Amiga is my childhood. Amiga Forever!

Who else clicked the video because it’s got Babylon 5 in the title?

@jason-vv6kv

5 жыл бұрын

me 😜. WB were really cheap. That show could've looked better. And their "to-DVD-choices" butchered the VFX even more.

@FuriousGriffin

5 жыл бұрын

@@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

5 жыл бұрын

and apparently a flat earther lol ...... are you John Snow?

@jason-vv6kv

5 жыл бұрын

​@@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.

@Neznany

5 жыл бұрын

I clicked because of Amiga in the title)

I used lightwave with my Amiga 2000 and Video Toaster professionally from 1992 - 2003. It was so ahead of its time for the money.

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.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

5 жыл бұрын

Blender began on SGI. It was originally called “Traces”.

@higochrana6424

5 жыл бұрын

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Wrong. Check this article - interview with the author of Traces zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/

@freddyncalm

5 жыл бұрын

@@higochrana6424 Thank you a lot for this information.

@vapourmile

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@marcozolo3536

2 жыл бұрын

@@vapourmile Wrong

My teacher from college worked on the B5 as a VFX artist. He had nothing but positive views working on the production.

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.

@Jokie155

5 жыл бұрын

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 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.

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.

@respectforkurt944

4 жыл бұрын

awesome, did you export the files as still images or movs? were they then imported straight into Avids?

@ELEKTROSKANSEN

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@philcarpenter242

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@philcarpenter242

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@avtpro

Жыл бұрын

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.

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 👍

@daishi5571

3 жыл бұрын

I'm stealing that!

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.

@dramaticusflatudicus3839

3 жыл бұрын

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..

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 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

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.

@vapourmile

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@MrComputerRetro

2 жыл бұрын

@@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?

@TemalCageman

Жыл бұрын

@@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. :)

My uncle used to always be rendering something on his Amiga in the 80s and 90s using Lightwave because it took so long. :)

@RetroDawn

2 жыл бұрын

Right on. In the 80s it would have been other programs--perhaps one of the two LW predecessors.

The Video Toaster won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1993 🏆

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

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!!!🤓👍

@VFXGeek

5 жыл бұрын

Thank you for pointing that out :)

@Tomurow

5 жыл бұрын

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).🤓🤓

@danl2073

5 жыл бұрын

Mojo is a true artist. You see him for a second in the video.

Oh how I miss my Amigas... blast from the past...

@sanjayshetty5640

5 жыл бұрын

jhwheuer : I still have my Commodore 128. Commodore was ahead of its time.

@Dayta

4 жыл бұрын

im still raging over problems on my pc that would not exist on a amiga ...

@oldtimergaming9514

4 жыл бұрын

I have 5 of them in the basement, want to get rid of them but it is hard to let go.

Commodore business machines got the short end of the stick with Microsoft and apple. The video toaster graphics was ahead of the curve.

@sanjayshetty5640

5 жыл бұрын

Bear Jew : it kicked IBM and Apple’s backside.

@asupshik

3 жыл бұрын

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.

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...

@RetroDawn

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@dramaticusflatudicus3839

2 жыл бұрын

@@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

Respect to Mr. Jay Miner, he was the greatest.

I still have my Amiga's and had a Video Toaster and Blender. Ahh Memories.

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

@sanjayshetty5640

5 жыл бұрын

Robert Madsen : I still have my Commodore 128. Commodore was ahead of its time.

Great insight. I love hearing how simple tricks & clever thinking brings VFX to life with Amigas and otter creative solutions.

What is it with youtubers that have to use speech synthesizers instead of doing their own VO's? It's so stilted.

@bytesabre

5 жыл бұрын

netik23 my guess is they aren’t native English speakers, and the voice synth might work better with the KZread algorithm than a strong accent

@IntyMichael

5 жыл бұрын

Because you would instantly hear that this video is made by a 10 year old. ;)

@DaveNarn

5 жыл бұрын

The voice tech is getting better, soon most talking heads will be NPC and you wont know the difference

@AnalogX64

5 жыл бұрын

Or Tutorial videos where the person types the info in Notepad.

@ralfbaechle

5 жыл бұрын

@@bytesabre Maybe - but this one still sounds awful. Maybe it's been created using Amiga's speech.library ;-)

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,

Just imagine where the Amiga computer system would be today if Commodore hadn't screwed up so badly!

@elta6241

5 жыл бұрын

Mike Minor Given how far ahead Commodore was and the industry they helped start its amazing they went out of business in 94.

@MikeDMinor

5 жыл бұрын

@@elta6241 yeah they had the technology but unfortunately just not leadership that they needed to be successful at the time... 😕

@MikeDMinor

5 жыл бұрын

@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.

@kjetilhvalstrand1009

5 жыл бұрын

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.

@Comakino

4 жыл бұрын

​@dothemathright 1111 Still got that 2000? Good time to dig it out :)

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

@Ryofb

5 жыл бұрын

you make a good job too :)

@TheGuruMeditation

5 жыл бұрын

@@Ryofb Thank you so much!

@VFXGeek

5 жыл бұрын

Thanks very much :)

@RetroDawn

2 жыл бұрын

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!!!!

I love this channel's contents. You guys are doing a great job!!

I love your content bro. Please do a series on pre- computer generated visual effects, like miniatures, matt paintings, optical printers...

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).

Awesome , Waiting for more videos

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!

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 ^^

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

This type of content videos should have 1m subs.

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.

Great video!

Crazy how that machine was released in March 1987, it was easily 5 years ahead of its time.

Am i the only Nigerian who thinks this is truly impressive?

great video!

B5 - Best SciFi show ever.

@OpenGL4ever

2 жыл бұрын

BSG enters the room.

6:55 "Team consistent of 8 animators and rendering farm" I love how they put it.

Amiga and Babylon5 for ever !!!!

2 megs??? DAMN!!! Easy to forget how far graphics have come!

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..

@VFXGeek

5 жыл бұрын

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 ;)

@ShallowRavers

5 жыл бұрын

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 :(

@daishi5571

5 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@ShallowRavers

5 жыл бұрын

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

@O-cDxA

4 жыл бұрын

" 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 "

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'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!

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?

@lifetrack6019

5 жыл бұрын

You should do that ! Great people there

Captain Disillusion talks about how Babylon 5 was his inspiration for a career in VFX.

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 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...

Sadly you missed Ron Thornton the pioneer of this. He passed away before this. Great guy, very helpful to all.

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 grew up with B5 , unbelieveable an Amiga modelling. We are so spoiled these days.

Genious graphics!

Great video. I don't understand the computerized voiceover, but other than that I loved it.

i loved my amiga 500!

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

Fond memories of my amiga 500

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.

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.

@JMDAmigaMusic

3 жыл бұрын

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

@TheOneTrueSpLiT

3 жыл бұрын

@@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!

@JMDAmigaMusic

3 жыл бұрын

@@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

Good old Lightwave!!!

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.

So, when are they going to remaster the series?

@houstonhelicoptertours1006

4 жыл бұрын

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 wonder what Babyon 5 would look like if redone on today's graphics?

@qnebra

5 жыл бұрын

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.

NASA used some amiga for a certain function until 2006.

nice ! I have Amiga3000 in my retrocomputer collection, I wonder what I really can do on it besides games)

ASDG Video Toaster boards. I almost got one for free...but I did have all the images of the ships..and station...but have lost it all when my PCs were taken by friends of the guy who bought my old house.

AmigaOS never ceased development. It just didn’t make sense for them to manufacture computers anymore

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.

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.

I named my tortoise Londo and I'm gonna build him a palace.

Ahh the good ole days. The Amiga was for the graphics folks.. meanwhile the Atari ST was being used in studios for music production.

@TemalCageman

Жыл бұрын

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.

Also SeaQuest did feature miniatures! I know a guy who did some of them.

I had an Amiga 500 in America. Rare. Video Toaster was a big deal.

Clicked because of B5, immediately left because of the voice synth.

i want to see, if you can it, how you can use it to create some VF, by your own. :)

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. 💻♥

Amiga makes it possible

If you need someone to do voiceovers I have a studio and I love VFX

@fastcode1772

5 жыл бұрын

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.

Did they say two petabytes? Did that much capability actually even exist back then?

Oddly appropriate that the narration is synthesized text-to-speech.

Dinosaur of Jurassic world 2018 was created with 200 million polygons?? 😨😨 I am a 3D modeler but that sounds a bit exaggerated

And did you forget the sound and music in Bab5?

Amigaaaaaaaa 😍

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/

Those Amigas only had *TWO* megabytes of memory? Heck, even my Amiga 500 at that time had 4 MB!

@jameswebb5080

5 жыл бұрын

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.

@MrJorgalan

7 ай бұрын

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....

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.

7:28 “Previsualization” i.e. not for the actual renders. Wonder why not?

@kirishima638

5 жыл бұрын

Because the Amigas weren't good enough!

@daishi5571

5 жыл бұрын

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 understand they lost the special effect files for Babylon 5.... Which is why they can't do a HD version...

@VFXGeek

5 жыл бұрын

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.

@chadlofts7926

5 жыл бұрын

@@VFXGeek not having the original files would make that job even harder 😕

@elta6241

5 жыл бұрын

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.

@watcherzero5256

5 жыл бұрын

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.

@kirishima638

5 жыл бұрын

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.

8:34 Hmm, I wonder what CG software is that? Begins with “B” ...

@sanjayshetty5640

5 жыл бұрын

Lawrence D’Oliveiro : Blender

I used my Amiga 1200 until 2000 or 2001. Amiga were that far ahead x86 computers.

'The computer have 2 Megabyte of RAM' 😮

Awesome information, thank you for talking about Babylon 5. It is a shame it is ruined with the computer voice! Get a person to narrate next time please.

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!

Electricimage animation system en una Mac de la época hubieran generado imágenes de mejor calidad y menos tiempo. Igual un logro impresionante

@VFXGeek

6 ай бұрын

That was developed in 2013 - 10 years later!

@pedromarmol4d

6 ай бұрын

@@VFXGeek I used EIAS for 10 years in the '90s to develop projects with millions of polygons on a Mac PowerPC 601. It was a highly efficient and incredibly fast software, also employed in Terminator 2 and the reedition of Star Wars.

Video toaster didn't have chroma key only Luminance keyer...