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NewTek Toaster [2]: TV Studio in a Box
 | | (Click for enlargement) Here's a view of a smaller skin of Toaster [2]'s switcher |
First let's look at the switcher, which looks like a control room video switcher (click on graphic at left for enlargement), with a program and preview bus, and an effects row. When you first open the software, there are 8 inputs available, but if that's not enough, just change the skin to the 24 input configuration and you're ready to go. There's that object-oriented configurability coming into play (no pun intended).
 | | Click on the graphic for a QuickTime movie of a few real time Toaster transitions |
There's a virtual fader bar, and just like a physical switcher, when you place a source on the preview row and move the fader bar, it dissolves to that source. Or, press the button for another source on the program row and it's taken on-air. There are hundreds of effects at your disposal for transitioning from one shot to the next, and many of them use LightWave models to add an extra touch of real world (or other-worldly) objects to transitions. In fact, anything that can be rendered in LightWave, including motion blur, depth of field, reflection and radiosity can be used in a real time 3D transition in the switcher or in Toaster Edit. Click on the graphic at right for a QuickTime movie.
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But there's one part of this system that's not quite ready yet, that will be a favorite of LightWave jockeys -- the ability to import your own LightWave objects into transitions. An effects compiler is not included yet, but NewTek tells us it's in the works for a future release. Until then, there are plenty of LightWave-based effects included, and all work in real time. The best news is that in order to do all this in real time, the minimum computer required, according to NewTek, is a 1.4 GHz single-processor P4. These days, that would be considered an average computer. Since these effects are all done in software, though, I'd recommend at least 512MB of RAM, and a gig of RAM would be even better. With my testing, 512MB behaved admirably on the dual 1.4GHz processor Pentium Xeon machine used here at the Midwest Test Facility. Also for our testing, we used an array of three Quantum Atlas 10,000 rpm Ultra 160 SCSI drives that are capable of a whopping 75 MB/sec. throughput, so to get the kind of performance I saw, you'll need some serious speed. Even if you don't have that kind of horsepower, the software is designed to be able to scale according to the hardware on the machine. So, if Toaster encounters a group of effects it can't play back in real time, it immediately begins to render those effects in the background, making it possible for the user to continue working while the processing is done out of sight.
What's the payoff, though, if you really have some big iron like we did? The effects performance of this system was formidable. For instance, I was able to stack up four simultaneous layers of uncompressed video, including a chromakey and three moving DVEs fading in and out and play it all back in real time without dropping any frames. It was the best software-based performance I've seen yet short of a proprietary effects box costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. The best part is, these effects looked amazingly clean, which sometimes is not the case with effects that are created using software only.
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