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I know absolutely nothing about Lightroom, but I enjoy watching you mess with it. Thanks Q!

STOP POINTING ALL OVER THE SCREEN PLEASE

Lightwave 3D has used the 1999 TCT Network station ID with a classic TCT logo until 2002

Ah, the power of the Amiga in the early 90's.

I love the apple floating in nice water animation! It was a great time to play around with in the late 80- early 90s.

I remember going to a Toaster 4000 demo event at an Amiga dealer in Seattle sometime around 1993.. Kiki Stockhammer and Wil Wheaton were there, and off to the side was a machine with a PAR playing a ~3 minute clip which was the train sequence from Back to the Future II. This was the first real 'full quality' digital video I had seen playing back on a desktop computer, and it was pretty damn cool for the time. I'm sure I still have the Toaster 4000 demo tape I got there.

It`s PAR better than Flyer? (better compatibility with formats?)

Q - "Don't do as I do, do as I say, after I actually figure it out of course." 🤣 That water looked really good for the time, and still looks good today. I'm loving the setup in your A2500.

I used Tornado3D quite a bit as it had bones and physics. It was a very promising piece of software but unfortunately it fell by the wayside. Thanks for the upload!

Nice!!

that water effect looks incredible! you did an amazing job with the animation of the bobbing Apple, that must have taken a lot of time and patience

The import has to convert and push all those files across Z2 bus to the drive on the PAR. PAR gets it's playback advantage by having all the data locally on the PAR card side of the Z2 bus, similar to the Flyer.

Can you show how to do video toaster stuff on an emulator like FS-UAE or Amiberry?

I have said it before and I will say that again, the water effect render looks absolutely amazing.

I see Screamer-net in Kevs future.

Loved the nod to Real3D! I did their US tech support and sales for a couple of years in the late 90s. Juha and Vesa are amazing programmers. Also still love Lightwave, vintage Amiga version and the just released Lightwave 2024! Real 3D worked great with the PAR as well.

I am aware the A2500 was released in 1989. However it spent the bulk of its glory in the early 90s! ;)

"This monitor sucks" . . . the only one that actually works . . . Jesus, stop talking and we might get more enjoyment out of your videos. You do demonstrate some interesting stuff, but damn, the nonstop, ad-lib commentary is stopping me from watching anymore . . . I'll try again a year from now.

This reinforces why I take my 1084's to a local electronics guy I found and pay him 100 bucks to service it. No risk of me dying.

SCALA with a LANC controller and a DV cam was MUCH MUCH better. S-Video/DVD quality recording. and MUCH MUCH CHEAPER. and all Digital. I was Destryong PC users in the 90's. Also used a DCTV with RGB adaptor and converted Video Footage into single frames and put them back into the Amiga as 16 color DCTV images (which it translates to 16 million colors) and played back smoothly. The Amiga thinks they are 16 color frames/animations and treats them as such so its light. I also used Elan Performer to play them back on an ECS Amiga to VJ. Instant response.

OMG! This is so awesome!!!!

On the Amiga monitor to get composite input, there is a slide switch on the right side of the flip down cover. It's pretty small and almost hidden, it slides left and right. On the back of the monitor there should be a composite labeled RCA input, or it's likely the yellow RCA. Might be a Y and C input on the back that I think was meant for C64's and 128's that had separate luminance and chrominance output cable. I remember drooling over those PAR cards in Amiga magazine ads. I had worked with a U-Matic 3/4" deck to lay one frame at a time using a serial to parallel controller that could control the VTR down to the field using SMPTE timecode that was on one of the audio tracks. I think the controller cost almost as much as the 3/4" deck. It worked perfectly, but man did it take forever. You would start an animation on Friday afternoon in Lightwave 3D, render each frame; each frame taking however long, usually depended on complexity of animation. Maybe by Monday morning it would be finished for a few seconds of animation. Hoping you didn't get some kind of glitch on tape or stupid animation mistake you made. Usually used virgin tape to get the cleanest playback.

IIRC the thing that you had to watch out for with PAR hard drives was how aggressive their thermal recalibration was. The demo reel that got me hired at Westwood was recorded via an original ISA PAR I got for cheap after the next gen SCSI-based cards came out. This was on a PC, and amazingly was quite usable for editing with Adobe Premiere.

YOU bought that!!! I was watching it. I had a PAR back in the day. It was decent quality but there wasn't really a solid way to do nonlinear editing, similar to VLab-Motion or Broadcaster Elite or Flyer. The PAR got around the Z2 bottleneck by putting the harddrive and an IDE controller on the card itself. There may be a size limit on the IDE drive. The TBC4 is necessary IF you want to record video on your PAR. You can dump rendered frames to it and playback without the TBC4. DCTV was closer to 18bit quality. And it produced some fuzzy results and banding in some of the darker colours. It was pretty good for what it was though.

If you don't know the history of the chemical soup pond, then you really need to read Brian Bagnell's books on Commodore.

luke warm take: old DOS computers , Amigas, Ataris and the rest were good fun in their day but nowadays we're able to enjoy them even more because of all of the fan-made projects which make them better.

I still want a high end Amiga Toaster with all the extra cards. One of these now that I know it exists.. I dream of using it to do a low rez youtube channel but probably... well I just want it. I lost my 500 and 1200 always dreamed of replacing them and kick myself for not buying nice one when they were fairly cheap. I can probably figure out DPaint but don't know if I can remember Imagine. It's been 35 years. Hopefully when I have that spare money I keep trying to get I will contact the Amiga gods and see if I can get all the parts to build my dream machines.

We are moving into the kewler season as I noticed the handwaving is several levels of better than before, a lot. Nice job getting the legacy hardware up and running again. I hope the old monitor was plugged in or turned on and it was that simple. But no doubt not that simple. Please excuse the sarcasm I had to turn on the heat for the first time this season or else the local boss would never let me hear the end of it.

I was nine when I'd been informed about such a thing's existence by my father who was a camera man video producer etc.( I was playing about videos as a kid with vhs's etc) .it had been remained in my mind as a mythical phenomenon I kinda thought my dad is making this up about the name PAR till I finally saw it here.thanks for closing this very important case for me :D.

The PAR was a game changer when I got that into my A2000 with the Video Toaster & Lightwave, I was broke buying all these cards, but happy. 🙂

My par ran the crapiest hard drive ever made. The Micropolis 1GB. Epic size for the day but 80% of the drives were doa From the factory

If only we had this back in the day, life could have been much easier... Great addition to your collection! Thank you very much. Have a great day!

Paused at the open.... Is that the PAR board!! If it is I used one a couple of years and it was astounding for the day! .... Back to the opening... Boy, does that bring me back to a great period in my life when I worked at Alpha Video in Minneapolis as my first job in 3D. I had the PAR board going and never had to do single frame recording after getting it. I was outputting to an M2 deck and it could be done so fast that I could do it while the edit bay was not using the deck for a bit. Only 6 months earlier I was single frame recording on a JVC s-video deck manually with cause and insert edits. Took me 4 months to make the 2 minute demo that got me that job. I didn't do it alone, my best friend did most of that single frame recording when he got home, while I was make the 3D for the next batch of frames to render over night. Last month he brought his Amiga 030 system to me. I need to do a serious clean and retro bright treatment. I'm excited to finally have a 2000 again. I miss the 4000 too.... Someday.

Kewl.😮

That was incredible. Amazing what the humble Amiga could do. It truly was an underrated machine and it's a shame it go marketed so badly.

DPA PAR. A old friend of my. I'd one, but for PC. Still lurking somewhere at home..

What a time in computing history it was! I still cant believe Amiga couldnt find a proper owner once Commodore went belly up

Par is IDE,why not just use a IDE/CF(or sd) adapter for the PAR hd? would be interesting to see how it works.

Pretty cool video. I have considered both the PAR and Video Toaster, but considering the analog NTSC, or rather SDTV, resolution always decided to save a precious Zorro slot for things I can actually use and passed on these devices. Thank god it was not yet another emulation video!😂

That 3.5" hd on the PAR was a lot smaller than the one I saw. He needed a huge 5.25" full height drive. We had to mount it in a PC minitower case. The cases designed for just drives were too expensive. I don't remember his playback time though. The toaster really drove the cheap TBC industry for a while there. They just plugged into the 2000's ISA slots for power and were controlled from the Amiga's serial port. They let you use consumer/prosumer grade VCRs with the Toaster. You needed one for every VCR input you planned to use. It synced horizontal, vertical and color clock so you could do Switcher effects.

Good addition Q. Its starting to look like one of my old machines. 😅 Had to call DPS and have them step me through getting both TBC-IVs working, there was some short cable that connected them together. Did actually use the PAR card to output completed TV commercials for clients here, pre-Flyer. Panasonic had the AG1980 SVHS deck out at the time that could record single frame too. Stacked both the PAR and OS hard drive in the 5.25" bay. Now you know why I had to put Bigfoot 500W power supplies in each A2000, all slots filled really sucked up the juice. Before long you'll have ScreamerNet running 😅

My memory is short, but when I had the A500 (bought a 80 Mb SCSI harddrive :-) I don't remember streaming IFF/ANIM that much it was memory bound. But I do remember a program for my A1200 called "biganim"? or something like that could stream IFF/ANIM files really big ones... Then again 24 FPS (720*576 PAL overscan) was not probably possible ofc But large 320*256 5 bit color IFF/ANIM was streamable from the harddrive as far as I remember. I also do remember setting up (I worked as IT tech in the 90's) a video editing studio (really low budget) in a school that had it as a course... and bought (if I remember correctly again) a Pentium Pro dual motherboard and Adobe Premier (v4?) and couple that with a MJPEG handling graphics card. It worked but you had to save your stuff every time on regular basis because a crash was always imminent. And although it was pretty good digitally, everyone wanted it on the TV ofc... and that conversion was not easy or nice... as the PC, graphics, or programs never really was connected to a PAL TV... so getting your digital video (usually PC resolutions) and then editing them on a PC (with PC resolutions, i.e 640*400 or 640*480 back then) to 720*576 interlaced (or something similar) was hard... and the School did not have an unlimited budget... At home back then I had A1200 with 68030 and the best OS known to man :-) I loved it... But for sure... the Dual Pentium 200 Mhz pro was way faster... I do also remember loving Lightwave, and got a couple of "outdated" PC's and bought one also (AMD K5, 133 Mhz? or 166?) and had neighbors with (Amigas and PC's) and built a BNC network so that I could install Screamernet on all their PC's and all of mine... did the modeling on my Amiga sent the animation on the Screamernet and it was just awesome... but after awhile they did not like the noise of their computers running 24/7 ofc... :-) But I loved watching the (I had the "server" install and ever render got back to my machine... the renders arriving on my machine... Think we had about 8-9 machines in total... and the Screamernet was just awesome it juggled everything so all computers just rendered my anim at 100% duty cycle :-)

i see everything

Actually I may be wrong but I saw NTSC video using DCTV before them ? However nothing as good as this or the German version that I have. Maybe we can replace the Chinesium monitor

Nice job, it was a true labyrinth of models, I think a lot of us would be hard pressed to know exactly when they all dropped. I’m sure this helps newcomers considerably Q. That 3000 still makes my heart flutter. That was always the one for me that was unobtainable 😢

The more upgrades you perform the more crashes you get. There are far too many variables to diagnose major issues unless you are a member of a user group.