Mi Amiga

It’s hard to explain to people of the digital age how much more difficult it was in the past to produce video content. I grew up in the video age and I’m sure there are folks from the film age that would be happy to tell me how easy I had it compared to the days of shooting and editing actual photographic film. But we would both agree that digital, non-linear filmmakers are spoiled rotten.

I started out producing video in the early 90’s with not much more than an Amiga 1000, a couple Hitachi 8mm cameras and acne. My father invested in a state of the art video suite to document experiments for his work and that all landed in my living room as a teenager. We also had a gen-lock, which I will get to in a minute. I made some horrible wedding videos. Take video of a wedding on 8mm and play it back. Not bad. Put camera #1 and #2 in playback decks and deftly, linearly edit those down to a Panasonic 1970 S-VHS (yes, that S stand for SUPER!) and create a master. Hmmm. Playback is a bit rough after one generation, but still OK. Now let’s record copies to give to the wedding party on standard VHS. By the time you’ve sent that content through another generation, its utter crap. Images are now pretty fuzzy and the crisp colors are a bit mushed together. Regardless of the poor quality output, I cranked out many o’ tapes of high school sports highlights, a few fuzzy weddings and a funeral.

Those limitations aside, the Amiga delivered unparalleled graphics and audio performance for its time. The Amiga 1000 had a Motorola 68000 CPU (the same legendary CPU introduced in 1979 of which the architecture is still being used today) and only packed a non-whopping 256 MB of RAM, yet it could out perform any other machine for the money in the year of 1985. The Amiga was a stallion at vector graphics and could render pretty impressive 3D animations.

Amiga 1000

Processor: 7.16 MHz

RAM: 256 KB

Internal Storage: 0 KB

*Impressive 3D animation

The gen-lock was a device that enabled the mixing of still or animated graphics with video in real-time. Once installed, the gen-lock was as easy to set up and operate as a stereo mixer and gave you the type of controls that you would expect in a professional TV studio, but in the comfort of your living room.

Together with the Amiga, a gen-lock and camera, you could produce video high jinks such as the video below. Sadly, this is not my living room and not my video. I lost all of my old tapes of Amiga video high jinks in a move, but look what fun you could have on this type of system.