
VFX, Amiga and Babylon 5 [video] - doener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn3UraChY0c&feature=youtu.be
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cromwellian
Wow, I'll have to add this to my set of "how can I show people, especially my
Apple zealot friends who obsess about the original Mac 128k, just how advanced
the Amiga was" videos. This video, is one of my favorites
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs)),
it shows just how advanced the Amiga was in 1985, let alone after 1987 when
the 2000 was introduced.

I learned to code on a Vic-20 and C64 (basic and assembly), but the Amiga was
my first exposure to C, and LaTeX, and 3D modeling / video editing. I grew up
relatively poor in Baltimore City, and this was an astonishing amount of
capability for something so affordable. (I also learned soldering because I
only had 512k of chip ram on my A500, and Commodore's official RAM upgrade was
too expensive, so I bought my own RAM chips and soldered them directly to the
mainboard)

I have an unlimited amount of nostalgia for this machine (and Babylon-5!)

~~~
cromwellian
This is another one of my favorites, the JobsNote-like launch of the Amiga
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8)

Compare this to the 1984 launch of the Mac which cost $2485 MSRP, all of these
capabilities came for only $1285 ($1595 with monitor), or the A500 ($699 MSRP)

As you can tell, I'm still bitter and annoyed at how Commodore mismanaged and
squandered the marketing and sales of this machine. The Amiga was so advanced,
it wasn't until PCs arrived with SuperVGA cards and SoundBlaster audio that I
was enticed to leave the Amiga platform. The Mac128k at school seemed like a
toy in comparison to my Amiga and what it could do, but somehow all of the
media attention was on it. It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and
no one cared.

~~~
sys_64738
I used AMAX II with my Amiga 500 to run Mac programs while at College. That
was an example of how brilliant it was given the native speed of the Mac under
emulation.

The Amiga platform is an era which I wouldn't trade for anything. I feel sad
for people who didn't have the opportunity to experience and live it first
hand.

~~~
tejtm
I used Shapeshifter to bring my Amiga up as a Mac but way faster, if I recall
the author (a German?) included a special thanks to Apple for making their
firmware so trivially reversable

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apostacy
JMS, the creator of this show, was way ahead of his time, and did some amazing
tricks to get this show produced.

He drew heavily from technology culture, and found innovative ways to save
money on production.

He was able to get consultation from the NASA JPL (and credited them), and he
pioneered early CGI; season 1 supposedly built a rendering cluster out of 486
computers.

Another way this show was trailblazing was that it was the first network
television show shot in 16:9.

You can read more about it on the Lurker's Guide[1] (That is a usenet
reference), which contains excerpts from the newsgroups where he gave feedback
to fans after each episode.

[1]: [http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/](http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/)

~~~
WorldMaker
More than just being the first shot in 16:9, it was the first network show
shot targeting HD television, before the networks fully agreed on what HD
would be. It just never got the final HD treatment that it should have.

It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital
originals for the special effects shots, because they should have easily had a
chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent
Blu-Ray rerelease. Some alternate universe has amazing Babylon 5 remasters
today on Blu-Ray versus the letterboxed no-worse-than-SD DVD copies ours is
left with.

(Another weird twist to the story here is that one tale has it that Warner
Brothers blames French company Vivendi for losing the digital SFX archives,
which WB loaned to Vivendi for a B5 game under development under the old
Sierra games brand that was eventually cancelled. Which also isn't the only
property that WB seems to have "lost" to Vivendi, as WB should _probably_ be
the owner of the No One Lives Forever videogame IP, by way of buying developer
Monolith into WB Games, but Vivendi lost the publishing contract somewhere and
no one seems to know in this timeline if WB actually does own it or not.)

~~~
diggernet
Wait, you said "digital". That means super easy to copy. The only way Vivendi
could have "lost all the digital originals" is if only one physical copy
existed (no backups??) and Warner simply handed that over to them instead of
making them a copy. There is absolutely no way Vivendi can be blamed for that
level of WTF negligence from Warner. It would be completely reasonable for
anyone at Vivendi to simply assume that any media they got from Warner was
just one copy of many, and had no intrinsic value.

~~~
WorldMaker
Yup, all part of the fascinating mystique of the story. At the end of the day
any stupidity is 100% WB's fault, but _how_ many mistakes they made in the
process seems to be a fascinating tale.

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harel
I've posted this before, but this is my go-to Amiga story to demonstrate how
amazing this was at the time where PC was the inferior alpha computer: My dad
was a graphic designer/print shop and he was building the panels for an F-16
fighter jet simulator, built by a private company for the Israeli Air Force in
the 90s. One saturday he took 14 year old Amiga fanatic me to the company HQ
and I had a go flying an F-16 inside a real cockpit, 180 deg. screen, amazing
out of this world 3D graphics. The whole shebang. That part was amazing as it
is. However, what really blew me away was first getting a demo of the $250K
SGI they had to run the whole thing, and then the real nuclear was the next
room filled with tens of Amiga workstations they used to actually generate all
the visuals and graphic models. Considering just around that time I tried
those 90s first attempt virtual reality arcades, which were powered by Amigas
but were quite shit because it was the 90s and not some oculus magic, seeing
and flying that simulator was an out of body experience for 14 year old me. I
can't express what the Amiga gave me in words. It showed me the future before
i had to go back into the past and wait until it caught up.

------
thinkingkong
I feel like we're still in the uncanny valley for voice synthesis for this
type of narration. It's good but just bad enough for people to be unforgiving
and have it feel creepy.

~~~
mortenjorck
It took me perhaps an entire minute before I realized something was strange
about the voiceover and that it was synthesized, which, in my view, is quite
impressive. Once I realized it was generated, though, I became much more
attuned to the pitch-shifting artifacts, slight cadence irregularities, and
cultural misses (like emphasizing the second syllable of "recall" in the title
of the movie Total Recall).

Still, a few more years of progress on neural nets (can GANs be applied to
vocal cadence and intonation?) and I won't envy the position of mid-tier
voiceover artists.

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baldfat
My church bought a Amiga 2000 and a Video Toaster because as a teenager they
trusted me to get what they needed. It was there till 2004. :) I loved that
machine.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Did the church actually have a use for that system?

~~~
trentlott
Well, he was apparently a member of the church - so, yes! And it was probably
bordered on lust in the classical sense (and, more accurately, in the modern
one).

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thinkingkong
Fun Video Toaster fact: The founder of the company Tim Jenison[1] is the same
guy that made the documentary 'Tims Vermeer' which if you haven't seen, is
absolutely awesome.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek#Tim_Jenison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek#Tim_Jenison)

~~~
dreamcompiler
True. Another one: The engineer who built the first Toaster for NewTek was
Brad Carvey, Dana Carvey's brother. The "Garth" character Dana plays on
Wayne's World is Dana's impression of Brad.

~~~
gdubs
And I think Garth wears a video toaster t shirt in Wayne’s World 2.

~~~
djmips
[https://i.redd.it/1tezuz463poz.jpg](https://i.redd.it/1tezuz463poz.jpg)

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yuchi
My first exposure to computers was an A1200 — which my father bought in 1994.
Now that I have a son, I’m desperately in search for something that could
influence him as much as that Amiga did to me.

Seriously, what is the Amiga of the current market? What is that product that
fosters creativity and is so futurist?

~~~
peterashford
There isn't one. What made the Amiga great was that it was a technically
amazing machine that hobbyists could actually use and do great things with.
The equivalent today would be Sony allowing completely open use of the PS4 and
letting anyone make anything for it that they wished. It wouldn't happen:
companies today like their walled gardens. The Amiga flourished by being open.

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philwelch
Babylon 5 really opened the door to using this much CGI on a weekly show. Star
Trek TNG and DS9 really didn't embrace it for a long time, even after B5 came
out. It wasn't until the sixth season of DS9 that a major CGI effects sequence
was used in Star Trek (though individual CGI assets were used prior to this):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIFUJxJwcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIFUJxJwcQ)

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mcguire
The narrator voice is synthetic?

~~~
dmitrybrant
It's a complete mystery to me why certain YouTubers do this. I'll take the
worst human voice (even Fran Drescher or Rich Evans) over a synthesized one,
particularly for expository narration. It reminds me of phishing phone calls,
and instantly draws me away from the actual content.

~~~
bootcode
A guess would be quicker production process. If you adjust the script, just
rerender it and done. Actually speaking and recording takes tons of time.

~~~
peopleeater
I guess. But if a human can't be bothered to record it, why should I be
bothered to read it?

