVISION...LOL!
If I recall correctly when videotoaster made the switch to pc, the toaster card essentially had some of the amiga custom chips on it to make it do its magic.
In 1992 I started to work for the first commercial television in Italy. For two years produced a lot 3d work with A2000 PP&S 68040 28Mhz with 32megs Ram, controller custom serial for Betacam SP and some Graphics card as the impact, Egs 110 and Colormaster 24bit that was perfecto to load on BetaSP step by step with a RGB->Component converter. I was using Image then Lightwave, Adpro. Then we switched to Intergraph, Softimage 3.51 then Houdini.
@RenatoT66 Indeed, here in Europe, the Video Toaster didn’t work because it only supported NTSC natively. What was done was to send the video frame by frame to a Betacam video recorder controlled by a serial port, and the use of 24-bit video cards for good image quality. 32 MB of RAM in 1992 was a lot, making it quite an expensive setup.
As a kid I remember getting an amiga1200 and on the copied discs had a babylonia 5 booklet loose and also a copy of lightwave 3d I think 3.5 or 5.5 . Also came with floppies of most of the ships :) the booklet explained how to make the layers and explosions ... I remember it went through robocop TV series effects like chest heat glow using nulls .... God that was a fun time playing through the night... ended up with lightwave 11 before health problems and sold it
Amiga, Lightwave, Newtek, Video Toaster, Babylon 5 ... those were some fun and awe inspiring days. (sidenote- "Atari Teenage Riot"; one one the best band names ever! =)
I started out on Real 3D v1.4 that I got free with an Amiga Format issue. I later went on to Lightwave v3.5 + AdPro + FrEd for dithering and animation assembly. Unfortunately the LW suite was way too expensive to buy for a teenage hobby 3D modeller, but man we had some good times. On LW 3.5 switching between modeler and renderer was seemless, when i later got v 5.0 the cracked version could no longer communicate and export between the windows so it got abit more tedious. Later on I started going on #Lightwave channels on IRC, but noone ever wanted to help, always asking for LW manual confirmation before they would talk to ppl. Jerks!! Thanks for this video, Ive always loved B5, but never seen any behind the scenes like this from the show..
Fantastic! I've started playing with 3D graphics in 3D Studio, on a PC, still in the DOS era. Amiga was known to me only for games, with models A500 and A600. The higher models were ureachable as SGI workstations ;)
We were a bunch of friends who actually started 3D modelling on the A500!! I remember getiing the 1.8mb memory expansion card and was able to compile larger animations from 3 floppydisks and then run from the now insane 2.3mb!! ram :D Later went on to a 040 accelerated A1200 before eventually landing on an A4000 With Apollo 060/60mhz card + PicassoIV gfx. Still have it sitting next to me here in computer room, and it still runs, but alas never in use any more :(
@@ShallowRavers You know you could just send that A4000 this direction, I swear it would be well abused ;-) I also started on an A500 but with Sculpt then later Imagine it was a great time showing ppl what you could do with that. The 1st time I heard someone gasp at an animation my friend and I did (copy of the water tentacle from the Abyss) put a huge smile on my face after the weeks it had taken to render.
The great part about it back then, was that what we could make at home could rival what the pro's were making. The imagination was the only limit. But when the Technology took priority and the big Companies started using behavioural animation, hair and clothing etc. in ways that was impossible for hobby animators.. it kinda stopped being fun.. I used to love trying to replicate B5 scenes after watching an episode, and actually getting Close.. We were a Group of friends, 3 were musicians, techno/trance, and 3 of us were animators. And we used to do these rave parties where we made animations and custom dj logos to show on a huge screen behind the artists performing. Sometimes the organizers would get the names wrong on the flyers, but that was all we had to go on.. no internet back then. We would show it to the dj on the night and say, listen, that took a week to render, there is no way of fixing it in 30 minutes :D
" Well, if you actually READ the manual, you would find your answer to the question you just asked on page 48, paragraph 5, section 2. Also, what are your system specs ? . What processor are you running, how much RAM. What video card ate you running ? What a noob ! " * ( I hated conversations like that. You would ask for the hotkey for such and such, and get a reply like that, when all they had to answer with was "Shift + W "
The SGI picture is showing 5 Origin 2000 / Onyx 2 racks which presumably are configured as at least two separate systems, one 4-rack system and another single-rack system. For the 4-rack system the maximum configuration would have been 64 processors, 64GB of RAM and 80 internal 3.5" disk drives. Onyx 2 was basically the same thing as an Origin 2000 but with a beefy graphics unit while Origins were headless. From the outside they were distinguishable by the blue case for the Origins 2000 and purple for the Onyx. Whatever, both were introduced in '96 while the Amiga 2000 dates back to '87. Afair the scenes of Terminator 2 shown were rendered by ILM on Iris 4D/240 and 4D/340 systems - much older systems more from a timeframe to actually have competed with Amigas. On a different matter, I'm wondering what voice synth software was used for this video?
I remember when the show was running someone asked JMS why the ending episode with Babylon 4 with Valen had the two Vorlons in their suits, instead of in their angelic forms. His response was, "because we'd still be rendering it." I imagine those machines were sitting there rendering a lot of things after hours just to keep on schedule. They really were ahead of their time in many ways, but also, I see why ST kept using models until the very end of Voyager with Enterprise being the first show to only use CGI.
I had a lot of amigas (i started with the a500, and finished with an amiga 2000 connected to a pc tower via scsi to use hard disks, i had a 68030+68882 on board); i also used an opalvision card ,wich burned :), after longs years i was able to buy a video toaster 2.0 on pc, i bought lightwave since the earlier versions (i was using imagine 3D at the time) and i'm still upgrading it today, lightwave3D is a great piece of software (i'm using it besides Blender, and i'm eager to see what the future 2023 version will do :), i do miss my amigas alot...
According to JMS; never. Some of the original film material was lost or got destroyed in storage. The current owner of the IP has also no intentions to do something new with it.
Right now I am looking at my Amiga 2000 with GVP's Geforce 68030/68882 card with 40MB SCSI HDD and 4MB memory (whoa!!!), OpalVision, Real3D and Sculpt4D. In the early '90s I re-created a number of scenes with Pixar characters (Luxor, Red, Knick Knack) as well as a short re-creation of the T2 scene @0:40 in this video that was taking 2.5 days PER FRAME to render in 24bit colour. I am amazed I ever managed to achieve anything back then, but I still dabble with CGI using Cinema 4D that can render similar stills in a matter of minutes! Ahhh, those were the days.
Most times amaterus like us were not using ray tracing, rather a less heavy rendering called Scanline, that would be analog at what 3D cards do in realtime, had for the time decent results and took less to render
@@JMDAmigaMusic What we know now as Cinema 4D actually started life exclusively on the Amiga as a program called Fastray although I'm not sure whether it or the likes of Real3D and Sculpt3D/4D used scanline or true ray-tracing but I'm pretty sure Real3D uses ray-tracing as that is why I bought it all those years ago and still have it and the manual printed on red paper!
@@TheOneTrueSpLiT I remember real 3d, the version 2 was pretty fast; i did use lightwave 3.5 and 5 and a friend of mine was pretty fond of Imagine; i suppose there should have been settings to enable/disable things like ray tracing, reflection and shadows
Oh Yes.. Amiga PC.. I loved these.. I had a 500+ then later on a 1200 AGA with extra memory and games adapter. The thing that they forgot to say was the Amiga was special because of the fact that the founder of Atari himself designed and made the 3D graphics chipset that Amiga computers used! And he only did it for that system and no other PC. That's why the Amiga was so super at doing 3D graphics before the IBM PC or Apple got into doing 3D. It was way ahead of it's time that Amiga for CGI & Graphics. Sadly my 1200 AGA got a fault and is been packed away now for 30 years. I hear there is websites which are run by people who love using the Amiga still and have spare boards and parts.. maybe I look those up?
The Amiga didn’t come with any built-in 3D graphics chip. It primarily had 2D graphics capabilities through its custom chipsets, like the OCS, ECS, and AGA, which were focused on handling 2D graphics, sprites, and bitmaps. While the Amiga was known for its advanced graphics at the time, 3D rendering was done mostly through software, with no dedicated 3D acceleration hardware included by default. However, later expansions and third-party graphics cards, like the Picasso or Voodoo series, could add 3D acceleration capabilities to the system.
It was sad to experience the fall of Commodore...I had purchased the A500 new in the mid 80s...very basic model that had a floppy drive and could plug it into a TV using an adapter, similar to the older Vic 20 and C64/128 machines. Later models had their own monitor though, and started to come with separate keyboards. And then some weirdness towards the last few years, recombining it all again into a smaller form factor. Some incredible ingenuity and design, that computer could have taken the world easily over the competition. Yeah, management and some industry back stabbing helped end Commodore. I think there was an attempt to revive the Amiga through another hardware vendor using the same processor family, but it seemingly fell apart. Apple was using the same CPU, but did things completely different. To many in the Amiga realm, practices Apple did that didn't make any sense...and hampered both performance and had a heavy storage demand. The storage demand itself containing all the code needed to "display" the GUI and so on. Amiga, this approach had all the common code to build a window, put objects like buttons, toggles, text lines and so on, all embedded in the firmware. Periodic firmware updates came along as improvements to video display and better GUI practices came along. Allowing the programmer to focus more on what the program did, and not worry about the interface. So programs themselves became quite small in size. Allowing a user to open up a full power word processor. Or play a video game. Using one single floppy disk of no more than 1.44 MB. You could get MSDOS on a floppy...but nope...no GUI at all there...ASCII graphics don't count. And Apple...a hard drive was a must before even entertaining the idea of adding a word processor or any other program. They improved, but considering where they were and where Amiga was when both hit the stores in the mid 80s...Amiga was hands down a superior machine form the get go. Had Commodore not gone belly up, it is fair to say Apple would not be anywhere what it is now....at least, not in the desktop graphics design scene. Likely a great competitor to keep things interesting. That pause in the Amiga platform allowed MS Windows 3 and 3.1 to flourish, as businesses gravitated to Intel and Microsoft and IBM clones and...an assortment of court trials at the time revealed some shady practices going on. It didn't help Commodore, much less Amiga. And some of it created hardware problems. Some patents could not be bought or obtained or were destroyed or lost or...revivalists tried to "redesign" some of the hardware to get around that...wrought with issues, it kind of floated on and off into the early 2000s...by this time, the race was over and other platforms filled the space left over and Amiga was lost. Shame really, because like I said, the other platforms were years behind the curve where power and capability were concerned...and yes...the A500 was slightly cheaper than that Mac also being offered at the time. A fraction of the dollar price in fact. In relative terms, more computer than any existing Mac. It was poorly marketed. Generally speaking, all of them were. And still are. Mac still dominates the multimedia design these days, but to be honest, there is absolutely nothing that the Mac has, that cannot be done in Windows. Of course, software options themselves being the only real challenge. Porting software between the two OSs is possible and common. Most Office products, most if not all Adobe products. When Amiga was gasping it's death chants, Microsoft offered nothing but pure crap. But it did office stuff well. And that's what stuck. Apple got stuck with graphics dominance. Soon it got to that point that few knew that yeah, a Mac can do Word or open spread sheets...and give you other bells and whistles...instead of just graphics stuff. PC architecture however, took off and now...no way would I waste money on a Mac when I can purchase, for the same cash value as the highest end Mac available now, and have a vastly superior PC in every measure to do far more "GRAPHICS INTENSIVE SHIT" than the Mac. I've seen those fast Macs a few times...even the latest models and...I'm spoiled...I know I own a fast and stable machine...because I built it that way. Hard to modify a Mac to user specifications. Slow USB is annoying as hell on any Mac...horrible... Still...if Amiga wasn't affected by all that crap that brought it down in the 90s, I am quite certain I would own one. And still look down derisively at those Apple products. lol
After B5 wrapped, Warner Bros demanded all the computer graphics, software models be boxed up and shipped to a warehouse for storage. All the high resolution models went missing shortly later so it was not possible to continue with the series.
Your ambient music is too loud, making it hard to hear what the people are saying. I turned on the CC but I couldn't watch while reading. In future videos, please put the music at the back so it doesn't interfere with the narration and interviews. Thanks!
Lightwave has not been popular since 2005 , but it used to be quite popular in 1996 when I started playing around with 3d graphics. It also had horrible GUI , I took a look at it back in 2000. Today is almost dead as an application but several years ago some its devs left it to create Modo , another 3d app which is fairly popular nowadays. Amiga 500 is the best computer of all time and the most influential, nothing has come remotely close to how good that computer was and looks great even for todays standards. Unfortunately Commodore got over confident with their success and they paid the price. PC rose to popularity by copying Amiga 500 success recipe.
If amiga wasn´t badly managed, i bet it would be just if not more popular than pc or mac these days. I got a pc before an amiga, most exciting was monochrome strip poker...i couldn´t believe my eyes 1st time I saw a 500, and bought it on the spot. And then swap/copy games using xcopy, because there were no shops with software lol. Speedball 2, turrican cannon fodder...good times.
At its peak, the Amiga was estimated to have around 5% to 10% of the global personal computer market share. In some regions, such as Europe, its market share was stronger, reaching up to 20% at certain times, especially in the video game and multimedia markets. And no, there was no way the Amiga could displace Macs or PCs from the market; it never had any opportunity.
Incorrect Amiga's having only 2MB RAM. Amiga used two types of RAM, Chip & Fast. Chip was considered the graphics memory. Those A2000 where upgraded to 2MB MegAChip Ram. Fast Ram was 32MB, Fusion 040 accelerator and Video Toaster. 💻♥
It was a prof of concept that didn't require millions of dollars to setup. SGI systems were much faster and vastly more expensive, but when you want that level of detail the render time is a nightmare even on an SGI render-farm. A friend of mine would who worked at DK and was the guy who presented the proof of concept for the Walking with Dinosaurs Multimedia CD to them (he started on an 1MB A500 running Sculpt then Imagine then upgraded the Amiga to an 68020) and it was only when it went to DK that it was moved from the Amiga because they were ignorant of the Amiga but that didn't stop him from working on stuff at home.
I think that just rerendering it in HD, could make it look even worse. Cause you would see all tiny details, and how it's not keeping up with modern vfx. So it would have to be at least retextured, new shaders created, etc. That would involve huge costs.
I don't think they could do it anyway for the same reason that HD versions of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Voyager can't be done. They don't have high resolution negatives to go back to as they did with The Next Generation, and even TNG and TOS was painstaking work with an awful lot of CGI having to be redone to make it look right. Recreating Babylon 5 entirely for HD would be spectacular, but ultimately not feasible.
Yes most TNG special effects work was done on film so they can remaster, they don't have the original film recordings of the later series as the SFX and editing was done on digital prints.
It's not just the space effects shots, it's the live action special effects, which they couldn't redo without the negatives. Also even in SD, the clearer image on modern screen wthout VHS and broadcast artifacts, highlights all the cheap props and iffy costumes that we didn't notice in the 90s. They were able to remaster Star Trek the original series and TNG only because there weren't so many effects shots and it still cost millions that they didn't recoup.
This is so true. I've visited 4 music studios and all of them still have their Atari STs (usually in a closet somewhere nowdays). Programs like Cubase started on the Atari platform.
This statement is made by the narrator's voice , not the old workers, there is no way to render such graphics (pilot episode) with 2 megabytes of ram, they use accelerated 040 amigas with up to 32 megabytes of ram. Check from other source of information around internet , it's naive to think than a professional project run with such limit budget of ram....
Your video is a bit dissonant, or rather logically incoherent. You first explain how the Amiga's (used by Foundation Imaging) were seriously restricted by the amount of RAM they had (2MB according to you, in total. I'm not certain that this is accurate, thats extremely little even for 1993, for example I had a 486 66DX2 with 8MB in early 1994 and the Amiga is capable supporting more, even without an accelerator board which you say they had.) and then in the next paragraph claim that "Amiga computers were more powerful and versatile than PCs or Macs of the time." Not only is this a bit of a contradiction, but IMHO completely false. In 1993 the Amiga was nearly 10 years old and as you said the company failed soon after that. This claim holds true when comparing Amigas to PCs and Macs from the time of the initial launch of the Amiga (1000), which was in 1985. By that days standards the machine was incredibly powerful in comparison to it's competitors and years ahead of it's time in nearly every respect but especially in terms of graphics output. Which undoubtedly lead to LightWave, Maya and other similar software packages for sound, 3D modelling, digital image manipulation and so on, having their genesis on the Amiga platform. Same goes for the Video Toaster addon boards having their origin on said computers, lending to it's versatility that stemmed from the easily expandable system architecture which didn't have licensing or overt complexity hampering it's adoption unlike with PCs, Macs and high-end workstations and their bus wars which had been stifling development and keeping systems expensive from the late 1980's. However, by 1993 PCs in particular were equal to and in some respects superior to what anyone could build around an Amiga system. Especially graphics cards had advanced with leaps and bounds, and early 3D accelerators were already being prototyped and showcased for high-end PC based CAD workstations. And by the first quarter of 1995, less than 18 months later, mainstream PCs (not just high-end and Workstation offerings) had become vastly more powerful than any Amiga system imagined, even if you account for accelerators and other tune ups available for the Amiga from 3rd party vendors. The only reason Foundation Imaging and others opted for Amigas at that time, was the software which had been evolving on the platform for the better part of a decade. It was some serious shit, since the companies went for it, while taking with it a considerable risk I might add. Since with Commodores bankruptcy there was no real support and any sort of HW fault could lead to a situation where a spare part could become impossible to source. It was the software, not the hardware, which drew companies and artists to this platform, and it became it's last and perhaps only significant success. Coming in way too late and in a way too small of market niche for it to enable Commodore or Escom to profit from it. And around and about this time LightWave, Maya etc. had started to migrate to PCs and Macs as a result of Commodore becoming defunct. The second this software was available relatively cheap much faster PC systems, Foundation Imaging switched to PC workstations and DEC Alpha rendering computers and only a few months later they ran rack fulls of Pentium Pros for rendering. So, I put it to you that it was superior software, not hardware, which drew CGI people on to the Amiga platform. Video Toaster is a significant innovation in the field as an addon card enabling digital video composition on otherwise relatively meek hardware but there's absolutely no technological reason it's creators couldn't have built it for PC systems. It's just that due to the on going bus wars of the time and the lack of a universal and inexpensive but fast expansion bus this was an unappealing prospect. There were three different high-performance bus solutions for PCs on the market at the time and all of them were cost prohibitive for ordinary consumers. (MCA, EISA and VLB.) In addition to PC systems lacking appropriate software for the field and thus a target audience for such an application. The second it became obvious that the PCI bus (introduced in 1992 btw) was going to become the ubiquitous expansion bus for just about any kind of computer Desktop / Workstation system regardless of CPU system architecture, system manufacturer or target market (consumer, professional or enterprise), video production addon board manufacturers started releasing products for it. Usually accompanied by support on multiple different operating system and CPU architectures. This was happening around the same time, circa 93 - 95. Not only was the PCI bus superior in terms of speed to the Zorro and NuBus offerings of Amiga and Mac of old, but it offered a far more wider market for auxiliary addon card manufacturers, making necessary initial hardware development investments not only financially viable but extremely profitable. And this was the final nail in Amigas coffin, which was living on life-support already by the time CGI companies found it and started to adopt it in a serious fashion. There were some attempts by European manufacturers who had licensed Amiga IP from the defunct company, to cater to the video production and CGI niche, like the MacroSystems Draco but they never made any sort of a major breakthrough in the field. In Europe, North America or South American markets. So, yes. The Amiga was revolutionary, more powerful and more versatile than PCs and Macs. But only by late 1980's standards. By the time the 90s had rolled around it was already out dated and Commodores chronic mismanagement blatantly evident to everyone, which alienated most of it's key user base who then started to migrate to greener pastures found on the Mac and the PC.
AmigaOS has some of the operating system stored in ROM, this allowed the Amiga to use less ram under operation, so ROM was like 512K, and after boot you used maybe 200K, (the rest as on disk and only loaded when needed, unloaded if not used.) to you had about 1,8Kbytes to work with. But I think your correct as this used video toasters, and Video toasters where kind a like true color graphic cards, I guess they came with some extra ram.
The Amiga 2000 was computer created in 1987, standard it came with 1 MB ram, it was the desktop version of the Amiga 500, that only had 0.5mb ram, that was considered a lot at the time, as developers where used to commodore C64 and commodore C128, that only had like 64K and 128K of ram ;-), originally they planned to only have 256K bytes of ram in original Amiga 1000 computer, but they lucky changed their minds, graphic was organized in most memory efficient ways like bitplanes for built in graphic card, where one bit is a pixel, one 2 color image was one bitplane, if you had 2 x 2 color images that gave you 4 colors, (the more 2 colors images the more colors you had, 2,4,8,16,32, and 64 halfbright) the graphic output was designed for TV's as monitors were not common in homes at the time. so resolution was 320x200 (NTSC) or 640x200 (NTSC), for pal you had extra 50 pixels, 320x250 (PAL) or 640x250 (PAL), interlacing was supported this give you flickering, and impression higher resolution, Amiga 500/2000 had built in hardware image compression called HAM6, allowing colors to be modified as there where drawn, this mode gave you max of 4096 colors, but image had artifacts due the decompression used, but this did not give you quality graphics, but saved a lot of RAM, for quality graphics you need to upgrade the Amiga, there was the DCTV, the Picasso 2 and few other upgrades. Lightway was able to render the image in true colors, was able to convert the images to display the graphics in Amiga native graphic formats.
Newer computer like the Amiga 1200 that came out in 1992; had 2MB of chip ram, and 1 MB of ROM, where a lot of OS was stored in ROM, and Amiga 4000 that came out also in 1992. Of course, 1993 was big change in PC industry, almost all PC's in 1993 came with SVGA graphics, while Amiga's optimized for saving memory, and keeping cost down, not really 3D graphics. Yes did have some graphic acceleration like flat fill of polygons, Amiga become costly because you had to buy Amiga + hardware upgrades to compete with PC. Amiga did have CDTV in 1988 but all Amiga commuters after came without CDROM (with exception of CD32 that game console), in 1993 however CDROM where normall in PC's, (even PC's without sound cards came with CD-ROM) and this popular video games had cuts scenes and this games became popular, it was bad case of poor timing, and ignoring the competition that killed commodore. before that also did lots poor marketing in the USA, this made Amiga more popular in Europa where marketing was different.
The 2 MB they are most likely referring to is the Chip RAM (graphics RAM), which is the most that you can have on the motherboard. You can also add a graphics card as you would on a PC but it won't integrate with the Video Toaster if you were using one of those. They could also have 8 MB of Fast RAM without an accelerator (I knew a guy in 95 or 96 who had an Amiga 4000 with 130 MB RAM, I had an A1200 with 34 MB). You say "in 1993 the Amiga was nearly 10 years old", this is true and the PC was even older, but both were drastically upgraded over the years. The Amiga went through 3 major chipset changes OCS, ECS and AGA in 1992. With the 68060 CPU it was able to keep up with the first Pentiums, but when they started clocking above 100 mHz , they began to fall behind and with no Commodore around the distance increased every year. I used my A1200 as my only computer until 1999 when I had to get a Win 98 machine for my new job (tax software). I remember I would turn them both on at the same time and the Amiga would boot, dial the modem and load my home page before the Win 98 (Celeron 333) would finish booting :-).
I think the video is also incorrect in the list of movies/series that were made on Amiga. The mentioned movies/series had CGI done in Lightwave, but mostly not on Amiga (even the Babylon 5 production used Amigas only for the first season). When it was possible, everybody switched with LightWave to different platforms (DEC Alpha was pretty popular for some time - a single system was able to provide the render speed similar to a room full of networked Amigas). Regarding the RAM - I think that Video Toaster would not even work with just 2MB of RAM (as far as I remember something around ~6MB was necessary). Typical VT equipped system had more RAM for sure.
The B5 producers had wanted to use miniatures and motion control before talking to Thornton. You should check out the Paul Bryant and Ron Thornton interviews on here. www.b5scrolls.com/
I recently saved an A2000HD that was used professionally for this kind of work, the workbench install is just a work of art! everything is there and was bought when it was all new back in the day. It is stacked to the gills with stuff that would have been used for pro stuff like a Video Toaster, Opalvision, TBC and SMPTE, art tablet/pad, frame grabber, genlock etc. The original software installation I managed to image and save (the hard drive had a little corruption which I fixed). It was built to do real work. I need to finish some bits and get it all put back together and show everyone what it is like.
Amiga is my childhood. Amiga Forever!
Who else clicked the video because it’s got Babylon 5 in the title?
me 😜. WB were really cheap. That show could've looked better. And their "to-DVD-choices" butchered the VFX even more.
@@jason-vv6kv Haha It was actually the most ground breaking cinematography and CG of the day by far! I was and still am in the film production industry as a technician, you are quite blatantly wrong.
and apparently a flat earther lol ...... are you John Snow?
@@FuriousGriffin
Oh good grief. I Never hinted the show was poor quality but for sure it could've looked better. And i base this on indirect statements from people involved with the show. And then there was DS9 and(ex-Foundaton staff) when they switched to CGI the comparison between B5 & DS9 in terms of ships, landscapes was obvious. Yeah it is ground breaking. PAramount poured out the money behind the fx. Said nothing untrue.
I clicked because of Amiga in the title)
I like how your final shot of the Amiga was rendered in Blender, which also began on the Amiga. Not enough people know the story of how the Amiga, and really the Video Toaster & LightWave, gave us modern CGI. Bundling LightWave with the Toaster put 3D into the hands of people who never would have had the ability otherwise. Lastly, RIP to Ron Thornton. He as a good man and is sorely missed.
Blender began on SGI. It was originally called “Traces”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Wrong. Check this article - interview with the author of Traces zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/
@@higochrana6424 Thank you a lot for this information.
LOL. LightWave did NOT give us modern CGI. That title belongs to the twin high-end rendering programs SoftImage and Alias|Wavefront: Power Animator / Maya.
Its comical that given even the fact that Amiga fans are still eulogising the Amiga more than thirty years after its launch and about 25 years after its death and it was a basic commodity device widely sold, aimed at consumers, and widely publicised and eulogised in the popular home computing press, somehow Amiga fans *still* appear to think it's some sort of secret.
The problem isn't that other people don't know about the Amiga, it's that Amiga fans don't know about anything else.
@@vapourmile Wrong
I used lightwave with my Amiga 2000 and Video Toaster professionally from 1992 - 2003. It was so ahead of its time for the money.
My teacher from college worked on the B5 as a VFX artist. He had nothing but positive views working on the production.
Bear in mind that in the 90's there were 3 options: SGI, Amiga, and Mac. For low budget shows, a Mac Quadra running Electric Image and After Effects (before Adobe acquired it) was a doable solution. I myself used Macs for VFX on JAG and Earth II.
awesome, did you export the files as still images or movs? were they then imported straight into Avids?
Did you really work on Earth II? Then: thank you very much, sir! It was and still is in my Top 5 shows of the 90s, and I'm so sad it seems to be completely forgotten.
@@ELEKTROSKANSEN Worked on the last 2 episodes, they were fx heavy and the regular team (half a dozen people) needed help. I did the bottomless pit which almost swallowed the heroes (you can't see it, lots of CG dust in front) and did the virtual maze in the last one. Tim Sassoon was the fx supervisor, he was an After Effects guru.
@@respectforkurt944 Can't recall how we exported, might have been Quicktime movs. We didn't use Avids, the CGI stuff went straight into After Effects for compositing with live action, rotoscoping, color grade. For the JAG stuff, we comped the cockpit shots, then shook them digitally to match what Bellisario did live action. All the good stuff - SGI workstations, Wavefront - was for the people working Crimson Tide. That was the big budget project.
ElectricImage was very serious tool. John Knoll used it on the first TV pilot with 3D space ships called Space Rangers before Babylon 5. I still get projects done with it from time to time.
Babylon 5 wowed me back in the mid-90s. While I know that we can do,far better with the same made-for-TV budgets to this day, those old B5 episodes still thrill me.
I remember getting really excited when I watched 'Signs and Portents' for the first time. The raiders attacking the station and the subsequent defence was so exciting to watch. And that was only mid Season 1.
What is it with youtubers that have to use speech synthesizers instead of doing their own VO's? It's so stilted.
netik23 my guess is they aren’t native English speakers, and the voice synth might work better with the TH-cam algorithm than a strong accent
Because you would instantly hear that this video is made by a 10 year old. ;)
The voice tech is getting better, soon most talking heads will be NPC and you wont know the difference
Or Tutorial videos where the person types the info in Notepad.
@@bytesabre Maybe - but this one still sounds awful. Maybe it's been created using Amiga's speech.library ;-)
I quickly learned a trick on Lightwave on the Amiga. The built in network rendering (called screamer net - great name) could actually be used to speed up rendering on a single Amiga. You could start Lightwave in batch mode and add it to the screamer net. I found the optimum setup was a single full on Lightwave with a GUI and two batch Lightwaves also running on the same Amiga.
Very cool. Jogs my memory a bit... I did'nt do it the same way, when I had enough RAM on my A1200 i Fired up 3 instances of LW and had them rendering separately to internal drive, external SCSI drive and Iomega ZIpdrives simultaneously. I was in a bit of a hurry back then..
If the Commodore marketing team got the gig to promote KFC, they'd sell it as "Warm Dead Bird". RIP Amiga, you will be forever remembered 👍
I'm stealing that!
I remember those series! Amigas with Genlocks and programs like SCALA were also used on many TV stations. It was a cheap and reliable solution.
Amiga fans always repeat the same ideas "Used in Many TV stations", "Became an *industry standard".
What's interesting about that is, there are almost NO compelling or culturally important examples. There's Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. For something so allegedly ubiquitous in TV and cinema it's interesting its use has left almost no impression at all on culture.
@@vapourmile Well, those old enough, do remember Amigas in most if not all TV stations during the late 80s and 90s (even the big ones). I used them too. It was a tool that enabled you to do the job easily at a fraction of the expected price. As for cultural examples, I don't know what more should it be expected to do. Build the Parthenon?
@@vapourmile Here in Sweden pretty much all video studios had them since it had a native video signal that was easy to genlock onto any broadcast signal. Even the Swedish National Television had many of them. Back then you have to remember that everything was video/tv signals.
In 2002 I went to study Computer/Video science. At that time, they all had moved over to PCs with Avid. I mentioned that I used Amiga to the handyman that worked there, and he opened up a storage space where they had 20 Amiga 4000 computers that were just collecting dust. Some of them were broken. He asked me if I wanted one, so we went through some of them and the first one that was working, I got and took home... and I got it for free. :)
Much of the best work on B5 was done by Foundation Imaging. Many of the shots in this package are by Netter Digital. Many fans would never notice the difference but I always felt that the Netter shots rarely captured the magic of the Foundation stuff. I think this is down to the artists. Ron Thornton’s ships and camera work always felt weighty and cinematic. When he left, the camera started behaving more like a ‘CGI’ camera and lighting and textures seemed to suffer and become less ‘real’. When you love a show as much as did B5, sometimes the smallest changes are thrown into stark relief. Great video by the way!!!🤓👍
Thank you for pointing that out :)
VFX Geek After season 3 all CGI was moved ‘in house’ under Netter. This obviously saved money and helped see through the B5 story , which saw 2 seasons worth of story arc compressed into one (thanks to looming cancellation).🤓🤓
Mojo is a true artist. You see him for a second in the video.
I believe Babylon 5 is the most good fantastic TV series The first time I looked in school the 90s and love greetings from Russia
My uncle used to always be rendering something on his Amiga in the 80s and 90s using Lightwave because it took so long. :)
Right on. In the 80s it would have been other programs--perhaps one of the two LW predecessors.
Oh how I miss my Amigas... blast from the past...
jhwheuer : I still have my Commodore 128. Commodore was ahead of its time.
im still raging over problems on my pc that would not exist on a amiga ...
I have 5 of them in the basement, want to get rid of them but it is hard to let go.
I still have my Amiga's and had a Video Toaster and Blender. Ahh Memories.
Wow! I never knew the Amiga was a trailblazer in VFX. I knew about Babylon 5. I remember how revolutionary its VFX were back when it came out. Some of these teams were only composed of 8 people?! Man, I wish I was in on the creative ground floor when stuff like this first happened. At the same time, it's great that I'm an adult in time where these things have become cheaper and a bit more within reach for more mortals like me. All thanks to the pioneering work of Amiga and the Babylon 5 VFX crew 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Great insight. I love hearing how simple tricks & clever thinking brings VFX to life with Amigas and otter creative solutions.
The Video Toaster won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1993 🏆
Top quality documentary guys, thanks so much for making this. Lots of great info. I didn't realize Amiga was used in all those films you listed at the end. Would love to know more about its role in them. Subbed. AMIGA4EVER!!!! -- AmigaBill
you make a good job too :)
@@Ryofb Thank you so much!
Thanks very much :)
Yeah, some of those films were news to me, too. He said Amigas were used for pre-viz. But, yes, I'd love to know more about that. They were also used for Terminator II (probably pre-viz), and the first usage I can think of: Max Headroom. But, I'm sure you knew those already.
Love your channel! Great to see you here! AMIGA4EVER!!!!
Amiga and Babylon 5 in the same video. Perfect.
First time i saw this. Quite the rabbit hole. Lightwave, the 3D software with the most expensive dongle attached. Between myself at home, college and work I had the A500, A1000 (used Deluxe Paint on that, then Desert Strike during lunch), A2000, A3000 (really sweet), and ending with the A1200/040T ... With Lightwave, I first used on the Amiga testing the morphing, then later lens flares, swapped to PC when 5.0 came out, but was on DEC Alphas by then too. At the same time I was on Onyx Reality for real time TV work, porting LW assets over on to that. Last time I used LW was making quick assets that I converted and rendered out in VRay on 3DSMAX. At home I still use LW, but a really outdated version. I used it to guide the builders when I built my house... Really nice to see people have not forgotten this great combination of hardware and software that revolutionised the TV/VFX industry... and I feel so old...
Right on! Good to hear your history. I would argue that the VT went beyond *just* a dongle, even for folks who *only* wanted LW, since it allowed for near-24-bit composite NTSC output, which was very useful for viewing and even outputting renders to tape for final production, as it was far better than the native HAM6 output of the Amiga 2000. Although, on the 4000, HAM8 was close enough for viewing renders, the VT was significantly-enough better that you would want to use it for final production.
@@RetroDawn Absolutely! Yes, the VT was a game changer! Eventually, I spent more time in post though, so for us we rendered to cards like the PAR, and played out to digibeta decks. Also seem to recall painfully outputting frame by frame with TVPaint (on a 2000) or something in the years before that too..! ugh! :P
Commodore business machines got the short end of the stick with Microsoft and apple. The video toaster graphics was ahead of the curve.
Bear Jew : it kicked IBM and Apple’s backside.
Nah, they were f'ed by own management. Chronically under invested and mismanaged. Story of A600 and A1200 released is really sad. They basically self imploded.
I remember it well. I owned a Amiga 1000, 3000 and a Amiga 4000T. All equipped with extra cards for video editing, sound enhancements etc. It was a shame when Commodore went down. It got me a job as a salesperson in a warehouse and I had to sell all those computers IBM-compatibles, Atari and Commodore. And I used my home computer to make demoanimations for our TV-screens to promote them all. Not thinkable on PCs then with their 16color graphic cards.... and of course, one of the biggest selling argument was that Amiga computers were used for Babylon5
Robert Madsen : I still have my Commodore 128. Commodore was ahead of its time.
Respect to Mr. Jay Miner, he was the greatest.
I love your content bro. Please do a series on pre- computer generated visual effects, like miniatures, matt paintings, optical printers...
I love this channel's contents. You guys are doing a great job!!
Just imagine where the Amiga computer system would be today if Commodore hadn't screwed up so badly!
Mike Minor Given how far ahead Commodore was and the industry they helped start its amazing they went out of business in 94.
@@elta6241 yeah they had the technology but unfortunately just not leadership that they needed to be successful at the time... 😕
@dothemathright 1111I believe that had Commodore had a true vision they could have adapted the hardware to meet or exceed the current competitive market space, the real magic of the Amiga was in the OS. The follow on Amiga projects, post Commodore used pc modular hardware and standard cpus to emulate the custom chips of the original Amigas. Competitive sales was a factor, but that was largely tied to the poor (to non existant) marketing that Commodore did for the Amiga platform. The Amiga could have been the premiere video and audio editing tool for all markets had development continued and the correct partnerships been made back then. IMHO.
Yes but video toaster was expensive, what crippled Amiga was that PC graphics were catching up, extremely quickly. The Amiga was less expensive but upgrades were expensive. A lot of software a where poorly coded. This made impossible to move program to better graphic cards that was able to use true color graphics.
@dothemathright 1111 Still got that 2000? Good time to dig it out :)
The Amiga opened up the video production business to many people with small budgets. It was a game changer. The PC clone overtook them in the mid 90's,
This type of content videos should have 1m subs.
Like to point out how Lightwave is still used in actual shows, included The Walking Dead ^^
It would be amazing if newtek releases amiga's lightwave for free to amiga community. With new accelerators as the vampire this software (lw 5) is still killer!
The accelerated Amigas in the early version of the 1st season of B5 and I think The Gathering was using a few CSA 40/4 Magnum SBC. It was because there was 0 wait-state SRAM on the board which meant the 68040 could access that memory super fast and that helped render times. However, I think due to the cost of the board, they ended up going with someone else later, and we never made larger SRAM for it (which would have been prohibitively expensive even for a studio).
I'm an artist and animator. I sent off for the free VIDEO TOASTER promo video cassette. Did anyone else? Anyone else remember this??? I was certain I'd save up all my money and make an animated short that would launch me into the big time...Or create something worthy enough to play on MTV'S LIQUID TELEVISION...LOL!
If I recall correctly when videotoaster made the switch to pc, the toaster card essentially had some of the amiga custom chips on it to make it do its magic.
In 1992 I started to work for the first commercial television in Italy. For two years produced a lot 3d work with A2000 PP&S 68040 28Mhz with 32megs Ram, controller custom serial for Betacam SP and some Graphics card as the impact, Egs 110 and Colormaster 24bit that was perfecto to load on BetaSP step by step with a RGB->Component converter. I was using Image then Lightwave, Adpro. Then we switched to Intergraph, Softimage 3.51 then Houdini.
@RenatoT66 Indeed, here in Europe, the Video Toaster didn’t work because it only supported NTSC natively. What was done was to send the video frame by frame to a Betacam video recorder controlled by a serial port, and the use of 24-bit video cards for good image quality. 32 MB of RAM in 1992 was a lot, making it quite an expensive setup.
2 megs??? DAMN!!! Easy to forget how far graphics have come!
As a kid I remember getting an amiga1200 and on the copied discs had a babylonia 5 booklet loose and also a copy of lightwave 3d I think 3.5 or 5.5 . Also came with floppies of most of the ships :) the booklet explained how to make the layers and explosions ... I remember it went through robocop TV series effects like chest heat glow using nulls .... God that was a fun time playing through the night... ended up with lightwave 11 before health problems and sold it
i remember as a teen i so badly wanted an amiga 2000 with a video taster.
my 1200 i had at some point was nice too but the rendering took forever ^^
Great video!
great video!
Awesome , Waiting for more videos
Crazy how that machine was released in March 1987, it was easily 5 years ahead of its time.
Amiga, Lightwave, Newtek, Video Toaster, Babylon 5 ... those were some fun and awe inspiring days. (sidenote- "Atari Teenage Riot"; one one the best band names ever! =)
Great video. I don't understand the computerized voiceover, but other than that I loved it.
Am i the only Nigerian who thinks this is truly impressive?
I started out on Real 3D v1.4 that I got free with an Amiga Format issue. I later went on to Lightwave v3.5 + AdPro + FrEd for dithering and animation assembly. Unfortunately the LW suite was way too expensive to buy for a teenage hobby 3D modeller, but man we had some good times. On LW 3.5 switching between modeler and renderer was seemless, when i later got v 5.0 the cracked version could no longer communicate and export between the windows so it got abit more tedious. Later on I started going on #Lightwave channels on IRC, but noone ever wanted to help, always asking for LW manual confirmation before they would talk to ppl. Jerks!! Thanks for this video, Ive always loved B5, but never seen any behind the scenes like this from the show..
Fantastic! I've started playing with 3D graphics in 3D Studio, on a PC, still in the DOS era. Amiga was known to me only for games, with models A500 and A600. The higher models were ureachable as SGI workstations ;)
We were a bunch of friends who actually started 3D modelling on the A500!! I remember getiing the 1.8mb memory expansion card and was able to compile larger animations from 3 floppydisks and then run from the now insane 2.3mb!! ram :D Later went on to a 040 accelerated A1200 before eventually landing on an A4000 With Apollo 060/60mhz card + PicassoIV gfx. Still have it sitting next to me here in computer room, and it still runs, but alas never in use any more :(
@@ShallowRavers You know you could just send that A4000 this direction, I swear it would be well abused ;-) I also started on an A500 but with Sculpt then later Imagine it was a great time showing ppl what you could do with that. The 1st time I heard someone gasp at an animation my friend and I did (copy of the water tentacle from the Abyss) put a huge smile on my face after the weeks it had taken to render.
The great part about it back then, was that what we could make at home could rival what the pro's were making. The imagination was the only limit. But when the Technology took priority and the big Companies started using behavioural animation, hair and clothing etc. in ways that was impossible for hobby animators.. it kinda stopped being fun.. I used to love trying to replicate B5 scenes after watching an episode, and actually getting Close.. We were a Group of friends, 3 were musicians, techno/trance, and 3 of us were animators. And we used to do these rave parties where we made animations and custom dj logos to show on a huge screen behind the artists performing. Sometimes the organizers would get the names wrong on the flyers, but that was all we had to go on.. no internet back then. We would show it to the dj on the night and say, listen, that took a week to render, there is no way of fixing it in 30 minutes :D
" Well, if you actually READ the manual, you would find your answer to the question you just asked on page 48, paragraph 5, section 2.
Also, what are your system specs ? . What processor are you running, how much RAM. What video card ate you running ? What a noob ! " * ( I hated conversations like that. You would ask for the hotkey for such and such, and get a reply like that, when all they had to answer with was "Shift + W "
Sadly you missed Ron Thornton the pioneer of this. He passed away before this. Great guy, very helpful to all.
The SGI picture is showing 5 Origin 2000 / Onyx 2 racks which presumably are configured as at least two separate systems, one 4-rack system and another single-rack system. For the 4-rack system the maximum configuration would have been 64 processors, 64GB of RAM and 80 internal 3.5" disk drives. Onyx 2 was basically the same thing as an Origin 2000 but with a beefy graphics unit while Origins were headless. From the outside they were distinguishable by the blue case for the Origins 2000 and purple for the Onyx.
Whatever, both were introduced in '96 while the Amiga 2000 dates back to '87. Afair the scenes of Terminator 2 shown were rendered by ILM on Iris 4D/240 and 4D/340 systems - much older systems more from a timeframe to actually have competed with Amigas.
On a different matter, I'm wondering what voice synth software was used for this video?
I remember when the show was running someone asked JMS why the ending episode with Babylon 4 with Valen had the two Vorlons in their suits, instead of in their angelic forms. His response was, "because we'd still be rendering it." I imagine those machines were sitting there rendering a lot of things after hours just to keep on schedule. They really were ahead of their time in many ways, but also, I see why ST kept using models until the very end of Voyager with Enterprise being the first show to only use CGI.
Captain Disillusion talks about how Babylon 5 was his inspiration for a career in VFX.
I had a lot of amigas (i started with the a500, and finished with an amiga 2000 connected to a pc tower via scsi to use hard disks, i had a 68030+68882 on board); i also used an opalvision card ,wich burned :), after longs years i was able to buy a video toaster 2.0 on pc, i bought lightwave since the earlier versions (i was using imagine 3D at the time) and i'm still upgrading it today, lightwave3D is a great piece of software (i'm using it besides Blender, and i'm eager to see what the future 2023 version will do :), i do miss my amigas alot...
B5 - Best SciFi show ever.
BSG enters the room.
So, when are they going to remaster the series?
According to JMS; never. Some of the original film material was lost or got destroyed in storage. The current owner of the IP has also no intentions to do something new with it.
I grew up with B5 , unbelieveable an Amiga modelling. We are so spoiled these days.
NASA used some amiga for a certain function until 2006.
Amiga and Babylon5 for ever !!!!
Right now I am looking at my Amiga 2000 with GVP's Geforce 68030/68882 card with 40MB SCSI HDD and 4MB memory (whoa!!!), OpalVision, Real3D and Sculpt4D. In the early '90s I re-created a number of scenes with Pixar characters (Luxor, Red, Knick Knack) as well as a short re-creation of the T2 scene @0:40 in this video that was taking 2.5 days PER FRAME to render in 24bit colour. I am amazed I ever managed to achieve anything back then, but I still dabble with CGI using Cinema 4D that can render similar stills in a matter of minutes! Ahhh, those were the days.
Most times amaterus like us were not using ray tracing, rather a less heavy rendering called Scanline, that would be analog at what 3D cards do in realtime, had for the time decent results and took less to render
@@JMDAmigaMusic What we know now as Cinema 4D actually started life exclusively on the Amiga as a program called Fastray although I'm not sure whether it or the likes of Real3D and Sculpt3D/4D used scanline or true ray-tracing but I'm pretty sure Real3D uses ray-tracing as that is why I bought it all those years ago and still have it and the manual printed on red paper!
@@TheOneTrueSpLiT I remember real 3d, the version 2 was pretty fast; i did use lightwave 3.5 and 5 and a friend of mine was pretty fond of Imagine; i suppose there should have been settings to enable/disable things like ray tracing, reflection and shadows
Oh Yes.. Amiga PC.. I loved these.. I had a 500+ then later on a 1200 AGA with extra memory and games adapter. The thing that they forgot to say was the Amiga was special because of the fact that the founder of Atari himself designed and made the 3D graphics chipset that Amiga computers used! And he only did it for that system and no other PC. That's why the Amiga was so super at doing 3D graphics before the IBM PC or Apple got into doing 3D. It was way ahead of it's time that Amiga for CGI & Graphics. Sadly my 1200 AGA got a fault and is been packed away now for 30 years. I hear there is websites which are run by people who love using the Amiga still and have spare boards and parts.. maybe I look those up?
You should do that ! Great people there
The Amiga didn’t come with any built-in 3D graphics chip. It primarily had 2D graphics capabilities through its custom chipsets, like the OCS, ECS, and AGA, which were focused on handling 2D graphics, sprites, and bitmaps. While the Amiga was known for its advanced graphics at the time, 3D rendering was done mostly through software, with no dedicated 3D acceleration hardware included by default. However, later expansions and third-party graphics cards, like the Picasso or Voodoo series, could add 3D acceleration capabilities to the system.
It was sad to experience the fall of Commodore...I had purchased the A500 new in the mid 80s...very basic model that had a floppy drive and could plug it into a TV using an adapter, similar to the older Vic 20 and C64/128 machines. Later models had their own monitor though, and started to come with separate keyboards. And then some weirdness towards the last few years, recombining it all again into a smaller form factor. Some incredible ingenuity and design, that computer could have taken the world easily over the competition. Yeah, management and some industry back stabbing helped end Commodore. I think there was an attempt to revive the Amiga through another hardware vendor using the same processor family, but it seemingly fell apart. Apple was using the same CPU, but did things completely different. To many in the Amiga realm, practices Apple did that didn't make any sense...and hampered both performance and had a heavy storage demand. The storage demand itself containing all the code needed to "display" the GUI and so on. Amiga, this approach had all the common code to build a window, put objects like buttons, toggles, text lines and so on, all embedded in the firmware. Periodic firmware updates came along as improvements to video display and better GUI practices came along. Allowing the programmer to focus more on what the program did, and not worry about the interface. So programs themselves became quite small in size. Allowing a user to open up a full power word processor. Or play a video game. Using one single floppy disk of no more than 1.44 MB.
You could get MSDOS on a floppy...but nope...no GUI at all there...ASCII graphics don't count. And Apple...a hard drive was a must before even entertaining the idea of adding a word processor or any other program. They improved, but considering where they were and where Amiga was when both hit the stores in the mid 80s...Amiga was hands down a superior machine form the get go. Had Commodore not gone belly up, it is fair to say Apple would not be anywhere what it is now....at least, not in the desktop graphics design scene. Likely a great competitor to keep things interesting. That pause in the Amiga platform allowed MS Windows 3 and 3.1 to flourish, as businesses gravitated to Intel and Microsoft and IBM clones and...an assortment of court trials at the time revealed some shady practices going on. It didn't help Commodore, much less Amiga. And some of it created hardware problems. Some patents could not be bought or obtained or were destroyed or lost or...revivalists tried to "redesign" some of the hardware to get around that...wrought with issues, it kind of floated on and off into the early 2000s...by this time, the race was over and other platforms filled the space left over and Amiga was lost. Shame really, because like I said, the other platforms were years behind the curve where power and capability were concerned...and yes...the A500 was slightly cheaper than that Mac also being offered at the time. A fraction of the dollar price in fact. In relative terms, more computer than any existing Mac.
It was poorly marketed. Generally speaking, all of them were. And still are. Mac still dominates the multimedia design these days, but to be honest, there is absolutely nothing that the Mac has, that cannot be done in Windows. Of course, software options themselves being the only real challenge. Porting software between the two OSs is possible and common. Most Office products, most if not all Adobe products. When Amiga was gasping it's death chants, Microsoft offered nothing but pure crap. But it did office stuff well. And that's what stuck. Apple got stuck with graphics dominance. Soon it got to that point that few knew that yeah, a Mac can do Word or open spread sheets...and give you other bells and whistles...instead of just graphics stuff. PC architecture however, took off and now...no way would I waste money on a Mac when I can purchase, for the same cash value as the highest end Mac available now, and have a vastly superior PC in every measure to do far more "GRAPHICS INTENSIVE SHIT" than the Mac. I've seen those fast Macs a few times...even the latest models and...I'm spoiled...I know I own a fast and stable machine...because I built it that way. Hard to modify a Mac to user specifications. Slow USB is annoying as hell on any Mac...horrible...
Still...if Amiga wasn't affected by all that crap that brought it down in the 90s, I am quite certain I would own one. And still look down derisively at those Apple products. lol
6:55 "Team consistent of 8 animators and rendering farm"
I love how they put it.
i loved my amiga 500!
nice ! I have Amiga3000 in my retrocomputer collection, I wonder what I really can do on it besides games)
I wonder what Babyon 5 would look like if redone on today's graphics?
Proper remaster of Babylon 5? Like it was done with cutscenes from Halo 2?
Actual Young Sherlock Holmes was done with a very early photoshop on a Macintosh. Frame by frame.
After B5 wrapped, Warner Bros demanded all the computer graphics, software models be boxed up and shipped to a warehouse for storage. All the high resolution models went missing shortly later so it was not possible to continue with the series.
4:33 Kohi mil gayea?
AmigaOS never ceased development. It just didn’t make sense for them to manufacture computers anymore
You know, looking back at the start of the video, it's obvious that the Amiga there is CGI, but I didn't notice until the end of the video.
Your ambient music is too loud, making it hard to hear what the people are saying. I turned on the CC but I couldn't watch while reading. In future videos, please put the music at the back so it doesn't interfere with the narration and interviews. Thanks!
Also SeaQuest did feature miniatures! I know a guy who did some of them.
Fond memories of my amiga 500
Good old Lightwave!!!
If you need someone to do voiceovers I have a studio and I love VFX
If the voice narration is computer-generated, I'd have to say it falls into the "uncanny valley" for me. I find it really distracting and annoying.
Lightwave has not been popular since 2005 , but it used to be quite popular in 1996 when I started playing around with 3d graphics. It also had horrible GUI , I took a look at it back in 2000. Today is almost dead as an application but several years ago some its devs left it to create Modo , another 3d app which is fairly popular nowadays.
Amiga 500 is the best computer of all time and the most influential, nothing has come remotely close to how good that computer was and looks great even for todays standards. Unfortunately Commodore got over confident with their success and they paid the price. PC rose to popularity by copying Amiga 500 success recipe.
Clicked because of B5, immediately left because of the voice synth.
Why not Amiga 4000s with more ram?
Perhaps because of price.
@@VFXGeek they had a shoe string budget, but could have likely squeezed in the difference
I can't really answer that.
From what I found, Amiga 4000 was around twice the price of 2000 in 1993. So I guess that's the reason.
@@VFXGeek but it was still very little vs a sgi box,etc
Genious graphics!
I named my tortoise Londo and I'm gonna build him a palace.
Did they say two petabytes?
Did that much capability actually even exist back then?
So sad, stupid Commodore management killed Amigas. :(
If amiga wasn´t badly managed, i bet it would be just if not more popular than pc or mac these days. I got a pc before an amiga, most exciting was monochrome strip poker...i couldn´t believe my eyes 1st time I saw a 500, and bought it on the spot. And then swap/copy games using xcopy, because there were no shops with software lol. Speedball 2, turrican cannon fodder...good times.
At its peak, the Amiga was estimated to have around 5% to 10% of the global personal computer market share. In some regions, such as Europe, its market share was stronger, reaching up to 20% at certain times, especially in the video game and multimedia markets. And no, there was no way the Amiga could displace Macs or PCs from the market; it never had any opportunity.
Dinosaur of Jurassic world 2018 was created with 200 million polygons?? 😨😨 I am a 3D modeler but that sounds a bit exaggerated
Incorrect Amiga's having only 2MB RAM. Amiga used two types of RAM, Chip & Fast. Chip was considered the graphics memory. Those A2000 where upgraded to 2MB MegAChip Ram. Fast Ram was 32MB, Fusion 040 accelerator and Video Toaster. 💻♥
7:28 “Previsualization” i.e. not for the actual renders. Wonder why not?
Because the Amigas weren't good enough!
It was a prof of concept that didn't require millions of dollars to setup. SGI systems were much faster and vastly more expensive, but when you want that level of detail the render time is a nightmare even on an SGI render-farm.
A friend of mine would who worked at DK and was the guy who presented the proof of concept for the Walking with Dinosaurs Multimedia CD to them (he started on an 1MB A500 running Sculpt then Imagine then upgraded the Amiga to an 68020) and it was only when it went to DK that it was moved from the Amiga because they were ignorant of the Amiga but that didn't stop him from working on stuff at home.
8:34 Hmm, I wonder what CG software is that? Begins with “B” ...
Lawrence D’Oliveiro : Blender
What’s with the horrid text to speech audio and zero input from anyone at Foundation or Newtek? Great idea for a video, but you’re missing half of it.
I understand they lost the special effect files for Babylon 5.... Which is why they can't do a HD version...
I think that just rerendering it in HD, could make it look even worse. Cause you would see all tiny details, and how it's not keeping up with modern vfx. So it would have to be at least retextured, new shaders created, etc. That would involve huge costs.
@@VFXGeek not having the original files would make that job even harder 😕
I don't think they could do it anyway for the same reason that HD versions of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Voyager can't be done. They don't have high resolution negatives to go back to as they did with The Next Generation, and even TNG and TOS was painstaking work with an awful lot of CGI having to be redone to make it look right. Recreating Babylon 5 entirely for HD would be spectacular, but ultimately not feasible.
Yes most TNG special effects work was done on film so they can remaster, they don't have the original film recordings of the later series as the SFX and editing was done on digital prints.
It's not just the space effects shots, it's the live action special effects, which they couldn't redo without the negatives.
Also even in SD, the clearer image on modern screen wthout VHS and broadcast artifacts, highlights all the cheap props and iffy costumes that we didn't notice in the 90s.
They were able to remaster Star Trek the original series and TNG only because there weren't so many effects shots and it still cost millions that they didn't recoup.
Video toaster didn't have chroma key only Luminance keyer...
And did you forget the sound and music in Bab5?
Ahh the good ole days. The Amiga was for the graphics folks.. meanwhile the Atari ST was being used in studios for music production.
This is so true. I've visited 4 music studios and all of them still have their Atari STs (usually in a closet somewhere nowdays). Programs like Cubase started on the Atari platform.
and all this thirst for "multimedia" machines started back in the 70's with Atari 800 designed by the same team.
Those Amigas only had *TWO* megabytes of memory? Heck, even my Amiga 500 at that time had 4 MB!
They meant 2 MB of CHIP RAM (graphics RAM), they would have had a few more MB of FAST RAM to make things work a decent speed.
This statement is made by the narrator's voice , not the old workers, there is no way to render such graphics (pilot episode) with 2 megabytes of ram, they use accelerated 040 amigas with up to 32 megabytes of ram. Check from other source of information around internet , it's naive to think than a professional project run with such limit budget of ram....
Oddly appropriate that the narration is synthesized text-to-speech.
Your video is a bit dissonant, or rather logically incoherent. You first explain how the Amiga's (used by Foundation Imaging) were seriously restricted by the amount of RAM they had (2MB according to you, in total. I'm not certain that this is accurate, thats extremely little even for 1993, for example I had a 486 66DX2 with 8MB in early 1994 and the Amiga is capable supporting more, even without an accelerator board which you say they had.) and then in the next paragraph claim that "Amiga computers were more powerful and versatile than PCs or Macs of the time." Not only is this a bit of a contradiction, but IMHO completely false. In 1993 the Amiga was nearly 10 years old and as you said the company failed soon after that. This claim holds true when comparing Amigas to PCs and Macs from the time of the initial launch of the Amiga (1000), which was in 1985. By that days standards the machine was incredibly powerful in comparison to it's competitors and years ahead of it's time in nearly every respect but especially in terms of graphics output. Which undoubtedly lead to LightWave, Maya and other similar software packages for sound, 3D modelling, digital image manipulation and so on, having their genesis on the Amiga platform. Same goes for the Video Toaster addon boards having their origin on said computers, lending to it's versatility that stemmed from the easily expandable system architecture which didn't have licensing or overt complexity hampering it's adoption unlike with PCs, Macs and high-end workstations and their bus wars which had been stifling development and keeping systems expensive from the late 1980's.
However, by 1993 PCs in particular were equal to and in some respects superior to what anyone could build around an Amiga system. Especially graphics cards had advanced with leaps and bounds, and early 3D accelerators were already being prototyped and showcased for high-end PC based CAD workstations. And by the first quarter of 1995, less than 18 months later, mainstream PCs (not just high-end and Workstation offerings) had become vastly more powerful than any Amiga system imagined, even if you account for accelerators and other tune ups available for the Amiga from 3rd party vendors.
The only reason Foundation Imaging and others opted for Amigas at that time, was the software which had been evolving on the platform for the better part of a decade. It was some serious shit, since the companies went for it, while taking with it a considerable risk I might add. Since with Commodores bankruptcy there was no real support and any sort of HW fault could lead to a situation where a spare part could become impossible to source. It was the software, not the hardware, which drew companies and artists to this platform, and it became it's last and perhaps only significant success. Coming in way too late and in a way too small of market niche for it to enable Commodore or Escom to profit from it.
And around and about this time LightWave, Maya etc. had started to migrate to PCs and Macs as a result of Commodore becoming defunct. The second this software was available relatively cheap much faster PC systems, Foundation Imaging switched to PC workstations and DEC Alpha rendering computers and only a few months later they ran rack fulls of Pentium Pros for rendering.
So, I put it to you that it was superior software, not hardware, which drew CGI people on to the Amiga platform. Video Toaster is a significant innovation in the field as an addon card enabling digital video composition on otherwise relatively meek hardware but there's absolutely no technological reason it's creators couldn't have built it for PC systems. It's just that due to the on going bus wars of the time and the lack of a universal and inexpensive but fast expansion bus this was an unappealing prospect. There were three different high-performance bus solutions for PCs on the market at the time and all of them were cost prohibitive for ordinary consumers. (MCA, EISA and VLB.) In addition to PC systems lacking appropriate software for the field and thus a target audience for such an application.
The second it became obvious that the PCI bus (introduced in 1992 btw) was going to become the ubiquitous expansion bus for just about any kind of computer Desktop / Workstation system regardless of CPU system architecture, system manufacturer or target market (consumer, professional or enterprise), video production addon board manufacturers started releasing products for it. Usually accompanied by support on multiple different operating system and CPU architectures. This was happening around the same time, circa 93 - 95. Not only was the PCI bus superior in terms of speed to the Zorro and NuBus offerings of Amiga and Mac of old, but it offered a far more wider market for auxiliary addon card manufacturers, making necessary initial hardware development investments not only financially viable but extremely profitable.
And this was the final nail in Amigas coffin, which was living on life-support already by the time CGI companies found it and started to adopt it in a serious fashion. There were some attempts by European manufacturers who had licensed Amiga IP from the defunct company, to cater to the video production and CGI niche, like the MacroSystems Draco but they never made any sort of a major breakthrough in the field. In Europe, North America or South American markets.
So, yes. The Amiga was revolutionary, more powerful and more versatile than PCs and Macs. But only by late 1980's standards. By the time the 90s had rolled around it was already out dated and Commodores chronic mismanagement blatantly evident to everyone, which alienated most of it's key user base who then started to migrate to greener pastures found on the Mac and the PC.
AmigaOS has some of the operating system stored in ROM, this allowed the Amiga to use less ram under operation, so ROM was like 512K, and after boot you used maybe 200K, (the rest as on disk and only loaded when needed, unloaded if not used.) to you had about 1,8Kbytes to work with. But I think your correct as this used video toasters, and Video toasters where kind a like true color graphic cards, I guess they came with some extra ram.
The Amiga 2000 was computer created in 1987, standard it came with 1 MB ram, it was the desktop version of the Amiga 500, that only had 0.5mb ram, that was considered a lot at the time, as developers where used to commodore C64 and commodore C128, that only had like 64K and 128K of ram ;-), originally they planned to only have 256K bytes of ram in original Amiga 1000 computer, but they lucky changed their minds, graphic was organized in most memory efficient ways like bitplanes for built in graphic card, where one bit is a pixel, one 2 color image was one bitplane, if you had 2 x 2 color images that gave you 4 colors, (the more 2 colors images the more colors you had, 2,4,8,16,32, and 64 halfbright) the graphic output was designed for TV's as monitors were not common in homes at the time. so resolution was 320x200 (NTSC) or 640x200 (NTSC), for pal you had extra 50 pixels, 320x250 (PAL) or 640x250 (PAL), interlacing was supported this give you flickering, and impression higher resolution, Amiga 500/2000 had built in hardware image compression called HAM6, allowing colors to be modified as there where drawn, this mode gave you max of 4096 colors, but image had artifacts due the decompression used, but this did not give you quality graphics, but saved a lot of RAM, for quality graphics you need to upgrade the Amiga, there was the DCTV, the Picasso 2 and few other upgrades. Lightway was able to render the image in true colors, was able to convert the images to display the graphics in Amiga native graphic formats.
Newer computer like the Amiga 1200 that came out in 1992; had 2MB of chip ram, and 1 MB of ROM, where a lot of OS was stored in ROM, and Amiga 4000 that came out also in 1992. Of course, 1993 was big change in PC industry, almost all PC's in 1993 came with SVGA graphics, while Amiga's optimized for saving memory, and keeping cost down, not really 3D graphics. Yes did have some graphic acceleration like flat fill of polygons, Amiga become costly because you had to buy Amiga + hardware upgrades to compete with PC. Amiga did have CDTV in 1988 but all Amiga commuters after came without CDROM (with exception of CD32 that game console), in 1993 however CDROM where normall in PC's, (even PC's without sound cards came with CD-ROM) and this popular video games had cuts scenes and this games became popular, it was bad case of poor timing, and ignoring the competition that killed commodore. before that also did lots poor marketing in the USA, this made Amiga more popular in Europa where marketing was different.
The 2 MB they are most likely referring to is the Chip RAM (graphics RAM), which is the most that you can have on the motherboard. You can also add a graphics card as you would on a PC but it won't integrate with the Video Toaster if you were using one of those. They could also have 8 MB of Fast RAM without an accelerator (I knew a guy in 95 or 96 who had an Amiga 4000 with 130 MB RAM, I had an A1200 with 34 MB). You say "in 1993 the Amiga was nearly 10 years old", this is true and the PC was even older, but both were drastically upgraded over the years. The Amiga went through 3 major chipset changes OCS, ECS and AGA in 1992. With the 68060 CPU it was able to keep up with the first Pentiums, but when they started clocking above 100 mHz , they began to fall behind and with no Commodore around the distance increased every year. I used my A1200 as my only computer until 1999 when I had to get a Win 98 machine for my new job (tax software). I remember I would turn them both on at the same time and the Amiga would boot, dial the modem and load my home page before the Win 98 (Celeron 333) would finish booting :-).
I think the video is also incorrect in the list of movies/series that were made on Amiga. The mentioned movies/series had CGI done in Lightwave, but mostly not on Amiga (even the Babylon 5 production used Amigas only for the first season). When it was possible, everybody switched with LightWave to different platforms (DEC Alpha was pretty popular for some time - a single system was able to provide the render speed similar to a room full of networked Amigas).
Regarding the RAM - I think that Video Toaster would not even work with just 2MB of RAM (as far as I remember something around ~6MB was necessary). Typical VT equipped system had more RAM for sure.
Amiga makes it possible
I had an Amiga 500 in America. Rare. Video Toaster was a big deal.
The B5 producers had wanted to use miniatures and motion control before talking to Thornton. You should check out the Paul Bryant and Ron Thornton interviews on here.
www.b5scrolls.com/
'The computer have 2 Megabyte of RAM' 😮