This programme was completely produced using the Video Toaster wasn’t it?

Yes, the editing and postproduction was entirely created on the Toaster (apart from the rostrum camera work using LightWave 7.5, but I’m sure that could have been done using LightWave VT). There was one effect on the DVD version that was made with KFramed 1.5, but that’s an Aura plug-in.

The DV footage was digitised using Jeff White from Visual Inspiration’s Decision Maker, but he's part of the family, and some bits of DigiBeta or BetaSP were digitised with Speed Razor 4.8.

Output was to a DigiBeta through an SDI interface (but, unfortunately not the sound which was recorded to CD in a studio for the final mix).

How did you discover the Toaster?

Since the 90’s and the Amiga I read American publications and dreamt of having a Toaster, but it didn’t exist in a PAL version. As soon as it was available on the PC in PAL and I had work for it to do I bought one.

When did you start to use the Toaster?

I bought a VideoToasterNT 1.0 in December 2000 for a job for ARTE (the franco-german arts channel) that needed the capture of uncompressed footage because I had to give the channel the footage composited with our LightWave work very close to airtime.

At the same time, I was working on a project where I had to take images from DigiBeta, work on them and send them back to the people who gave them to me so that they could be finalised on a Flame. An uncompressed format was a must. Having always worked with NewTek products the choice was a natural.

What do you like about the Toaster?

Its simplicity of use and the final output quality.

For you, what’s the best tool on the Toaster?

ToasterEdit (TEd) is for me, without doubt, the best tool on the Toaster. It’s intuitive to use and very fast. For seven years I had used a wide variety of non-linear editing tools (from Video-Action to Premiere, etc.) without ever finding one that satisfied me: ToasterEdit was the first.

And then, perhaps the best tool on the Toaster is its image quality. Along with the guys I was working with, I was surprised by the superb quality of the images I achieved. The colour correction (obviously, it’s not ILM’s colour corrector!) is particularly powerful and gives excellent quality, this is probably to do with the way the image is treated internally.

After colour correction

What could be improved for you?

Batch capture, print to tape and the audio side of things.

Speaking of the audio side, it has to work with SDI connections. The fact that it doesn't at the moment is a big handicap (along with print to tape) for finishing a film. I could ask for a better integration between the tools (Aura, ToasterEdit, ToasterCG), but I know that that’s coming.

What sort of computer was the programme edited on?

This film was edited on an old Pentium III 800MHz dual processor machine without any problem. Not in real time, but the background rendering works very well. The hard drives didn’t correspond to recommendations either: it was a RAID of four 120 GB IBM IDE drives on a 3Ware 6000 card, but it gave 58 MB per second, plenty for my use.

Obviously the final colour correction needed a complete rendering of the film, which was done on a single ATA 100 IDE drive on its own controller (the MSI motherboard in my machine has four separate IDE controllers). It was fast enough to be able to handle the job.