Newtek DigiView The Newtek DigiView video digitizer is a very early example of a video digitizing system from approximately 1985. It was developed to take advantage of the Amiga 1000's advanced video capabilities and it is about the size of a Zippo cigarette lighter and plugs into the Amiga's parallel printer port. A video cable then leads from the digitizer to either a black and white video camera with the included color wheel attatched or to an external color splitter box. The DigiView takes 3 passes to digitize a frame, and each pass is done by filtering through one of 3 primary colors: red, green, and blue. This means that the image being digitized must be still or paused. The digitizer generally captures at 320x200 in up to 4096 colors, but is capable of 640x200 if the system has enough memory to handle it. Once all three captures are done, the Newtek software then merges them into a single color capture. I use my DigiView with a color splitter with the video images coming off of a good quality VCR that has been paused.

Five years later, in 1990, Newtek would make history with the introduction of the Video Toaster for the Amiga, priced at $1600. It incorporated special hardware and software which allowed sophisticated video editing and special effects, output in broadcast quality.

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