Last Friday I drove to Universal City to take a first look at NewTek’s now shipping Video Toaster 2. I have been a longtime fan of NewTek, the folks that started the whole desktop video thing with the original Video Toaster. Heck, I even started using a pre-release version that a friend obtained by bribing a dealer, so I can safely say that I was one of the very first original Video Toaster users.
Besides the revolutionary Amiga-based switcher, they have brought us other great products such as Lightwave and Aura. But being a fan of the company didn’t prevent me from wondering, throughout the 90-minute drive, if Video Toaster 2 was yet just another nonlinear edit system. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
If you are an experienced editor like me, coming from film or the old days of analog pre-computer controlled editing, you probably noticed that something went wrong when nonlinear systems starting coming out. A concept was invented and virtually every company adopted it. But it wasn’t exactly the best for editors. We are creative individuals, used to selecting the best parts of the best shots and putting together a story with them. All we care about are the final results. We don’t necessarily love computers. We are not particularly fond of having to convert different file formats, having to worry about different sampling rates and compression types. And we certainly aren’t having a great time when we must obey a programmer’s set of authoritarian rules while all we wanted was to just put together a good show. Unfortunately, every year at least one new nonlinear editing application seems to come out and it insists on following the same stupid rules that someone else who had probably never edited a video in life invented in the first place. The truth is that very few companies truly understand how editors think.
So there I was, ready for another press demo, wondering if NewTek was abandoning its original “video for the ordinary man” dream in favor of competing against the more established nonlinear editing application companies. What’s truly ironic about the whole scenario is that NewTek started things virtually before everyone else. At a time when you needed to purchase tens of thousands of dollars worth of dedicated boxes to put together the simplest of edit systems, NewTek had the vision to utilize the power of a reasonably priced personal computer to make video production and post production affordable for the first time. They started on the right track and the Video Toaster completely changed our industry. Sure it had several limitations, imposed in part by the computer technology that was available at the time. But NewTek definitely had a vision and it was going in the right direction. Unfortunately a few things happened that caused NewTek’s video products growth to virtually stop. It’s as if the company was the absolute leader in the desktop video race but had engine problems, forcing it into a very long pit stop while the other racers took over the lead. Suddenly the company that started it all is not seen as worthy competitor anymore.
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